Category: Reviews – Opera and Ballet

NZSM Students’ operatic double bill moves and delights

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PURCELL – Dido and Aeneas
RAVEL – L’Enfant et les Sortilèges

Students and Staff of Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Casts and supporting musicians

PURCELL – Dido and Aeneas
Dido – Alicia Cadwgan / Aeneas – Declan Cudd / Belinda – Ester Leefe
Handmaidens – Hannah Jones/Rebecca Howie / Sorceress – Olivia Marshall
Spirit – Luana Howard / Witches – Shayna Tweed / Elyse Hemara
Sailor – Luka Venter / Covers – Olivia Sheat/Griffin Nicholl

Conductor: Donald Maurice

RAVEL – L’Enfant et les Sortileges
The child (Katherine McIndoe) – Cover (Pasquale Orchard)
The mother (Luana Howard) / The sofa, The cat (Daniel Sun)
The armchair, The shepherd (Emma Carpenter)
The clock (Luka Venter) / The teapot, The little old man (Declan Cudd)
The fire (Hannah Jones) / The Chinese cup, The shepherdess (Olivia Marshall)
The princess (Olivia Sheat) / The tree (Joseph Hadow) / The dragonfly (Olivia Marshall) The nightingale (Esther Leefe) / The bat (Shayna Tweed)
The squirrel (Rebecca Howie) / The frog (Griffin Nicol) / The owl (Elsa Hemara)
The footstool (Bethany Miller) / Cover (Julian Chu-Tan)

Conductor: Kenneth Young

Chorus: Julian Chu-Tan, Nicole Davey, Alexandra Gandionco, Sophia Gwynne-Robson, Joseph Haddow, Elizabeth Harré, Sally Haywood, Canada Hickey, Emma Cronshaw Hunt, William King, Eleanor McGechie, Bethany Miller, Griffin Nichol, Garth Norman, Pasquale Orchard, Nino Raphael, Karishma Thanawala

Musicians from Te Kōkī NZSM and guest players from the NZSO

Director: Frances Moore / Design: Alexandra Guillot / Talya Pilcher (lighting)

Memorial Theatre, Victoria University, Wellington

Thursday, 13th August, 2015

One has come to expect a high standard of performance, interpretation and artistic creativity from students at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, based on the success of some of their recent activities. This latest production was, in effect, “double the pleasure”, as it  brought to the stage two works so utterly different as to turn our sensibilities on their heads, yet capture our sympathies as strongly in each case.

Beginning the programme was Henry Purcell’s most well-known work for the stage, Dido and Aeneas – a story featuring a whirlwind romance which ends in despair and death, one whose description sounds like verismo opera! Rather than seek to reinforce the “grim reality’ scenario with a companion-piece like, say, Puccini’s Il Tabarro, the School most enterprisingly went instead for Maurice Ravel and his setting of Colette’s whimsical tale-with-a-moral L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.

Each of the works had its own particular set of qualities and disciplines, making the choice of the two a happy one from both the performers’ and the audience’s point of view. Conductor and orchestral players were different but many of the singers appeared in both productions. Unlike Purcell’s work, which sported more-or-less full-blooded operatic characters, Ravel’s featured a single leading singer in tandem with a kind of “parade” of colourful characters, personifications of both animals and normally “inanimate” objects come to life.

From this point alone it could be gleaned that the experience for all of us across the two halves of the evening was different and wide-ranging on many counts, but for this listener at least, extremely satisfying. There were one or two moments which lacked sweetness and grace, mostly in the Purcell work, where at the Overture’s beginning the players’ determinedly vibrato-less tones were straightaway laid bare, and took time to generate warmth and ease. As well, there was a slight stage hiatus during Aeneas’s deer-hunt, later in the piece, those on stage seemingly “stranded” by the action – or rather, its disappearance – for a few moments.

Otherwise, the presentation throughout both works flowed hand-in-glove with the music, a state of things by no means a “given” in contemporary opera production, but one here fruitfully and organically upheld throughout. Director Frances Moore mentioned in a programme foreword the capacity of both operas to go beyond a naturalistic storytelling setting, and this was beautifully achieved by simple means – powerful, direct staging, ramps and platforms made in an instant into castle ramparts, assembly halls, forest glades, witches’ dens, child’s nurseries and scented gardens. Costumes, props and lighting also played their part in evoking these wide-ranging scenarios created by the stories and the music.

I thought the “girls’ school” origins of Purcell’s work nicely delineated by the production’s directness – simple, striking modern-day costumes of white, two handmaidens to the Queen “filled to the brim with girlish glee” in their movements and interactions , and Dido herself spectacularly clad in red, regal and dignified as befitted a monarch. In the best sense a student-ish enthusiasm informed the work of those on stage, exemplified not only by the singing but by lovely touches such as the aforementioned horseplay between the Queen’s handmaidens, and the endearing goofiness of one of the witches during the “coven” scenes. It all enhanced the presentation’s theatricality, both liberating and ensnaring our sensibilities and interest, and putting them all the more deeply at the service of the story.

Properly dominating the stage was the Dido of Alicia Cadwgan – right from her first, heartfelt protestations, her voice resonated with queenly sorrow, her character poised precariously between imperiousness and vulnerability. With both voice and “presence” she was able to bring out all of the character’s greatness of heart and implacable sense of truth unto herself, making her eventual betrayal by her suitor Aeneas the death-blow to her own existence. Her delivery of “Your Councel all is urged in vain” here threw Aeneas’s irresponsible protestations into boldly-exposed relief, making us truly believe that death, for her, was the only course, “the only refuge for the wretched left”. It was, for me, a beautifully-wrought portrayal, in every way.

No other character in the opera matches that of Dido’s in depth or breadth of utterance – but her serving-maid, Belinda, played by Esther Leefe, and the two handmaidens, Hannah Jones and Rebecca Howie, respectively, sang and acted with both spirit and sensitivity, the duet “Fear no danger to ensue” making a lovely sound, as well as amends for an earlier, slightly out-of-kilter “The greatest blessing Fate can give”. And Esther Leefe’s “Pursue thy Conquest, Love” made an excited, and not inappropriately breathless an impression, as Belinda urged her Queen towards her wooer, the Trojan hero, Aeneas.

Declan Cudd as Aeneas, the all-conquering hero, cut a very dapper figure in his dress coat and scarf, ready to charm the uncertain Dido with honeyed words. He sang accurately, if somewhat drily – one suspects his voice has yet to properly “bloom”, though having to be, as the role decrees, more politician than lover in utterance didn’t help him generate very much romantic feeling. It’s certainly not the most grateful of characters to play, and in the Second Act he’s reduced to “talking up” his pursuit and shooting of a deer to make the venture sound more heroic, though he made the most of the declamation “Yours be the blame, O Gods”, after being sent a bogus message, allegedly from Jove, to sail for Rome immediately, thus abandoning his recently-wooed Queen.

I liked the use of the theatre’s aisles to throw open the vistas of the hunting throughout the forest’s glades, and enjoyed the amusing, slightly tongue-in-cheek representations of Aeneas’s quarry, in stark contrast to the “Monster’s Head” which the hero makes a meal of describing. But even more fun with the space’s entrances and exits was had by the Witches who introduce the Second Act, the “Wayward Sisters” with their “dismal Ravens Crying”. Olivia Marshall made a gleefully nasty impression as the Sorceress, striking in appearance while bent upon evil, aided and abetted by a “Mutt-and-Jeff” pair of cohorts (Shayna Tweed and Elyse Hemara), one goofy, the other sharp and impatient, but each in their different ways nasty pieces of work. Together with the chorus assuming “coven camp-followers” roles, the grisly wraiths danced and cavorted throughout their ensembles, limbo-rocking beneath a piece of “infernal cloth” during “But ere we this perform”, and then using both stage and aisles for the wonderful echo effects throughout “In our deep-Vaulted” cell”, the reddish lighting backdrop appropriately suggesting the context of infernal forces.

Much was made of the contrast between the bustle and contented confusion of “Haste, haste to town” at the onset of rain, with the chorus sporting umbrellas and making a wonderful job of the pre-Handelian-like ensemble, immediately before the visiting of Aeneas by the spirit of Mercury. Both Luana Howard as the Spirit and Declan Cudd sang steadily and pointedly throughout, and managed to convey the essence of the exchange, involving Aeneas’s confusion and uncertainty, which resulted in his downfall. His plight and betrayal of Dido had already been rather cruelly lampooned in anticipation by the Sailor’s song (lustily delivered by Luka Venter), calling his shipmates to take their leave of their “nymphs” on the shore, promising them they will return though never intending to do so.

It remained for Aeneas to be sent packing by Dido amid all of his bluster, and for the latter to deliver perhaps baroque opera’s most famous farewell aria, “When I am laid in earth”. Again, Alicia Cadwgan was equal to the task, “pinging” her high notes thrillingly (the first a little more comfortably than the second, though, dramatically, the slight faltering on the later ascent wasn’t inappropriate!) and imbuing her more meditative lines with wonderful pathos and finality. By this time the orchestral playing had long “found” its voice, and the aria and final chorus was most sensitively and eloquently accompanied by the strings. Altogether an excellent performance of a great and difficult work, with the singing-lines everywhere exposed and merciless (a case of “only the very skilled need try this music”) – and these musicians brought enough skill and sensitivity to the task, working fruitfully with conductor Donald Maurice to produce a memorable result.

After this was a case of “vive la difference!”, even if Ravel’s delightful adaptation of Colette’s cautionary tale L’Enfant et les Sortilèges seemed, next to Purcell’s tragic masterpiece, more of a divertissement than usual. Of pleasure, however, there was no less, as the performers (this time with a different conductor, Ken Young, and a new set of instrumentalists) transformed the performing-spaces into a child’s world of wonderment, accompanied by those characteristically magical sonorities we associate with the composer of Ma Mere L’Oye and Daphnis et Chloe. All credit to director Frances Moore and designers Alexandra Guillot and Talya Pilcher for effecting such a convincing contrast between two very different kinds of realities.

