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‘An American Soldier’ and ‘Les Fêtes de Thalie’ : Modern Tragedy and Baroque Comedy at the Opera‘An American Soldier’ and ‘Les Fêtes de Thalie’

With music by Huang Ruo and a libretto by David Henry Hwang, an opera at New York’s Perelman Performing Arts Center about a viciously bullied Army private proved taut and haunting; uptown, Opera Lafayette’s production of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s 1714 work was a skillful, snappy delight.

By: Heidi Waleson

May 14, 2024

Brian Vu and Alex DeSocio in ‘An American Soldier.’

PHOTO: MARC J. FRANKLIN

New York

Symbols abounded around the New York premiere of Huang Ruo’s opera “An American Soldier” (2018) on Sunday. Its venue, the recently opened Perelman Performing Arts Center, is just blocks from Chinatown, the home of Pvt. Danny Chen, the opera’s real-life protagonist, who took his own life in 2011 after enduring brutal racist hazing in the U.S. Army. Boxy and forbidding, PAC NYC sits across the street from the yawning pits of the 9/11 memorial and catty-corner to the exuberant wings of the Oculus—an impersonal, manufactured crossroads born out of an act of war. Finally, the premiere took place on Mother’s Day, and it is Pvt. Chen’s grieving mother who has this powerful opera’s last word.

Mr. Huang and librettist David Henry Hwang reworked the piece for PAC NYC’s small Zuccotti theater, replacing the large chorus heard in its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis with an ensemble of six singers who perform all 18 nonprincipal roles. There is no pit, so the 37-member orchestra was positioned behind the rear scrim, necessitating amplification (David Bullard did the sound design). From a seat in the fourth row, one could hear some natural sound; from the back of the house, the amplification mixing flattened Mr. Huang’s rich orchestral palette and explosive vocal writing.

Still, Chay Yew’s taut, theatrical staging captured the opera’s cruelty and anguish. The well-structured libretto is built around the military trial of Sgt. Aaron Marcum, accused of driving Danny to his death; the story glides seamlessly back and forth from courtroom testimony to flashbacks of Danny’s life before and during his Army service. Danny enlists right out of high school; uninterested in the academically high-achieving, model-minority future expected of Asian teenagers, he longs to find his “team” in the Army. The opera ruthlessly tracks the swift dismantling of that dream. A cheerful, resilient recruit, he takes ethnic slurs in stride during basic training. But once deployed to Afghanistan, he is singled out by Marcum for verbal and physical abuse that intensifies over the course of the second act. In one chilling episode, he is ordered to instruct his platoon—in Chinese—to erect a tent. Just as much as the physical abuse—later, Marcum makes the other soldiers pelt Danny with stones—it makes him believe himself forever an outsider, and kills his hopes.

Hannah Cho and Nina Yoshida Nelsen

PHOTO: MARC J. FRANKLIN
Daniel Ostling’s set is an empty, white-sided box; a kitchen table appears for scenes in the Chinatown apartment. Nicholas Hussong’s simple projections on the rear wall suggest locations—the pine trees of the training camp, the mountains of Kandahar; Jeanette Yew’s lighting intensifies the opera’s emotional states, such as cold white bleakness for the courtroom where Danny’s ghost cannot make himself heard and saturated purple for his misery in Afghanistan. A yellow moon accompanies the poignant duet in which Danny and his high-school friend Josephine speak to each other from opposite sides of the world; it expands to fill the entire wall during Mother Chen’s final lullaby. Clean, geometric directing zeroes in on the figures populating the space, whether it’s a line of running soldiers in fatigues (Linda Cho did the costumes) or the intense emotion of a soloist alone onstage.

Tenor Brian Vu was a gripping Danny, seizing on the young man’s determination to be himself, whatever the cost. Nina Yoshida Nelsen’s eloquent mezzo brought out Mother Chen’s toughness, battling the military to get justice for her son. Soprano Hannah Cho relished Josephine’s high-flying vocal lines and exuded warmth in the scenes where she reads Danny’s letters to his mother; Alex DeSocio was appropriately vicious as Marcum.