Central to this child’s world is the character of THE child itself, the role here so very wholeheartedly acted and sung by Katherine McIndoe, and nowhere more touchingly than during those moments of “growth towards empathy” on the character’s part. After being scolded by its mother and rejected by its “first love”, the storybook heroine, the child seeks solace at being in the garden, but is traumatized by the fruits of previous misdeeds, which caused the tree’s “wounds” and the dragonfly’s loss of its mate, caught by the thoughtless miscreant and pinned to the wall. In the midst of the resulting melee of acrimony, the child finds itself almost involuntarily bandaging the wounded paw of a baby squirrel, an act which brings about its eventual rehabilitation.

From the willfulness of the opening exchanges with “Mama”, through the despoliation and subsequent recriminatory interaction with the objects in her world to her remorse and eventual rehabilitation, Katherine McIndoe fully engaged our imaginations, and, towards the end, our sympathies. She was supported by a series of brilliant character portrayals whose range and detailing provided constant and “rolling” entertainment on the way to bringing about the story’s “uncovering of the self” at the heart of the matter – in this case, the underlying human desire for love.

It would be unfair to single out individual performances of these roles, as, despite the “one-after-the-other” aspect of the interactions, the opera SEEMS an “ensemble piece”, due to the production’s pace and cumulative tensions, which drew the characters unswervingly together for the final denouement. Suffice to say that the characterisations brought the objects and animals readily to life, either with great tenderness and pathos or with plenty of bubbling, roaring energy. Throughout they were supported by conductor and orchestra with alert, on-the-spot instrumental detailings, augmented at certain points with great washes of ensemble sound – all told, a splendid achievement from all concerned.

With productions such as these to the School’s credit, one hopes for further operatic delights in the not-too-distant future – as well as invaluable performing experience for the students (of a kind our home-grown singers don’t get as readily as they might in certain quarters), these efforts, always eagerly awaited, bring to our local operatic scene some much-welcomed enterprise, in the form of repertoire that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see. More power to Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marvellous Wagnerian farewell (Siegfried and Götterdämmerung) for conductor Inkinen and his Symphony Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen
Wagner Gala

Christine Goerke (soprano) and Simon O’Neill (tenor)

Episodes from Siegfried and Götterdämmerung

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 12 June, 6:30 pm

I hadn’t heard Eva Radich’s interview with soprano Christine Goerke on Upbeat before the concert (and that has a bit to do with the unfortunate shift of the programme’s time from midday to 2pm). But I heard it on Saturday morning. It was one of those wonderful, animated, intelligent, thoroughly prepared interviews that Eva invariably achieves with articulate and gifted people that reveals many of the physical and psychological issues that a great singer faces.

And the session ended with a recording of her singing Brünnhilde in the first scene of Act III of Die Walküre (‘The Ride of the Valkyries’) recorded when she sang the entire music drama with the NZSO in 2012. Not only was it a thrill to hear her performance again, but being allowed to focus on her singing, without visuals or much awareness of her fellow Valkyries, was an endorsement of her stature as one of the best Wagner sopranos in today’s post-Nilsson world.

Before discussing the present concert however, I must express what I think many must feel, that it is a shame – a lack of nerve and financial confidence perhaps – that the wonderful Walküre has not been followed by comparable semi-staged performances of both Siegfried and Götterdämmerung; better still would have been the more complete visual realisation such as the Parsifal at the 2006 International Arts Festival.

In this review I will mention more of the events in both works, as the programme notes rather dwelt on matters like orchestral instrumentation, Leitmotive, but did not adequately identify the excerpts performed and make clear what was sung and what was not.

The concert opened with the Prelude to Act III of Siegfried. It was a well-chosen, awe-inspiring introduction for an audience, few of whom had probably seen the work staged, with motifs relating, among others, to Wotan’s spear on which the ‘laws’ are inscribed and one touching the downfall of the regime of the gods.  That only takes a couple of minutes after which the first scene opens with Wotan (in Siegfried, The Wanderer) calling on earth goddess Erda (who had born Wotan’s many off-spring including Brünnhilde and the other Valkyries) to hear his account of the world’s condition and attend to her wisdom. I couldn’t tell whether the orchestra played, without voice, the Wanderer’s first lines of his call for Erde, skipping the rest.

Also passed over is Scene 2 where the Wanderer encounters Siegfried who is seeking the way to the fire-encircled rock on which Wotan had confined Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre. That fascinating encounter with its detailed etching of personalities and ambitions, ends with Siegfried breaking The Wanderer’s spear, thus finally destroying his authority and power: all wonderful stuff that one rather missed.

Simon O’Neill’s first appearance, after the Wanderer’s departure, is preceded by an ecstatic orchestral Interlude running through several motifs and seamlessly passing to the Introduction to Scene 3 where delightfully played wind passages capture the misty mountaintop. It sets the scene for Siegfried’s encounter, evading the ring of fire, to find the sleeping Brünnhilde, with calm violins before Siegfried murmurs “Selig Öde auf sonninger Höh”, and soon wakens her to lovely sequences of bassoons, bass clarinet, oboe, and harp.

Finally Brünnhilde wakes and slowly realises that this is the hero she saved while he was in Sieglinde’s womb. My memories of the wonderful Christine Goerke from her thrilling performance in Die Walküre in 2012 came back, as her performance unfolded. She presented a vivid impression of wonderment, with a penetrating, gleaming upper register that was perfectly integrated with the warmth and humanness of the lower part of her voice. There was both gentleness and intelligence in her portrayal, and even though the two stood on either side of the conductor, one could sense the rapport, growing slowly towards erotic attraction between them as the long scene progressed.

The two voices transmitted different characteristics, O’Neill’s seeming to emerge from a more self-observing and detached sensibility, yet heroic and hugely expressive, as the grain and intensity of his timbre created an engrossing drama. And his response to Brünnhilde reveals a sensitivity and gentleness that we get hardly a hint of in Siegfried’s relationship with Mime, in the first two acts of this part of the cycle. O’Neill approached that tenderness with genuine feeling, but one has to feel that he seems even more convincing when he has the opportunity to boast of his heroism in braving the flames, for example in “Durch brennendes Feuer”.

Because it is more frequently performed on its own, Die Walküre, with its Siegmund-Sieglinde love scene and Wotan’s moving farewell to Brünnhilde are better known high points. But this last scene of Siegfried is their match, and we await performances of it as soon as the NZSO can gather courage and resources.

Then after the interval, Götterdämmerung. Here, the whole span of the work was encompassed, starting with the opening of the near-40 minute Prologue where we meet the Norns, the equivalent of the Fates in Greek mythology, who reflect on the past of the race of gods and on what will happen. They weave a rope that determines the course of events, but it frays and breaks and they return to the depths of the earth. The Prologue presents a beautiful depiction of Dawn, the NZSO strings exhibiting Wagner’s genius not merely in the brass department, here for strings (if anyone had doubted).

Brünnhilde and Siegfried wake from their night(s? – we’re not really told how long the lovers are together) of ecstasy, and within minutes the devoted Siegfried, seemingly prompted by nothing, prepares to leave his lover on the rock, protected by the fire to be sure, in order to pursue heroic deeds. In any case we hear the exchanges between the lovers, with their ecstatic climax, followed by the orchestral Siegfried’s Journey to the Rhine.

Throughout, of course, a huge amount of the excitement of the performances derived from the superb playing by the orchestra, very conspicuously the horns – nine of them – with four picking up Wagner tubas at the start of Siegfried Act III, and in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung.  Other brass players tend to be less conspicuous, but their contributions, trumpets, trombones, the tuba, were always distinguished. Wagner’s oboes often catch the ear too, as in Siegfried’s journey to the Rhine which is not just a mighty brass fanfare, and the NZSO’s oboes are a joy.

Contrary to some belief, Wagner’s orchestra is not inconsiderate of singers: instrumentation complements rather than smothers the singer, diminishes and thins out to allow the voice and the composer’s own words to penetrate and be understood.

In the first and second acts proper, Götterdämmerung introduces a new race, the Gibichungs, introducing an entirely new element to the story. Their only known connection with the main figures in the Ring is through the Nibelung, Alberich, who is Hagen’s father. In Act I Siegfried arrives at the Gibichung castle where bizarre events take place: Siegfried is drugged and is at once attracted to Gutrune, sister of Gunther, the king of the Gibichungs; then Siegfried is persuaded to give Brünnhilde to Gunther in marriage and then, disguised as Guntyher, Siegfried returns down the Rhine to capture her. Brünnhilde is forced to ‘marry’ Gunther and the latter’s sister Gutrune ‘marries’ Siegfried;

Confusion proliferates: at the end of Act I Scene 2 we get our only sample of the act with a rich and beautiful orchestral interlude, a compendium of a number of the most evocative and relevant motifs; but there was nothing else from the first two acts; it precedes the scene where one of the Valkyries, Waltraute, attempts to persuade Brünnhilde to give the ring back to the Rhine Maidens; then Siegfried arrives at Brünnhilde’s sanctuary, disguised as Gunther, tears the Ring from her hand and forces her, protesting violently, to accompany him back to the Gibichung castle.

In Act II the confusion, for Brünnhilde, Gunther and Gutrune increases, exploited by Hagen, leading nevertheless to Brünnhilde being forced to ‘marry’ Gunther. Brünnhilde, unaware that Siegfried’s inexplicable behavior is the effect of a potion, eventually concludes that he has betrayed her, and  she falls in with Hagen’s plan to murder him.

At the start of Act III as Siegfried is hunting with Gunther, Hagen and co, he is tackled by the Rhine Maidens in another attempt to have the Ring returned to the Rhine; Siegfried refuses , is induced to tell his heroic history of forging the sword, dragon slaying. Then, after taking a reversing potion from Hagen, Siegfried recalls his marriage to Brünnhilde, and relates it: a ‘treachery’ that gives Hagen the excuse to kill him.

The performance picks up immediately after Hagen has killed Siegfried with his spear, and Siegfried, finally aware of the reality, addresses dying words to Brünnhilde. The sequence opens with the famous Funeral music for Siegfried and skipping the exchanges between Gunther, Hagen, Gutrune, devoted the last half hour to Brünnhilde’s concluding soliloquy, the Immolation scene, in which the orchestra demonstrated its astonishing command through the endless succession of Leitmotive, from many episodes of the cycle, with a panoply of brilliant orchestral colours and moving emotional structures.

Goerke sustained a level of energy, of vocal drama, that gave the audience a wonderful taste of the way the whole marvellous creation comes to an end, an end after four and a half hours of music, when most proponents of Brünnhilde’s role show at least some signs of tiredness, but she has been spared the huge challenge of singing the entire role.

The audience was even moved to come to its feet at the end, no doubt to mark both a great and momentous performance and the departure of a gifted musical director and chief conductor.

It was much more than a mere taste of the two parts of the Ring that had never been performed in New Zealand; but surely an enticement for many who will have heard this performance here and in Auckland and Christchurch, to call for an awakening to this astonishing music drama, as well as a reminder to New Zealand Opera and, one would even dare hope, the International Arts Festival in Wellington that some of the greatest dramatic music ever written still awaits full performance in this country, that calls itself civilised.

 

 

Cenerentola brilliant in every aspect – principals’ singing and acting, orchestra and chorus, production, sets and costumes from New Zealand Opera

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Opera

Rossini: La Cenerentola, or La Bontä Trionfa (in Italian with English surtitles)

Directed by Lindy Hume, with Musical Director Wyn Davies, Orchestra Wellington, Freemasons NZ Opera Chorus (Wellington), soloists Sarah Castle, John Tessier, Marcin Bronikowski, Ashraf Sewailam, Andrew Collis, Amelia Berry, Rachelle Pike

St. James Theatre

Saturday 9 May 2015, 7.30pm

While writers may disagree concerning whether La Cenerentola (Cinderella) is a comic opera, there is no doubt that New Zealand Opera played it as such, with much humorous activity.  Perhaps some of the symbolism and solemnity of this moral fairy tale was lost in the process, but the rich variety of visual and aural delights made for a thoroughly enjoyable entertainment.  The version of the story used by Rossini’s librettist Jacopo Ferretti was certainly not as grim as that by the brothers Grimm.  It was not until comparatively recently that this opera was seen as a masterpiece comparable to the composer’s The Barber of Seville and The Italian Girl in Algiers.

Gioacchino Rossini was indeed a precocious talent, as the title of the essay in the programme by Peter Bassett declares, having written numbers of operas while still in his teens.  But not quite as precocious as the dates 1817-1868 shown above his portrait opposite the essay would indicate.  1817 was the date of the composition of Cenerentola.  Not Rossini’s date of birth, which was 1792.  The opera comes at the midpoint of Rossini’s opera-writing career: it was his nineteenth opera, and there were 19 to follow over the next decade, after which he wrote no more operas.

The Director’s decision to set the story in Dickensian London led to marvellously detailed and evocative sets from designer Dan Potra.  The opening set, seen by the audience as background to various high-jinks during the overture, was a huge library, obviously in a great house.  It returned at appropriate points through the story, doubling at one point as the wine cellar in the prince’s palace – when, as if magically, several book shelves transformed into wine-racks, liberally stocked with bottles, including (according to the ‘revised’ libretto shown in surtitles) Cloudy Bay!  Above the highest shelves were portraits of past British monarchs; thus the audience was immediately informed of the locale.

Among the entertainments during the overture was the showing on a screen in a gilt frame of a series of portraits (photographs from the nineteenth century or early twentieth) of prospective brides for the prince, who is under pressure to get married.

The overture is one of the best-known parts of the opera, and its liveliness was rendered with proficiency by the orchestra, under the opera’s musical director, Wyn Davies.  (Too often, including on radio, is it implied that he is there just to conduct the orchestra.  Not at all; he directs all the musical aspects of the production, including all the singers.)

Rossini’s usual good humour and ability to entertain an audience were immediately in evidence.  This joint production with Opera Queensland had much going for it, including not least a cast of principal singers who were uniformly of the highest standards, not excluding the two young New Zealanders as the step-sisters.

The scene transformed, through London fog, to a street view of Don Magnifco’s well-stocked emporium, where the opening duet from the step-sisters, Clorinda (Amelia Berry) and Tisbe (Rachelle Pike) takes place.  At the beginning, they sounded occasionally unsure, but this was soon overcome, and was about the only vocal problem (and a minor one) in the entire performance.

As Angelina (Cinderella), Sarah Castle was immediately impressive, in her first aria: a song in a simple folk-like idiom, about a king who decides to marry an innocent, beautiful but poor young woman for her goodness, rather than marrying for rank, title or money.  The subtitle of the opera means ‘Goodness Triumphant’.

Castle had the coloratura style required for Rossini’s florid writing to a ‘t’, and she and prince Don Ramiro (John Tessier) really lived the parts, as did the excellent Dandini (Marcin Bronikowski).  This character in particular, resplendent in a red suit while he was posing as the prince, and the sisters also, were required in this production to overact, or shall we say act up for laughs; this they did fully.  If at times this gave a vulgar tinge to the production, it obviously lived out Lindy Hume’s conception of these characters.

The many ensembles were excellent, disguising their considerable vocal difficulty.

The male chorus, through numbers of changes of costumes and roles, was energetic and well-voiced.  Some of its members were dressed as women, though obviously being men, most sporting beards.  This added variety not only to their appearance, but to the acting required.  Their set pieces were splendid, not to mention the typical Rossini patter songs, which require such vocal, verbal and labial agility.

Andrew Collis sang and acted his part of Don Magnifico… well, magnificently.  His movement, facial expressions and general deportment spoke of an older man, and one with ideas of improving his station in life.  No wicked step-mother in this story, but a cruel and vain step-father.

Ashraf Sewailam as Alindoro was outstanding, both vocally and in characterisation.  He had the right degree of magnanimous dignity, and his singing was a delight to hear.  However, it did bother me that, as a dignified tutor, he wore his top hat too far back on his head – a symbol of a scoundrel, which he certainly was not.  The hat should be worn squarely on the head (likewise the ‘lemon-squeezer’ military hat).  But so often in dramatic productions (and at other times) one sees them perched towards the back of the head.  (It was noteworthy that on Anzac Day Sir Jerry Mateparae wore his correctly.)

Costumes and props were numerous, colourful and appropriate, given the chosen setting.  Although this version of the story involved bracelets rather than the glass slippers (or should it have been fur?) that we are accustomed to, at a suitable moment when Angelina was being robed for her wedding, Don Ramiro placed new slippers on her feet – a nice touch.

The show was beautifully lit, and there was opportunity for some extraordinary effects, including during a storm with lightning, the chorus the while waving its umbrellas, bedewed with visible raindrops.

This was certainly a production requiring much acting, and also dancing, a particularly amusing sequence being when the chorus danced at the prince’s palace, with suitable seriousness.  The choreographer for this and other dance episodes was Taiaroa Royal.  At this point I thought I felt a slight earthquake – and then the word, and the actions of people suffering from one came up in the opera (to excess, of course!).  On consulting GeoNet later I found that there was a 3.4 quake west of New Plymouth at about the right time.  Did I feel it, or was it precognition?

Two other scenarios were used: the spacious grounds of the prince’s palace, bedecked Capability Brown-style with ornamental trees, which proved useful both because they could be moved, and because characters could hide behind them.  The perspective effect in this scene was beautifully achieved.

An unacknowledged keyboard player (perhaps Wyn Davies?) accompanied the recitatives that opened the second Act; meanwhile lots of stage business involved undressing and dressing Don Remiro as he sang a magnificent aria that included several wonderful high notes.  In this instance, I did find the amount of acting by members of the chorus detracted from the impact of his beautiful singing.

The delightful sextet a little later is one of the high points of the opera, as the main characters amusingly roll their r’s, particularly in the word ‘gruppo’ (knot) which they utter numerous times to describe the tangled web of relationships and characters, particularly the transformation of the ‘valet’ into the prince, and vice versa, and the transformation of Angelina into the prince’s betrothed.

The final scene of the opera took place in front of and on the balcony of the prince’s palace.  It appeared remarkably like the central section of the façade of Buckingham Palace.  It was created by conveniently turning around Don Magnifico’s emporium.

Every effort was made to extract humour from the opera, but pathos and seriousness were not absent, particularly in Angelina’s role.  The underlying themes of the exploitation of servants and the effects of the class system were not entirely lost.  Sets and costumes alone were a feast for the eyes; the singing and orchestral playing made up a feast for the ears.  Congratulations are due all round, not least to set-builders and costume-makers.

The season continues in Wellington on Tuesday 12 May at 6pm and Thursday 14 May and Saturday 16 May at 7.30pm.  The Auckland season opens on 30 May.

 

 

Opera Boutique with a boisterous Pergolesi double bill

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Pergolesi: Livietta e Tracollo and La Serva Padrona

Boutique Opera, Directed by Alison Hodge, with Musical Director, piano accordion and keyboard, Jonathan Berkahn.  Performers: Barbara Graham, Roger Wilson, Charles Wilson, Stacey O’Brien, Alix Schultze and Salina Fisher (violins)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 28 February 2015, 7.30pm

Boutique Opera has not performed for a number of years; it was pleasing to see them back, with light-hearted material as last time – though Edward German’s Tom Jones was very different from the current offering.

Giovanni Pergolesi had a short life: 1710-36.  He wrote a number of operas, some more successful than others.  Both the works performed in this programme were written as Intermezzi, the light-hearted works performed as interludes in more serious operas by the same composer. Obviously the opera-goers in Italy at this period had the appetite for quite a long evening out, since each of the Intermezzi was approximately three-quarters of an hour long.

The first of the two has an alternative title, La contadina astuta, and was an intermezzo for Pergolesi’s opera Adriano in Siria.  The piece was new to me, whereas I have heard the second offering before, and it is relatively well known.

Jonathan Berkahn played the piano accordion for the overture and throughout Livietta e Tracollo as the ‘orchestra’.  It seemed an odd choice of instrument, and it is not one of which I am a fan, but one had to admire his multiple skills.

The operas were sung in English.  Barbara Graham (soprano) took the female lead roles in both, and she was in fine voice.  Her foil in the first was Charles Wilson, who began as Tracollo in disguise as a woman.  His father, Roger Wilson, and Stacey O’Brien both had non-singing roles – but they contributed substantially to the drama, especially the latter, as Fulvia, a friend of Livietta.  Roger Wilson was designated as a servant to Tracollo, but his old crone did not appear capable of much activity!

I found that I had written about Charles Wilson in Tom Jones (2011), the following, which with adaptation of the character’s name, fitted exactly this time around too: ‘Charles Wilson made the most of his role as Tracollo, his acting exactly fitting for a farce, and raising many a smile.  Vocally, too, he was more than adequate, characterising his voice appropriately.’  However, he did have difficulty in that numbers of notes were set too low for his voice.  But his presentation of his role in the drama was realised with great feeling, appropriately overplaying the melodrama of the story of Livietta’s and Tracollo’s tortured relationship.  All ends well, however.