The six fine ensemble members—Christian Simmons, Ben Brady, Joshua Sanders, James C. Harris, Shelén Hughes and Cierra Byrd—shifted roles with aplomb. Mr. Simmons, with his resonant bass-baritone, stood out as the Military Judge and Pvt. Manny Davis, who testifies about his own experience of Marcum’s racist behavior. Conductor Carolyn Kuan skillfully paced the American Composers Orchestra, winding up the opera’s tension and managing its brief intervals of release. Amplification challenges notwithstanding, we heard—and felt—the military fanfares and ostinatos that limn the anxious progress of Danny’s story and the haunting digeridoo that accompanies his restless ghost.

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Opera Lafayette, a Washington-based company specializing in historical performance, had a winner with Jean-Joseph Mouret’s “Les Fêtes de Thalie” at New York’s El Museo del Barrio on May 7. Hugely popular for decades after its 1714 premiere, this opera-ballet sets out to demonstrate that, in the words of its titular muse of comedy, “One tires quickly of weeping. Does anyone ever tire of laughing?” Muses and gods squabble in the prologue and epilogue that bracket three gossamer-light stories about love. Opera Lafayette’s witty production, directed by Catherine Turocy, with its skillful integration of dance, kept the emphasis on fun, as did the splendid conductor, Christophe Rousset, and the small but snappy period-instrument orchestra; the elegant performing edition was created by harpsichordist Korneel Bernolet.

The game cast of nine singers and eight dancers took multiple roles. Some notable performances included soprano Angel Azzarra aptly over-emoting as the muse of tragedy in the prologue; tenor Scott Brunscheen and baritone John Taylor Ward vying for the hand of a widow in the second vignette, “La Veuve Coquette” (she opts to remain single); and soprano Pascale Beaudin in the roles of the widow, a scorned wife in the third vignette, “La Femme,” and Terpsichore, muse of dance, in the epilogue. Marie Anne Chiment’s gleeful era-mixing costumes helped set the tone. Similarly, each vignette had its own choreographer and style, the most delightful and surprising of which was the Indian wedding staged as an entertainment in the middle of “La Veuve Coquette.” Choreographed by Anuradha Nehru and Pragnya Thamire in Kuchipudi, a classic Indian style, its elegant shapes and sprightly rhythms fit the 18th-century music perfectly.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘El Niño’ and ‘La ville morte’ Reviews: A Radiant Nativity Tale and a Lackluster Rarity

John Adams’s oratorio, which draws on a diverse set of texts to tell the biblical story, receives a joyful production at the Metropolitan Opera; at NYU’s Skirball Center, Catapult Opera presented the U.S. premiere of a work by the eminent 20th-century composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Heidi Waleson

April 25, 2024 at 7:00 pm ET

Julia Bullock (center) and Siman Chung, Key’mon W. Murrah, and Eric Jurenas (above) in ‘El Niño.’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

New York

The Metropolitan Opera’s first production of John Adams’s dynamic oratorio “El Niño” (2000) on Tuesday radiated joy. An unconventional recounting of the Nativity, the work has dark moments; yet its overall message is one of hope, stemming from the ongoing miracle of birth. Taking her cue from the Latin American poetry in the libretto, director Lileana Blain-Cruz, along with set designer Adam Rigg and projection designer Hannah Wasileski, devised an environment filled with bright color and pulsating movement; the set’s flat surfaces and the whimsical flying effects and puppetry gave it the feeling of a child’s pop-up book come to brilliant life.