The disguise of Livietta as a French boy was very apt for Barbara Graham, who has won awards for French song; she got an opportunity to exercise that language.  Just as Charles is the son of a very experienced singer and singing teacher, so Barbara is the daughter of Lesley Graham, similarly qualified.  She sang and acted with great assurance; her voice was a delight to hear.

It was a pleasure to hear the two violins and pseudo-harpsichord accompanying the second opera, which was a much livelier work than the previous one – though that, too, had its moments.  Nevertheless, it must be said that Jonathan Berkahn performed wonders of tone and dynamics in the first opera.

A remarkable feature was the clarity of Roger Wilson’s words in La Serva Padrona, which had not always been the case with the characters in the previous piece.  His singing was strong and the voice was produced with full tone and great expressiveness; his acting, too, was convincing and full of amusing detail.

Director Alison Hodge can be pleased with her efforts in both works. There was plenty of amusing stage business in both operas. Costumes for Livietta e Tracollo would pass as eighteenth century, whereas those for La Serva Padrona were 1930s-1940s.

Simple props were adequate and appropriate.

Barbara Graham made a luscious maid on the make.  Hers was quite a demanding role. Her acting was lively and funny, while her singing in the many florid passages was lovely.  Her demeanour was perfect for the part of the devious servant.

Pergolesi’s music was full of energy and wit, and provided a fine vehicle for Graham’s talents as an actor as well as a singer. Instrumental parts underlined the solos deliciously, especially in Roger Wilson’s (Umberto’s) soliloquy in which he contemplates whether or not to marry his maid Serpina (her aim all along).  His low notes were meaty and meaningful.  The mock serious music was fully realised by the soloists, and Pergolesi must have had fun writing the charming final scene between master and maid.

The bright and humorous music and story, and the quality of the singing and acting created a most entertaining evening for the rather small audience – no doubt the entertainment coinciding with the NZSO and Freddy Kempf at the Michael Fowler Centre deprived Boutique Opera of potential audience members.

The season continues on Sunday 1 March at St. Andrew’s on The Terrace at 2pm, on Sunday 8 March at Expressions in Upper Hutt at 2pm, and on Sunday, 22 March at 2pm at Te Manawa Gallery Palmerston North.

 

Days Bay Opera in great success with early opera, La Calisto

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Opera in a Days Bay Garden presents:
Cavalli: La Calisto

Conductor/Keyboards – Howard Moody
Director – Sara Brodie
Producer – Rhona Fraser
Opera in a Day’s Bay Garden Orchestra

Cast: Jove, King of the Gods – Robert Tucker
Mercury, his Messenger – Fletcher Mills
Calisto, A Nymph in Diana’s band – Carleen Ebbs
Endymion, a love-struck Shepherd – Stephen Diaz
Diana, adored Cult-Leader – Maaike Christie-Beekman
Linfea, one of Diana’s Maidens – Imogen Thirlwall
Satirino, a Satyr – Jess Segal
Pan, desperately seeking Diana – Linden Loader
Sylvano, one of Pan’s People – Simon Christie
Juno, Queen of the Gods  – Rhona Fraser
Juno’s Furies – Katherine McIndoe / Rose Blake
Satyr Dancers – Christopher Watts / Jack Newton

Canna House, Day’s Bay, Wellington

Wednesday 11 February, 2015, 6:30 pm

Review modified and edited by Lindis Taylor from Peter Mechen’s notes for his on-air review for Upbeat!)

In Days Bay Opera’s growing record of enterprising opera productions, this one was perhaps the most adventurous yet; it was certainly the earliest. La Calisto was first performed in Venice in 1651 – the composer was Francesco Cavalli and the libretto was written by Cavalli’s most frequent collaborator, Giovanni Faustini. For the story of Calisto he had woven together two myths – the story of the nymph Calisto and her seduction by Jupiter, and of the shepherd Endymion and his love for the goddess Diana.

Francesco Cavalli was born in Lombardi in 1602, which places him between Monteverdi, whose extant operas appeared between 1607 (Orfeo) and the early 1640s (Ritorno d’Ulisse and Poppea), and the more-or-less-known names that appeared later in the 17th century, like Cesti, Steffani (who was featured in a Composer of the Week programme last year, the hero of Cecilia Bartoli’s Mission CD), Stradella, Alessandro Scarlatti (strange that the French opera composers Lully, Charpentier, Campra, get ignored in this context), and later, Vivaldi, Porpora and many others including of course, Handel, an Italian opera composer par excellence.

Cavalli wrote forty-one operas as well as a lot of other music – church music for performance at St Mark’s in Venice, where he was organist and choirmaster until his death in 1676 at the age of 73.

A surprising number of his operas have been staged in the past half century, including Australia. This seems to be the first in New Zealand.

La Calisto wasn’t one of Cavalli’s great successes; a revival at Glyndebourne in 1970 put it on the map. Accepting the conventions of the time, the opera has proved popular: the story is by turns erotic and savage, silly and profound, the music is catchy, and the action is swiftly-moving and filled with interest.

That was certainly the case at Days Bay – the action never flagged, but was kept nicely spinning, the story of a bunch of gods behaving badly – in fact, behaving like the human beings they’re supposed to be setting an example to. The director Sara Brodie achieved a balance between music, drama and setting – no one thing dominated, which was extraordinarily satisfying.  Entertainment rather than profundity was the main concern of conductor and director, though there was a level at which serious issues were well handled; the emphasis was on communication with the audience.

Given the open air performance, diction was generally clear. Characters were sharply-drawn and entirely convincing, and an ear for wit and a lightness of touch enhanced the buoyancy and energy of it all. There were no stage designs or sets – the house, the decks and the environment served excellently – but the costumes were amusing and suggestive.

There was very fine singing from local singers and the instrumental playing – a mix of violins, cello, double-bass, harpsichord, organ with two recorders, dulcian (an early bassoon) and a theorbo, under the lively and sensitive direction of English conductor and early music specialist Howard Moody who had been a colleague of Rhona Fraser’s in England – produced textures that were coloured with a keen sense of the period.

Duets and ensembles were as important as solo moments so that no one singer dominated, least of all the lead role, Calisto. Nevertheless, from her first entrance, Carleen Ebbs as Calisto made a richly sonorous impression, producing tones that illuminated the words’ intention – for example she contrasted nicely her chaste rejection of Jove’s initial advances, with her besotted acceptance of the bogus Diana as her lover (Jove in drag and singing falsetto). Ebbs is a voice to listen out for.

Another to impress was the Jove of Robert Tucker, whom I’d seen previously as Noye in the Festival’s production of Noye’s Fludde. His rich voice was matched by wholehearted acting as Jove, the characterization thrown into bold relief by his portrayal of Diana, sung in a falsetto voice, but with irruptions of male testosterone fuelling both the excitement and the tensions of possible discovery by Calisto of the deception.

As the lovesick Endymion, counter-tenor Stephen Diaz was magnetic, with a deportment allied to a voice which occasionally generated a kind of unearthly angelic quality. The object of his desires, Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Diana beautifully and convincingly maintained the balance between public disinterest while privately besotted with her handsome shepherd, her diction allowing the words their full expression.

Imogen Thirlwell always commands attention on stage as a fine actress, and her voice has such lift and energy, galvanizing any role she takes on. Here Linfea’s thoughts ran the full gamut of the lovesick maiden’s thoughts and feelings in a totally convincing fashion. And Rhona Fraser as Juno was just wonderful – properly imperious, implacable and vengeful – a force to be reckoned with (as a hapless young male audience member found out to his embarrassment, though he didn’t entirely panic at being suddenly thrust into the limelight!).

Simon Christie and Linden Loader gave characteristically solid performances as Sylvano and Pan respectively, as did Fletcher Mills as Mercury, Jove’s occasionally libidinous sidekick!

But it was the teamwork which impressed as much as anything, the ensembles, the co-operative dovetailing of tones, the delight in gaging exactly what and how much was needed in any given situation.

 

NZ Opera’s “Don Giovanni” in Wellington enthralling

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Opera presents:
Mozart: Don Giovanni

Cast:
Don Giovanni: Mark Stone, Leporello: Warwick Fyfe, Donna Elvira: Anna Leese
Donna Anna: Lisa Harper-Brown, Don Ottavio: Jaewoo Kim, Commendatore: Jud Arthur
Masetto: Robert Tucker, Zerlina: Amelia Berry

Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus, Orchestra Wellington,
Conductor: Wyn Davies,

Director: Sara Brodie

St. James Theatre

Saturday, 11 October 2014

 

Much has been written about what is probably the world’s most continuously
successful opera: Mozart’s Don Giovanni. That it continues to draw in the crowds despite the misgivings of various ‘experts’ over the years is tribute not only to the variety and virtuosity of the music, but also to the characterisation in Lorenzo da Ponte’s sometimes denigrated libretto.

This opera is notable for many things; the complexity of the vocal writing is certainly one of them. Another is the complexity of the plot. All the characters contrive to find themselves in bad situations from which they manage to escape, just in time. Except for Don Giovanni at the end; his final come-uppance was delivered in this version with a dramatic twist that was in accord with the contemporary production.

There were numbers of features in Wyn Davies’s conducting, Sara Brodie’s production and John Verryt’s sets that made this production of Mozart’s great opera stand out from others one has seen. In no particular order, features were: plenty of fast-paced action and music, the use of the revolving stage making for quick changes of the sets, the 21st century setting, the contemporary English of the surtitles (e.g. ‘creep’ to describe the Don), and the uniformly high standard of the lead characters’ singing and acting.

Setting the story amongst shabby ‘low life’ gathering places rather than in palazzos and piazzas was a surprise. The Hotel Commendatore, and the Hotel Ottavio, plus the Libertino’s ‘Nite Club’ allowed for much comic business, particularly the latter venue. The use of cellphones, tablet, and a modern Red Cross-style rescue team were ‘verismo’ features, 2000s-style.

These were hardly incongruities in terms of the setting; what was incongruous was having the cast doing contemporary formless slow jogging about to Mozart’s delicious music designed for quite different dances; this left me feeling disappointed and deprived – though it is hard to know what else could be done, given the contemporary setting. The pole-dancers in the background were no more or less incongruous.

The well-produced programme featured not one, not two, but three excellent essays, by John Drummond, Nicholas Reid and John Pattinson. Another commendable feature of this production was that apart from two very fine singers from overseas (Mark Stone from UK and Warwick Fyfe from Australia), the principals were all New Zealanders.

Those tremendous, portentous opening chords from the orchestra set the scene for a dramatic evening of opera. From the overture onwards, the orchestra played with great verve and panache, always ‘on the ball’, every instrument making a marked contribution to the whole.

The curtains opened on a dark set revealing the night club, a homeless man endeavouring to bed down in its vicinity (this on the day following World Homeless Day), and the brusque treatment he received – these all came to mean something in the ensuing drama.

The first character to reveal himself is Leporello, with Warwick Fyfe in fine voice, and with much nuance in his acting. Under Sara Brodie’s direction he was not so much of a buffoon as in some productions. His ‘Catalogue Aria’ in Act I was brilliantly performed. The catalogue was held on his cellphone, which he manipulated with sweeping gestures (a little impractical, I would have thought, to have a document with 2065 entries, on a tiny device!). Only in the final scene, his contribution could not be clearly heard.

The appearance of the Don introduced us to the splendid singing of Mark Stone. These demanding roles were well under the belts of the two gentlemen; Mark Stone was very much the persuasive seducer, his voice ready for the variety of timbres demanded by the different aspects of his character portrayed in the company of his would-be conquests, of his denouncers and of his servant. His big arias were sung with lots of swagger where appropriate, and sure vocal technique – masterful. The delightful Canzonetta with mandolin, ‘Deh vieni alla finestra’ was ingratiating and sung with great variation and subtlety in the voice.

Lisa Harper-Brown’s Donna Anna was at first rather overwhelmed by the orchestra, from where I sat. Her voice was at times rather shrill; I agree with William Dart’s comment in his New Zealand Herald review that she ‘showed some vocal straining’; words were not clear and her acting was stiff much of the time. This could be taken as characterisation of a woman whose father had just been murdered, but I wasn’t persuaded. I found her costume rather unbecoming for a tall woman. However, her final recitative and aria ‘Crudele…’ sung to Don Ottavio was very richly rendered.

Anna Leese’s Donna Elvira was wonderful – relaxed, her voice and words always clear, her acting natural and effective, she fulfilled the role superbly. Her entire portrayal was very strong and dramatic, commanding in both acting and singing, and her final aria was fabulous. As the Commendatore (a role he also played in Wellington City Opera’s 1987 production) Jud Arthur has the right bearing, and certainly the right voice: a deep, resonant bass, which he uses superbly well.

Don Ottavio (Jaewoo Kim) is criticised for being wooden, or not an adequate character, or other such phrases. However, he is written as rather a ‘wet’, and his apparently unsympathetic attitude probably stems from the fact that as a nobleman he could not believe that another nobleman would perpetrate such an act as murder. Kim has a lovely voice, and I did not find him inadequate, given the character he was portraying. He and Lisa Harper-Brown evoked the shocked, grieving couple very well. His ‘Il mio tesoro’ was a pleasure to hear.

Amelia Berry (Zerlina) had a few rather uncertain notes early on, but she soon settled down, and revealed not only splendid tone with a variety of timbre, but also her acting and characterisation were uniformly very good; she was really ‘in’ the role. Her singing blossomed, not the least when she produced a magical high C at one point. Her ‘Batti, batti’ was ingratiatingly lovely. Robert Tucker’s Massetto was a rather sturdy, stodgy character, but given to some fine acting and singing, though his voice was not always strong.

Of the many familiar arias in the opera, the singers gave great account, on the whole.I found the Don’s ‘Là ci darem la mano’ a little too slick. Maybe this was to depict his nature (and experience!), but would it persuade a young woman?

As if Mozart did not produce wonderful orchestral sounds and textures, superb solos and telling recitatives, where he excels in this opera is in the ensembles. The first quartet was just splendid, with the variety of emotions between the characters portrayed with sensitivity and skill by the singers. The trio early in Act II was another gorgeous ensemble; there were particularly lovely nuances in Anna Leese’s singing. The sextet in the middle of the Act was wonderfully well done, the drama conveyed through each part; the brilliance of Mozart’s writing here is quite breathtaking.

Summing up, it must said the production made less of the comic and more of the dark, even gothic and tragic in the story than do some productions. There was lots of loud and not a great deal of soft. However, characters were brilliantly portrayed, while the action and stage business kept things interesting. The chorus, like the orchestra, were uniformly first-class, and had plenty of stage business and acting, always carried out convincingly. All involved deserve hearty congratulations.

Among the many notable production touches were the scaffold beside the Hotel Ottavio, that enabled the Don to climb close to Donna Elvira’s window; the sight of the maid through the window as she went through Elvira’s bag, finally removing money.

The nice connection between the homeless man and the Commendatore should not be given away in a review, nor should the dramatic stunt that despatches the Don. The ending sextet was a commendable conclusion, following which the audience erupted in enthusiastic response, thoroughly deserved. We were privileged to attend such an enthralling, high quality production of Mozart’s great work.

Further performances are on 16 and 18 October at 7.30pm.

NZSM’s “A Night at the Opera” generates a feast

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Arias, Ensembles and Scenes from Opera
performed by the NZSM Classical Voice Students

Katrina Brougham, Alicia Cadwgan, Emma Carpenter, Declan Cudd, Georgia Fergusson
Jospeh Haddow, Elyse Hemara, Jamie Henare, Rebecca Howan, Luana Howard
Rebecca Howie, Hannah Jones, Brooks Kershaw, Aluapei Kolopeaua, Priya Makwana
Olivia Marshall, William McElwee Katherine McEndoe, Nino Raphael, Tess Robinson
Olivia Sheat, Daniel Sun, Christian Thurston, Shayna Tweed, Luka Venter.

Director: Frances Moore
Music Director: Mark Dorrell
Repetiteur: Heather Easting
Designer: Alexander Guillot
Lighting: Lisa Maule

Adam Concert Room, Kelburn Campus
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 19th September 2014

Earlier last week I had the good fortune to catch Radio NZ Concert’s “Upbeat” interview with Margaret Medlyn, one of the tutors of Classical Voice at the NZ School of Music in Wellington. She spoke about the then oncoming “Night at the Opera” presentation involving the voice students and featuring arias and ensembles from well-known operas and operettas. She said that the concert’s semi-staged aspect with costumes and lighting was especially valuable for the younger students, as it gave them a chance to experience a theatrical context in which to perform and to put into practice what they had been studying. But she also thought that all the performers as well as the audience would relish the theatrical aspects of the presentation, adding value and interest to the musical experience.

The presentation was in the capable hands of director Frances Moore, a former first-class-honours student at the School of Music here, and subsequently a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, while working as an assistant director with the Manhattan School of Music’s Summer programme. She’s returned to New Zealand to continue studies at Toi Whakaari, and pursue a career as a director of opera. Here, she certainly made the most of the depth and diverse range of talents among the student performers, encouraging them to relish their opportunities by singing out and giving themselves up entirely to their characters and their interactions. She was aided and abetted by Alexandra Guillot’s inventive set and costume designs, and Lisa Maule’s very appropriate, on-the-spot (sic) lighting, both helping to bring the different scenarios of each item to life.

I’d recently attended and much enjoyed “Der Rosenkavalier” in a “scaled-down” performance edition out at Days Bay, courtesy of music director Michael Vinten, so I was more than usually receptive to the similar treatment accorded tonight’s items – the normally orchestral accompaniments were by turns brilliantly realized by pianists Mark Dorrell and Heather Easting, giving the singers, whether solo or in ensemble, complete security of support at all times, the playing’s energy and sense of fun creating many delightful and alchemic moments. I couldn’t see the pianist(s) from where I was sitting in the Adam Concert Room, but I understood that Heather Easting provided the Britten, Mozart, Donizetti and Puccini accompaniments.

Technically, the items went with a hiss and a roar, with only a handful of unsynchronised ensemble moments disturbing the flow, and which the performers simply pulled together again with confidence and élan. The concert began with an excerpt from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, sung in English, and designated as “Act One – finale” in the programme – as I later found, trying to pinpoint that same sequence on a “complete” recording I had of the operetta led to all kinds of discrepancies and confusions which suggested that the work had been mercilessly “hacked about” over the years, and with all kinds of “performing editions” emerging from the fracas. Comparing notes on this matter with Mark Dorrell a day or so later considerably relieved my confusion, and restored my faith in my ears!

The gods as presented here were a rum lot, indeed, with delightfully ungodlike characteristics shining forth for all to savour – each singer relished his or her opportunities, most notably Alicia Cadwgan’s delightfully kittenish Diana and Christian Thurston’s suitably machoistic Jupiter, the perfect foil for the suave Pluto of Declan Cudd, whose manner, apart from his highest notes, was easeful and insinuating, causing a sonorous and forthright rebellion among the ranks of Olympus’s celestial inhabitants! It made me long to see and hear a performance of the complete work, whatever the edition and its corruptions and inconsistencies!

From the fripperies of Offenbach’s satire to the stark realities of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” was a quantum leap for the sensibilities, a “plunge-bath after a sauna” effect, whose marked contrast worked extremely well. This was the quartet sequence “From the gutter” from Act Two of the opera, showcasing the voices of Olivia Marshall, Hannah Jones, Rebecca Howan, and, as Ellen Orford, Katherine McEndoe. Olivia Marshall in particular, as Auntie, impressed with the beauty and steadiness of her line, ably supported by her nieces Hannah Jones and Rebecca Howan; while Katherine McEndoe as Ellen engaged our attention with her strength and focus of utterance. The voices in ensemble readily conveyed that stricken, passionate quality called for by the music – beauty of a disturbing, intensely-wrought kind.

Intensities of a different order were generated by the Act One “Padlock” Scene from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, leading to those exchanges between Tamino and Papageno and the Three Ladies that must be among the most beautiful of all operatic moments. First we had Luka Venter as Papageno with his powers of speech bound by enchantment, his frustration and eventual relief at being released warmly and amusingly conveyed. The Three Ladies, Shanya Tweed, Elyse Hemara and Georgia Fergusson, were terrific! – in fact, a little too much so, in fact, as they needed more light and shade, more ease in their singing – but they were still admirably focused, direct and transfixing in their impact.