As the production makes clear, the piece works as a theatrical narrative centered on a woman’s experience of pregnancy, birth and motherhood—both mundane and miraculous—in an uncertain world. The libretto, arranged by Mr. Adams and Peter Sellars (who also directed the world premiere in Paris), intersperses familiar Gospel accounts with poems by three Latin American women—Rosario Castellanos, Gabriela Mistral and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—along with other poems, stories from the New Testament Apocrypha, Old Testament prophecies, and texts drawn from Martin Luther, Hildegard von Bingen and the Wakefield Mystery Plays. The story takes us from the Annunciation through the birth of Jesus in Part I; the adoration of the shepherds, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt make up Part II. Scenes of domestic intimacy alternate with explosive choral and orchestral statements; Mr. Adams’s arresting score seldom flags.

J’Nai Bridges and Ms. Bullock (center) and company.

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

Two Marys make the journey. Soprano Julia Bullock, vividly intense in her Met debut, and mezzo J’Nai Bridges, her lusher sound offering a moodier, more internal aspect of the Virgin, came together eloquently in their duet “Se habla de Gabriel,” a Castellanos poem about the physical and psychic pain of pregnancy and birth. Ms. Bullock’s radiant, anticipatory “Magnificat” in Part I was balanced in Part II by her wails and leaping intervals in the devastating “Memorial de Tlatelolco,” also by Castellanos, a mother’s bitter mourning of the 1968 massacre of student protesters by the Mexican military, a modern-day slaughter of the innocents. Ms. Bridges did her best with the score’s one miscalculation, an overlong setting of Castellanos’s “La Anunciación”; she was heard to greater advantage in the lullaby with chorus that begins Part II.

The powerful baritone Davóne Tines, also making his Met debut, supplied male ferocity—he was God in “Shake the Heavens” (a nod to “Messiah,” a clear “El Niño” forebear, which used the same text from the Book of Haggai for a bass recitative) and a raging, venomous Herod, demanding that the Magi find the child and report back. In contrast, one of his finest moments was the simple song of the gently enraptured Joseph, who, just before the birth, sees everything on earth suddenly stand still. Three countertenors—Key’mon W. Murrah, Siman Chung and Eric Jurenas—blended ethereally to depict Gabriel, the three Magi and the piece’s narrator. The Met chorus, though at times uncomfortable with the choreographed movement, was impressive in noisy scenes like “In the day of great slaughter.” Conductor Marin Alsop, in her Met debut, skillfully paced the show, whether letting the orchestra erupt in violent minimalist oscillations or whittling it down to a single guitar.

Davóne Tines

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

Ms. Blain-Cruz’s direction made the work’s big moments stand out. In the opening scene—a vibrant countryside of greens and blues, with a trio of lavishly dressed Latin American Virgin figures in the background and a stage crammed with people—the three countertenors, in glittering silver robes and crowns (the costume designer was Montana Levi Blanco), ascended into the air for Gabriel’s “Hail, Mary Gracious!” In “Shake the Heavens,” Mr. Tines was flanked by seven enormous pink and purple insect wings, each with a glowing eye. Birth takes center stage in the tumultuous Part I finale of “El Niño”: The chorus and soloists sing Mistral’s “The Christmas Star,” a riveting depiction of a girl holding a star and burning up, interspersed with Hildegard von Bingen’s ecstatic “O Quam Preciosa.” Here, amid the joyful noise, a shining cutout of the running girl passed across the background, both Marys were in labor—Ms. Bridges in a boat high above the stage—and shooting stars blazed through the sky.

Intimate scenes were similarly well-conceived: Elisabeth, whose “babe leaped in her womb” upon meeting Mary, was played by a dancer, with five other dancers shadowing her, bending backward in ecstasy (Marjani Forté-Saunders created the athletic, eye-filling choreography). Ms. Bullock sang the “Memorial” aria on a darkened stage (Yi Zhao did the lighting), surrounded by slaughtered children; they stood up, bathed in purple light, for the final stanzas about remembrance as eyes appeared, embedded in stylized ocean waves, on the backdrop video. In Part II, desert cacti replaced the greenery; dancers became a community of migrants accompanying the Holy Family on their flight, and pausing around a campfire to contemplate the natural elements—in the words of Sor Juana—that will help them. Dragons tamed by the child Jesus were whimsical puppets. And for the final song, a simple children’s chorus in praise of the palm tree that succored the travelers in the desert, the children stood in a line at the front of the stage, ending the piece as quietly as the opening had been ebullient—two sides of joy.