Declan Cudd as Tamino, along with Luka Venter, his Papageno, gave us a bit more of the lightness of touch that the music needed – but I was waiting (as I always do) for that lump-in-throat moment begun by the wind instruments in complete performances of the opera, when the women sing about the Three Boys who will guide Tamino and Papageno along their appointed journey. Here, I thought the utterances from all concerned were too rushed, wanting the air and space which would generate a certain “charged” quality, as if, for a moment, creation had paused to witness here a kind of celestial laying-on of hands. The scene still worked its magic – and I did like the appearance of the three “Knaben” high up in the balcony at that point, opening the vistas in a way that the music so beautifully suggests.

I was delighted that we got the chorus “Comes a train of little ladies”  from Sullivan’s “The Mikado” as well as the “Three Little Maids from School” – in the opening chorus the voices truly caught that sense of rapturous wonderment at the words “And we wonder, how we wonder….”, with marvellous surges of tone, and a beautiful dying fall at the end. It was the perfect foil for the “three little maids”, Hannah Jones’s Yum-Yum strong and focused, but the others (Katherine McEndoe and Rebecca Howan) closely in attendance. Their three-pronged exuberance  mischievously nudged and poked at the figure of the bemused Pooh-Bah, who declined (perhaps by way of protesting a little too much!) to “dance and sing” as the three girls confessed (“So, please you Sir, we much regret”) they were, by nature, apt to do. Jamie Henare, strong-voiced as Pooh Bah, had a fine time not quite completely evading their clutches!

The first-half closer, appropriately enough the finale of Act One of Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”, was an ambitious piece of singing and staging which, thanks to plenty of energy, wit and engaging vocal characterisation, backed up by strongly-focused direction and presentation, came across to us most entertainingly. William McElwee’s Count Almaviva was delightful, dramatically outlandish and vocally sweet, if just a bit coloratura-shy in places, while Brooks Kershaw’s Bartolo/Barbaro/Bertoldo responded with plenty of appropriate puzzlement and stupefaction at the count’s appearance as a drunken soldier. Alicia Cadwgan’s Rosina charmed us from the beginning with her quicksilver responses regarding the “letter business”, the characters readily catching the “spin” of the composer’s interactions in their adroitly-dovetailed ensemble.

The arrival of Figaro (Christian Thurston), along with Don Basilio (Jamie Henare) and Berta (Tess Robinson) properly galvanised things to the point where the police were called, and an exciting, tarantella-like ensemble swept us all along, emotions bubbling, simmering and seething with everything ranging from pleasure to bewilderment, ensemble thrills and spills treated as part of the experience. As its riotous way unfolded we were thoroughly engaged by the goings-on – I don’t think the most polished professional presentation could have given us more pleasure than we got here from these exuberant and fearless young performers!

A different kind of sophistication awaited us after the interval with Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music”, the scenario allowing Emma Carpenter’s voice to shine as Anne, both solo, and combining nicely in duet with Alicia Cadwgan’s Petra. Hannah Jones turned in an alluring Desiree, while as a couple Christian Thurston’s robust Carl-Magnus and Tess Robinson’s stratospheric Charlotte also gave pleasure. The performance caught the piece’s essentially “chic” surface nature while allowing us glimpses of the characters beneath the precarious facades – most enjoyable.

“Donizetti’s wonderful Don Pasquale” read the programme-note, and the music certainly lived up to the effusive introduction – this was a committed, no-holds-barred performance of the duet “Tornami a dir” (Tell me once more), which the composer styled as a “nocturne”, performed by Declan Cudd and Olivia Marshall. The former’s tone was freer and fuller in his lower register, though none of his high passages were shirked – while his opposite, Olivia Marshall, brought a confident and secure voice to the music given Norina, his sweetheart. For me, at any rate, the couple’s fervour and commitment easily carried the day.

Back to Mozart and his “Magic Flute” we went, this time with the Three Boys (Olivia Sheat, Luana Howard and Rebecca Howie) very much in vocal focus, delightfully attired in “Davy Crockett from Bavaria” style hats, and turning their tones in well-wrought ensemble towards dissuading Pamina from taking her life over her Prince Tamino’s apparent rejection of their love. As with the excerpt from “Peter Grimes” Katherine McIndoe impressed upon the memory with her focused commitment to the character, conveying her confused emotions with plenty of force and immediacy.

I thought the Rossini ensemble as we saw and heard just before the interval would be hard to beat, but the company at least matched its earlier achievement with the evening’s concluding item, a colourful and heartfelt delivery of the Waltz-Song and Soldiers’ March from Act Two of Puccini’s “La Boheme”. It all came vibrantly together – Tess Robinson’s appealing Musetta floated the insinuations of her melody quite irresistibly, at first angering her estranged lover, Marcello (Christian Thurston), and then winning him back over, to the annoyance of her elderly escort  Alcindoro (a lovely cameo from Nino Raphael), and the amusement of the watching Bohemians.

Though there wasn’t much for them to do as spectators, William McElwee’s Rodolfo and Hannah Jones’s Mimi looked and sounded lovely together, while Luca Venter’s Schaunard and Jamie Henare’s Colline amply completed the Bohemian contingent. Then as the military band approached, it was indeed “half the population of Paris” which seemed to be milling around on the stage as if on holiday, the contingent then marching off to the concluding bars of Puccini’s music in grand style.

All credit to the NZ School of Music’s Classical Voice Faculty and to the students whose performances this evening would have richly justified their tutors’ efforts – it was a great show, whose creative flair and sense of occasion lifted it far above the conventional hotch-potch method of random assemblage of  “vocal gems”, and produced something really worthwhile and memorable. I’m sure Margaret Medlyn, for one, would have been delighted.

Source of innocent merriment – Wellington G&S Society’s “The Mikado”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington G & S Light Opera presents:
GILBERT AND SULLIVAN – The Mikado
Libretto by W.S.Gilbert / Music by Arthur Sullivan
Stage Director: Gillian Jerome
Musical Director: Hugh McMillan

Cast:  The Mikado, Emperor of Japan (Derek Miller)
Nanki-Poo, His Son (Jamie Young)
Ko-Ko, Lord High Executioner (John Goddard)
Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else (Orene Tiai)
Pish-Tush, A Noble Lord (Kevin O’Kane)
Go-To, A Noble Lord (Lindsay Groves)
Yum-Yum, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Pasquale Orchard)
Pitti-Sing, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Michelle Harrison)
Peep-Bo, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Marion Wilson)
Katisha, an elderly Lady, betrothed to Nanki-Poo (Jody Orgias)

Chorus and Orchestra of the G & S Light Opera Company
Opera House, Wellington,

Saturday 6th September, 2014

Those of us who know and love the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas confidently expect that, despite the swings and roundabouts of popular taste and fashion, they will continue to delight, charm and entertain – in short, endure as classics. Though uniquely of their time they still express relevant commentaries regarding equivalents among individuals and circumstances in contemporary life. Perhaps first and foremost of them, and probably still the most popular, is “The Mikado”.

From the moment that the Japanese ornamental sword fell off the wall of W.S.Gilbert’s study, giving the author the idea for a libretto which would be set in Japan, but would mercilessly lampoon the British bureaucracy, “The Mikado” has commandeered a position of on-going success among the “Savoy” Operas, one which its fellows, even the well-known “HMS Pinafore” and “The Pirates of Penzance” haven’t quite emulated. No other G & S operetta casts its satirical net so widely, nor pulls in such a memorable catch. And as Jonathan Miller’s legendary, though disconcertingly not-so-recent, production update of the work at the English National Opera demonstrated, “The Mikado” lends itself readily to modernization, provided  that it’s done creatively and intelligently.

Wellington G & S Light Opera’s recent production of  the show (which Gilbert adroitly sub-titled “The Town of Titipu”) played its modest part in following the “updating” tradition via references to recent “Down Under” events. The opportunities for interpolation occur mostly in two songs, firstly Ko-Ko’s famous “Ive got a little list” in which the Lord High Executioner informs us of the most likely candidates for pending decapitation, and secondly, the Mikado”s equally well-known “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime”, also a list, detailing the fate of certain types of miscreants, each in a manner that befits the original offence. Standard performance practice, really, and hardly ground-breaking – but the updates always have the effect of to some extent revitalizing the performance/listening process, and so it proved here.

In fact I was expecting rather more “input” considering the plethora of politically poisonous goings-on of late in our normally po-faced little country – but I thought Ko-Ko’s song the more imaginatively “doctored” of the two efforts, the best contemporary reference being to Nicky Hager’s recent book, the line containing the “dirty politicist” phrase bringing the house down! By comparison, the Mikado’s best in situ reference in his song was the punishment for the window-pane scribbler in railway carriages, having to “ride on a buffer on Hutt and Johnsonville trains”, though there was also a side-swipe at list MPs which caused an amused rustle. Still, the important thing was that the updated interpolations were done and duly enjoyed.

At the opera’s beginning we noted the traditional cut of the Japanese costumes, elaborate enough without being cumbersome, and sufficient to suggest the orientalism of the operetta’s original inspiration. The chorus’s singing throughout was excellent, even if their stage movements sometimes lacked the rhythmic snap and verve suggested by the music – the opening “If you want to know who we are” looked marvellous in tableau, but I felt it still needed more theatrical energy and dynamism in both movement and attitude.

The gentler, very different character of the women’s choruses created their own worlds of expression, although I noticed a tendency to adopt tempi in some of the music that didn’t allow the melodies to bloom – no heeding of the plea “fleeting moment prithee stay!” when the women intoned “Comes a train of little ladies”, and even more disappointingly, “Braid the raven hair”, both of whose lovely tunes seemed to me subjected to something of a hustling, “come along, now!” treatment that I felt compromised their soaring, lyrical qualities. However, I did like the feistiness of tone with which the women sang throughout – not especially beautiful a sound, but very schoolgirlish and convincing!

So, the choruses gave a lot of pleasure both in appearance and in vocal terms. But where I thought some members could have been profitably deployed was in assisting both of the “imperial” entrances, both of which seemed too bare and exposed, wanting in theatricality and gravitas. Firstly, I expected there would have been a short, sharp whirlwind of a disturbance with the vengeful arrival in Titipu of Katisha, the Mikado’s daughter-in-law elect, to reclaim her fugitive fiancee, Nanki-Poo. As Katisha, Jodi Orgias seemed, at her entrance, strangely unattended as befitted her station, apart from two rather impassive imperial guards – could we not have had, for example, a quartet of attendants drawn from the onstage chorus (I’m certain there’d none of them be missed!) quickly running in and prostrating themselves in terror by way of announcing her arrival?

The Mikado’s entrance was similarly underwhelming – there was no sense of any imperial retinue indicating the character’s majesty and overweening importance – I would have thought it simply needed half-a-dozen or so of the chorus “redeployed” as attendants to the Monarch – in fact none of the men’s chorus was required on stage in Act Two up to that point, so a transformation from Titipu citizen to royal attendant would have been a relatively easy thing to achieve. Any number would have made a more ceremonial and worshipful impression than did just the same two guards as came with Katisha.

Both men’s and women’s choruses, as I’ve said, made splendid noises, as, by and large, did the principals, the singing discreetly aided by some amplification – I found it a shade aurally confusing at first, until I worked out just how it was being done (though one is opposed in principle, one can put up with it when, as here, it’s unobtrusively handled).

As Nanki-Poo, tenor Jamie Young fearlessly attacked his lines with enthusiastic, ringing tones, characterizing his delivery most adroitly in the different stanzas of “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” – and while the voice wasn’t entirely easeful and elegant in places, what he did always sounded wholehearted. Kevin O’Kane’s Pish-Tush was smartly and stylishly presented, able to put across “Our Great Mikado” with some relish, amid the appropriate stuffiness. And I liked the pompous cut of Orene Tiai’s Pooh-Bah, who seemed to savor his every utterance with a fine sense of his own puffed-up importance (including at one point a “Minister of Maori Affairs” reference – or words to that effect – to add to his list of portfolios!). And his little vocal cadenza at “Long life to you!” was an especially delicious moment.

Both Jody Orgias as Katisha and Derek Miller as the Mikado did their best to convey a sense of imperial gravitas. We also got Katisha’s vulnerable, soft-hearted side from Jody Orgias – I was moved by her “The hour of gladness”, and in the second act her distress at the tale of the fate of the “little tom-tit” who died for love gave an additional dimension to the ferocity of her duet with Ko-Ko, “There is beauty in the bellow of the Blast”, though neither her nor her duetting partner, John Goddard as Ko-Ko, managed at the conductor’s speeds to REALLY point and get across to us the deliciousness of those words: “……but to him who’s scientific there is nothing that’s terrific in the falling of a flight of thunderbolts!”.

I wanted some more interplay between the Mikado and Katisha just after their first entrance, with the “Daughter-in-law-elect” making it quite clear that she intended to rule the roost in the Royal Household! – oddly enough a publicity photo in the programme of this scene in rehearsal conveyed much more sense of this happening than I thought we actually got on stage! And, whether Derek Miller’s “A more humane Mikado” was deliberately cut or whether there was some kind of mishap I don’t rightly know – but having re-established the “running order” of the song, he gave a good account of the rest of it, even if the interpolations weren’t quite up to those in wit and sting written for and sung by Ko-Ko in his “little list” song.

The “Three Little Maids from School” invariably score a hit, and the winsome trio of Pasquale Orchard (Yum-Yum), MIchelle Harrison (Pitti-Sing) and Marion Wilson (Peep-Bo) brought off their “signature tune” with wit, gaiety and appealing freshness – though again I felt they were unnecessarily overtaxed by the tempi adopted for the following  “So Please you Sir, we must regret”, as was Pooh-Bah, in reply. While Pasquale Orchard’s appealing Yum-Yum properly dominated, with a performance that sparkled and glittered with ripples of surface delight upon oceans of character, Michelle Harrison’s grainer, more circumspect Pitti-Sing was the perfect foil, a kind of “Despina” to her sister’s “rolled-into-one-Fioridiligi/Dorabella”, making an all-too-convincing job of her description of the unfortunate Nanki-Poo’s bogus execution!

I’ve left John Goddard’s portrayal of Ko-Ko, the hapless Lord High Executioner, to the end because his was a pivotal performance – he “owned” the stage and consistently “placed” his character just where it should have been. His timing of the words in his songs, as with his dialogue, was exemplary, and he made the most of his set of topical interpolations. His character seemed alive to possibility at all times, rather like a musician who thinks about and fairly places every single note in the score – nothing gave the impression of being mechanical or by rote, but was instead lived and relished. Along with Michelle Harrison and Orene Tiai, he played his part in bringing into grisly focus “The Criminal cried”, one of the performance’s highlights.

Apart from a slightly uncertain beginning to the Overture, and a tendency in places to push the music a tad too hastily, music director Hugh McMillan kept the performance securely on the rails, drawing some lovely solos from his orchestral players, led by Orchestra Wellington’s Slava Fainitski, along with some deliciously deft ensemble sequences, as well as plenty of energy in appropriate places. As with other recent G&S Light Opera productions there was much to enjoy during the course of the evening, the splendour of the tried-and-true classic in places shining forth with enough warmth to stimulate and satisfy our pleasure.

 

“The Knight of the Rose” (Der Rosenkavalier) delights at Days Bay

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Opera in a Days Bay Garden presents:
Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose)
An Opera by Richard Strauss (edited and arranged by Michael Vinten)
Libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal (English translation by Alfred Kalisch)
Producer:  Rhona Fraser / Director:  Sara Brodie
Conductor:  Michael Vinten

OperainaDaysBaygarden Orchestra / Leader:  Blythe Press

Cast:  Rhona Fraser (Marshallin) / Bianca Andrew  (Octavian)
James Clayton (Baron Ochs) / Barbara Graham  (Sophie von Faninal)
Matt Landreth  (Herr von Faninial) / Imogen Thirlwall (Annina)
Tehezib Latiff (Italian Singer) / Simon Christie (Police Commissioner)
Frederick Jones  (Major-Domo / Landlord) / Marian Hawke (Marianne)
Lachlan McLachlan  (Mahomet)
also:  Bethany Miller, Coshise Avei, Elizabeth Harris, Luka Ventner,
Declan Cudd, Isabelle van der Wilt, Kahu Rolfe, Pania Rolfe, Finlay Barr-Clark

Wellesley College Hall, Days Bay, Wellington

Sunday 24th August 2014

I readily admit that I approached this Days Bay Opera production of “Der Rosenkavalier” with mixed feelings and with expectations somewhat on edge, wondering how well one of my  favourite operas would emerge from the processes of being not only shortened but also rearranged for chamber-like forces.

It’s just that a goodly part of Rosenkavalier’s appeal for me has always been its sheerly sumptuous quality, with  gorgeous late-romantic orchestral writing, and, in stage productions I’d previously seen, costume and set designs reflecting wealth and lavish display – everything, in a word, resplendent.

Counter-balancing these feelings was my previous (and it must be said) resoundingly positive experience of productions at Days Bay –  I had seen operas by both Handel and Mozart successfully performed there, on each occasion in the open air of producer Rhona Fraser’s magnificent garden, in presentations where singers and instrumentalists turned in strongly focused performances that triumphantly invigorated the music and brought the characters engagingly to life. So I was thus nicely poised between both pleasurable and doubtful anticipation as the opera’s beginning-time approached.

This time round, instead of staging the production outdoors and risking their audiences’ exposure to the cold and wet of winter, the organisers wisely took the step of securing the use of nearby Wellesley College’s beautifully-appointed assembly hall, whose harbour-view vistas served as a stunning introductory backdrop to the performing area for we in the audience before the show.

So, it was a production more-or-less “in the round”, with the orchestra at the back, and audience taking up the remaining three sides around the performing area, the singers making their entrances and exits from any of three of the corners. I thought director Sara Brodie’s use of the area beautifully conveyed both fluidity and stillness in her deployment of personages, around and about a centrally-placed bed in the first act, and across the more unimpeded spaces of Acts Two and Three.

I found to my great delight production and performances thoroughly engaging and in places enchanting – in short, most satisfying, even if I’m certain my reaction was partly due to pleasurable relief at experiencing so very much more of the work’s magic than I thought would be possible to convey under the circumstances. Of course, even in a full-scale production a good deal of the essence of Rosenkavalier as a piece of theatre can be found in the intimate exchanges between the characters and in the composer’s own chamber-like scoring of the accompaniments to these, however thrilling those big, fulsomely-upholstered moments remain.

In this sense the production’s excising of certain sequences (conductor Michael Vinten making the adjustments and rearrangements) enhanced the chamber-like nature of what we saw and heard, most definitely to this particular setting’s advantage. We lost detail here and there,  but gained in overall sweep and flow, dropped a couple of minor characters as well, but lightened the musical and theatrical textures in doing so.

A substantial cut was the lengthy orchestra-only preamble to Act Three, normally accompanying the “booby-trapping” of the room at the inn organised by the lascivious Baron Ochs for his illicit dalliance with the Marshallin’s “maid”, Mariandel (Octavian, the Marshallin’s young lover, in disguise). Most adroitly, Michael Vinten had merged Acts Two and Three together as one, so that the Baron, tricked by Octavian’s letter at the end of Act Two suggesting the “tryst” goes straight from the music of his beautifully lascivious Waltz-tune to meet up at the inn with Octavian/Mariandel.

So, all the “ghostly” irruptions intended to unnerve Ochs, and usually demonstrated during the Prelude were dispensed with, shifting the focus of the Baron’s discomfiture to the appearance of a bogus ex-wife and children, and of course, the arrival of the Faninals, father and daughter, and the Marshallin herself, to properly put the seal on Och’s downfall.

In light of these divergencies from the original the venture required a surety of focus, a kind of determination, even zeal, to bring it off – and right across the spectrum of production, of stage and musical direction, of singing and acting, and of orchestral playing one sensed this burning commitment to make it all work, a veritable glow which settled over certain moments in particular, but which for me resonated in ambient terms most satisfyingly thoughout the entire performance.

Three things got the proceedings away to a wonderful start – firstly, the playing of the famous Act One Prelude, with its bubbling energies capped by those notoriously orgasmic horn passages (Ed Allen’s playing gloriously exuberant at that point), followed by some extremely tender, beautifully-realised instrumental sounds of all persuasions, from the players.