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“La ville morte,” the only opera by Nadia Boulanger, the renowned composition teacher of Aaron Copland, among many others, was given its U.S. premiere by Catapult Opera last weekend at NYU’s Skirball Center. Written with her mentor Raoul Pugno and finished in 1913, the work was sidelined by World War I; a reconstructed version was finally performed in Sienna, Italy, in 2005. Catapult commissioned a new 11-instrument accompaniment to replace Boulanger’s lost orchestration.

In Gabriele D’Annunzio’s overheated libretto, Alexandre and Anne, a married couple, and Léonard, an archaeologist, are all in love with Léonard’s sister, Hébé. The text and the music are reminiscent of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” but without the mystery: Alexandre woos Hébé aggressively while Léonard’s declaration is filled with self-loathing. Hébé’s feelings in the matter appear to be less important, though her duets with Anne have an erotic undercurrent. Naturally, she has to die in the end.

Lushness was needed to put this across, but Catapult’s production was undernourished. Melissa Harvey’s light soprano needed more juice for Hébé’s Straussian death aria; as Léonard, Joshua Dennis’s tenor sounded strangled at high intensity. Baritone Jorell Williams and mezzo Laurie Rubin were capable rather than compelling, and the orchestra, led by Neal Goren, only hinted at color. The chorus was eliminated. Robin Guarino’s abstract staging and Andromache Chalfant’s set placed much of the action in a tiny, white, box-like room surrounded in darkness, an oddly chilly environment for all this feverishness.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Heartbeat Opera: Productions Grounded in the Present

The company, celebrating its 10th anniversary season, offers a contemporary spin on Tchaikovsky’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ and the world premiere of Dan Schlosberg’s eco-themed ‘The Extinctionist.’

By Heidi Waleson

April 8, 2024 at 5:04 pm ET

The company of ‘Eugene Onegin’ in the Heartbeat Opera production.

PHOTO: RUSS ROWLAND

New York

Heartbeat Opera, now presenting its 10^th anniversary season at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, specializes in putting a contemporary spin on classic operas through musical and theatrical adaptation. Its take on Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” by Dustin Wills and Jacob Ashworth (Heartbeat’s artistic director) posits that Onegin’s secret love for his friend Lensky is the reason that he coldly rejects Tatyana’s amorous declaration and then goads Lensky into a fatal duel. But—as was the case with last season’s “Lady M,” Heartbeat’s version of Verdi’s “Macbeth”—the idea doesn’t quite cohere. Directed by Mr. Wills, the show bluntly shoehorns the concept into the score, which has been trimmed to 100 minutes and radically rearranged by Dan Schlosberg(Heartbeat’s music director) for nine musicians.

The conceit is love as performance and artifice. The set, designed by Mr. Wills, is a collection of frames, platforms, ladders, footlights and other backstage gear, handily assembled into different locations with the aid of the performers; costume designers Haydee Zelideth and Asa Benally mix contemporary outfits with dress-up clothes—an epauletted military jacket, a clown suit. When Olga and Lensky sing their first arias, they grab microphones and spotlights, suggesting that their emotions are as much performative as heartfelt. Prince Gremin, Tatyana’s adoring husband in the third act, is an automaton—his batteries run down at the conclusion of his aria, and he’s carted offstage on a dolly. Reza Behjat’s lighting emphasizes the switches from acting to—maybe—reality.

The gay subtext is subtle—perhaps too much so. Onegin and Lensky exchange some meaningful glances. During their confrontation at Tatyana’s name-day party—ostensibly over Onegin’s flirtation with Olga—Onegin gropes Lensky; they kiss for the first and only time just before the duel. But the actual opera gets in the way. Why would Onegin pursue Tatyana at the end? Do we interpret his explosion of passion for her as performance (the scene is played on a miniature stage, with the other characters as the applauding audience) or, perhaps, displacement? It’s not clear.