Secondly we enjoyed director Sara Brodie’s inventive ploy for getting the lovers into the bed for their opening exchanges,  the Marshallin and Octavian entering in the midst of a flourish of bodies (a “chorus of many characters”) and quickly and unobtrusively sliding under the covers as their cohorts stood and bowed to us, by way of acknowledging our presence, before leaving as quickly as they had come.

Thirdly Bianca Andrew’s singing of Octavian’s opening lines (the opera was sung in English), had such a refulgent glow, a sound one wanted to simply bask in for a blessed time, getting the opera off to a most mellifluous beginning, voice-wise, one amply and characterfully furthered by Rhona Fraser’s dignified, worldly-wise Marshallin, Marie Therese. A pity we were distracted more than we ought to have been by the latter’s wig which seemed to be giving the singer cause for concern every now and then – the Marshallin could, at the very opening, surely have displayed her own hair as befitted the intimacy of the situation, as her young lover’s semi-clothed state certainly did!

Throughout the opening Act Bianca Andrew brought out the full gamut of her character’s youthful bravado, very much an infatuated youth prone to extremes of feeling, with great and natural exuberance followed by episodes of near-debilitating despair. And her acting when disguised as Mariandel was sheer delight, by turns engagingly gawky and irresistibly coquettish.

Equally as absorbing, but in an entirely different way, was Rhona Fraser’s Marshallin – as previously remarked, a dignified portrayal, if more than usually sober and reflective a figure from the outset, making us feel as if, perhaps even from the moment of waking she had already begun distancing herself from her young lover. The opportunities for lightness, even coquettishness between her and Octavian weren’t relished and pointed as one might have expected, in places such as her cool response to the young man’s’s angst at her hastily retracted “Once…..”, suggesting that he was by no means her first illicit lover.

So we got more of a progression in the Marshallin’s demeanour and attitude away from Octavian throughout the Act rather than a contrast before and after her encounter with her boorish, gold-digging cousin Ochs. However, Fraser’s circumspection gained full force with her “growing old” soliloquy after her cousin’s departure, as well as in the terms of her dismissal of her lover with the words “One day you will fall in love with someone younger and prettier”. She gathered in all of our sympathies throughout this scene by dint of her firmly-centred singing, and a patient, gently-etched delineation of the predicament faced by an older person enamored of somebody more youthful. And Michael Vinten’s control of the finely-woven orchestral texturings at the end, made for moments of such magic.

As for the force of rustic gallantry gone awry that was Baron Ochs, this was a part splendidly brought to life by Australian baritone James Clayton, all the more telling because of his and the production’s avoidance of excessive caricature. Clayton was a younger, more virile and physically personable Ochs than usual, whose oafishness lay more in his arrogance and sexist behaviour than anywhere else, a far more believable, and potentially dangerous figure than the usual boorish and physically repulsive character presented in the role. In his unfussily elegant eighteenth-century costume he actually cut a splendid figure, though the depiction of his attendant “love-child”, Leopold, sailed perilously close to caricature.

Act Two burst upon our sensibilities like a firecracker, the relative lack of tonal weight in the orchestra countered with plenty of “glint” and wonderfully incisive playing. Matt Landreth’s Herr Faninal wanted only a tad more metal in his tone to further resound his great excitement when announcing the “wondrous day” of his daughter Sophie’s betrothal to Baron Ochs. As for Barbara Graham’s Sophie, the portrayal would, I’m sure, have ticked everybody’s set of boxes  – she was girlish, pretty, vivacious, tremulous, exuberant and impulsive, and her singing was clear, unforced and accurate, both radiant and charming in her responses to Octavian and the Silver Rose. The actual presentation scene was as breath-catching and for me as goose-pimply as ever, those gorgeous wind arabesques cleverly supported by the piano when sounding their usual lump-in-throat progressions. Both singers “caught” and superbly held the intensity of exchange and the growing of emotional experience of each of their characters.

The reintroduction of Ochs and his father-in-law elect properly burst the scene’s romantic bubble, and the subsequent business culminating in Octavian’s wounding of the Baron in a duel went with a roar and a swing – this production “made do” with only one “conspirator” rather than the usual Machiavellian pair, Imogen Thirlwall using her comic talent and gift for characterization as Annina to great effect. She nicely teased the wounded Baron with Octavian’s “Mariandel” letter, and set him up to positively revel in his famous Waltz Song – a nice “stage-business” touch was allowing Ochs every opportunity to seize the opportunity to waltz suggestively with the nearest available female every time the music appeared!

Without the “haunted-room” aspect, the final act centered much more on the “gulling”of the Baron by public exposure of his intentions, the setting up of the bogus wife’s arrival and her children more of a comic diversion here than a significant nail in his coffin. At the end I thought the innkeeper and his cohorts standing in a group bearing their sheaves of bills could have profitably contributed to the choreography of swirling bodies around and about the befuddled would-be-Casanova, rather like an added circlet of punishment from Dante’s Inferno! – the children’s efforts, complete with their compromising cries of “Papa! Papa!” were sturdy and valiant, but more of a maelstrom of activity around the Baron would have heightened the effect even more hilariously. Still, the Baron’s penchant for waltzing to his “tune” was nicely inverted by Imogen Thirlwall as the “bogus wife” grabbing hold of him and putting him through his reluctant paces once more, for all to see!

By this time Ochs’ undoing had been well-and-truly gazetted, with all the major players plus a Police Commissioner on the stage re-aligning the situation (the latter a sturdy comprimario from Simon Christie), and Octavian having put “Mariandel” to rest, to the unfortunate Baron’s eventual and bemused realization. With his exit came the famous trio for the Marshallin, Octavian and Sophie, here sung and acted as heartrendingly as if there was to be no tomorrow, by the three principals, followed by the Marshallin’s dignified exit with Herr Faninal, and the final duet for Octavian and Sophie. It would be churlish of me to comment that I thought Bianca Andrew’s delivery of the final ascending phrase a fraction too full to “balance” properly with Barbara Graham’s, so I will conclude instead by conveying a sense of the feeling which, among other things, overtook me as we listened to the opera’s final pages of being made to feel young once again – the efforts of all concerned with this production had, for this listener, resulted in a memorable and intensely-moving outcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Product of Terezin concentration camp survives as admirable, enjoyable children’s opera

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music

(on the first day of the Recovering Hidden Voices conference-festival)

Hans Krása: Brundibár (Bumblebee)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

21 August 2014, 7pm

The soloists for this production are members of the NZSM’s Young Musicians Programme with a chorus from Kelburn Normal School and a chamber orchestra of NZSM Classical performance students. It is conducted by NZSM Lecturer Dr Robert Legg and directed by NZSM alumni and artist teacher Frances Moore.

Hans Krása was a German Jewish composer who studied with Zemlinsky and also at the Berlin Conservatory and under Roussel in Paris.  He was born in 1899, and died in Auschwitz (it is assumed) in 1944.  The opera was completed in 1939, with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, and it was performed many times in the Terezin ghetto (Theresienstadt).  This performance used a new English adaptation by Tony Kushner, which was often humorous with unexpectedly funny rhymes.

While the significance of the story about an evil organ-grinder (Brundibár) who prevents two children from getting milk for their sick mother can be seen in terms of Nazi persecution, on the surface it is a fairy-tale.

The production was enhanced by wonderful costumes and a colourful set.  The confined space on the platform at St. Andrew’s made it difficult, however, to see everything that was going on.  It would marvellous if the cast could stage it again in an auditorium with more room on its stage.  The large cast of mainly children plus a few singers from NZSM’s Young Musicians Programme and Classical Performance Programme (in one case) was complemented by an 11-piece student orchestra, plus at a couple of junctures a children’s orchestra of two violins, two descant and two tenor recorders.

The director, Frances Moore, also acted in the show.

Coincidentally, I had a couple of days before been alerted to the children’s opera with music by Gareth Farr that had been produced in 2009. Although I did not see that, it seems from the review I had just read that there were similarities. And there were occasions that reminded of Janáček’s wonderful opera The Cunning Little Vixen, recalling the characters of Cat, Dog and Sparrow.  There were also an ice-cream seller and other sellers, doctors, pickpockets, mayor (and Celia Wade-Brown was present) and mechanicals.

The villain was played in an accurate and bright, if not particularly threatening manner by Niklas Best.  Other important parts were performed by Canada Hickey, Bronwyn Wilde, Francesca Moore, Alexandra Gandionco and Beatrix Carino.  Notable too was Lucia McLaren-Smith as the milk seller, whose words were wonderfully clear.

The orchestra was very skilled, played accurately and made a good sound in both the bright, jolly music of much of the score, and also in the more solemn, thoughtful and sad passages.  However, given the light children’s voices, solos were in danger of being overwhelmed by the instruments if the singers were near them.  The same went for some of the spoken dialogue.

The show was full of variety and colour, not least when two girls dressed in dirndl skirts danced.  Throughout, the music was charming, as was the ensemble of violins and recorders.  The more experienced singers certainly stood out, not only from the excellence of the projection of their voices, but also in their greater use of facial expression.  Some of the chorus singing was in two or three parts, and the young performers acquitted themselves well here.  Intonation was usually very good, and it was obvious that a lot of work had gone on in rehearsals and at home, with the young players memorising their parts.  Words were very clear when the singing was in unison.

I was surprised, however, that the composer had much of the music set in the lower register of the children’s voices; where children excel is in the higher pitches, and the music would have been even more telling if these had been used more.

On the whole the singing was better from the middle of the performance onwards; the children were well warmed up by then, and also more confident.  Hopefully the second performance will have them in good form throughout.

The show was preceded by a specially made brief film titled Conversations with Vera, about Vera Egermayer, who survived Auschwitz and came to New Zealand, and had been a small child in Terezin when the performances took place there.  She is currently in Prague, and was interviewed actually in the theatre in Terezin where the first performances took place.  Aside from short clips from a film of an original performance in 1942, the remainder of the film had children either acting the part of Vera, or talking about her and their own reactions to her life and experiences.

Some of these were very good, but others spoke their lines too quickly to be clearly understood.  The last girl was excellent, and spoke clearly, with expression and sincerity.

All in all, this was a worthwhile and enjoyable children’s opera, and the performance was a tribute to all have worked on it.  The entire show, including film, was about an hour in duration, and so not too taxing for children in the audience.  Another performance will be held on Friday, 22 August 2014 at 6pm.