As for the other snag, this was Tatyana’s show. With her luminous soprano, Emily Margevich captured the young girl’s romantic abandon in the Letter aria, and the adult woman’s sense of loss in the final scene. As Onegin, Edwin Joseph’s colorless baritone was no match for her or for Roy Hage’s poignant Lensky, whose pre-duel farewell aria—to Olga and life—was eloquently sung. The adaptation also cut Onegin’s aria at the beginning of Act 3, making him seem even less consequential.

Mezzo Sishel Claverie displayed considerable personality as Olga; she donned the clown outfit and sang Monsieur Trinquet’s name-day salute to Tatyana, starting at tenor pitch and then wandering through different keys along with orchestration, like a slowed-down recording. Shannon Delijani (Madame Larina), Tynan Davis (Filipyevna) and Lloyd Reshard Jr. (Prince Gremin) ably sang chorus parts in addition to their own. Mr. Ashworth energetically led the ensemble from the violin. Mr. Schlosberg’s arrangement had some interesting elements, such as the harp filling in textures, and saxophone (one player tripled with clarinet and bass clarinet) that turned the Act 3 ball into a raucous, Kurt Weill-style cabaret. But the scrappy string playing and the electronic effects on the second violin, electric guitar and electric bass often left the music sounding muddy and chaotic, overdoing the swerve away from romance and into nightmare.

Eliam Ramos and Katherine Henly in ‘The Extinctionist.’

PHOTO: RUSS ROWLAND

Heartbeat’s first world premiere, “The Extinctionist” with music by Mr. Schlosberg and a libretto by Amanda Quaid (who wrote the play on which it is based), is contemporary from the start: Its protagonist, called only Woman (Katherine Henly), is agonizing about having a baby in a world being destroyed through human-accelerated climate change. “Every child born today is making it worse,” she tells her pregnant Friend (Claire Leyden). In a tight 75 minutes, the opera deftly seesaws between extremes—Woman’s longing for motherhood and her terror about the future. Man, her husband (Philip Stoddard), and her doctor (Eliam Ramos) keep suggesting that she will change her mind about her wish for sterilization; it’s left to us to decide if theirs is a reasonable response, a patriarchal reaction to “female hysteria,” or the obtuse dismissal of a modern Cassandra.

Mr. Schlosberg’s score reflects the centrality of Woman’s anguish: Her high-flying, jittery vocal line seems to brush off the vocal efforts of the other characters. The sound of the four-member ensemble (violin/viola, electric guitar, and percussion, led by Mr. Schlosberg from the piano) ranges from delicate transparency to electronic roar; it keeps returning to a two-note motif that evokes—depending on the moment—a heartbeat, a dripping tap, or the inexorable ticking of a clock. Two solo interludes—one for electric guitar, the other for drums—emphasize the ominous atmosphere.

Kate Noll’s spare set, with a bedroom on one side of the stage, a chair and table on the other, and some bare trees in front, incorporated the band as part of the show. Camilla Tassi’s projections suggested locations including a doctor’s office and a fancy shopping mall, along with the cataclysms of fire and flood. Shadi Ghaheri’s sensitive direction made clever use of a puppet for Woman’s dream about her imagined child and even managed the awkwardness of an onstage gynecological examination. Ms. Henly threw herself fully into Woman’s vocal and emotional turmoil. With Woman left alone at the end and her decision made for her, her haunting contemplation of a future in which “the sidewalks will be rivers again” captured the opera’s sorrowful ambivalence in the face of an impossible choice.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘Songbird’ Review: Making Offenbach Swing in Washington

The composer’s operetta ‘La Périchole’ gets a smartly trimmed adaptation set during the Prohibition and starring Isabel Leonard and Ramin Karimloo at Washington National Opera.

By Heidi Waleson

March 20, 2024 at 2:08 pm ET

Isabel Leonard and Ramin Karimloo

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN

Washington

“Songbird,” the adaptation of Offenbach’s operetta “La Périchole” now playing at the Washington National Opera, harks back to the days when Covid-19 forced arts groups to find new ways to perform. In 2021, the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y.—then helmed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of WNO—presented its season as “Glimmerglass on the Grass.” The singers were on an outdoor stage, the orchestra was in the theater, and all the operas were edited down to an intermission-free 90 minutes. I missed “Songbird” that summer because the performance I was to attend was canceled due to lightning.

Working within Covid-era constraints could produce ingenious creations, and “Songbird” certainly qualifies. The piece, adapted by director Eric Sean Fogel, conductor James Lowe and librettist Kelley Rourke, has been trimmed and set in a speakeasy in Prohibition-era New Orleans instead of 18^th-century Peru. Mr. Lowe’s instrumental arrangement replaces the 19^th-century Gallic orchestral spice of the original with the bouncy rhythms and wailing slides of New Orleans jazz, played in Washington by an 11-piece cabaret-style ensemble, including banjo and sousaphone. Ms. Rourke’s snappy new English dialogue deftly relocates and streamlines the story, and her lyrics, a skillful fusion of English and French, nod to the original while—like the musical arrangement—making something completely new.

Kresley Figueroa, Cecelia McKinley and Teresa Perrotta

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN

From the opening brassy salvos of trumpet and trombone, it’s clear we are in a different world from France or Peru. The impoverished performing duo of Songbird (Isabel Leonard) and Piquillo (Ramin Karimloo) are doing a vaudeville turn at the speakeasy owned by Don Pedro (Jonathan Patton); the villain, Don Andrès (Edward Nelson), here the Mayor of New Orleans instead of the Viceroy of Peru, spots Songbird and wants her. The convoluted plot—which involves finding a husband for Songbird so that Andrès can have her in his household; getting both Songbird and Piquillo drunk; outbursts of masculine jealousy; imprisonment, escape and reconciliation—is about as silly as the original. But the abbreviated book glides easily over the absurdities.

The band, made up of members of the WNO orchestra plus a few guests and led by Mr. Lowe, is onstage in the speakeasy. The playful set and lighting are by James F. Rotondo III and Robert Wierzel, respectively; the colorful period costumes for the flappers, gangsters, and the Krewe members of a splashy Mardi Gras parade are by Marsha LeBoeuf and Timm Burrow. (The Washington production in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater is more elaborate than the makeshift outdoor Glimmerglass stage allowed.) Mr. Fogel’s directing keeps up a madcap pace throughout; with the trims in the story, the resulting string of high-energy musical sequences rarely takes a breath.

Edward Nelson

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN

The performers appear to be having the time of their lives. Ms. Leonard, striking in her Louise Brooks bob and flapper dress, captures the Songbird’s allure, charm and common sense with her throaty, multihued mezzo and winning stage presence. Delightfully off-balance in the “tipsy aria” and down to earth as she tries to get Piquillo to play along with the masquerade in “You men are so annoying / Que les hommes sont bêtes,” she’s the show’s anchor. Mr. Karimloo, a musical-theater star, has a lighter vocal character than the opera singers; it works, since he’s supposed to be a bit of a wimp, and his Piquillo is lively and appealing, especially in his fits of helpless jealousy. Mr. Nelson has the baritonal resonance for the villain’s menace as well as the drollery for his puffed-up ego—he even joined the pianist for a few bars on one of his numbers. A bevy of WNO Young Artists were ebullient in the supporting roles: Teresa Perrotta, Kresley Figueroa and Cecelia McKinley as the speakeasy’s “Three Muses”; and Sahel Salam as Panatellas, Mr. Patton’s eager partner in crime and bad jokes. The big ensemble numbers were effervescent, though Mark Rivet’s primitive sound design made them overly harsh and blaring.

“Songbird” is its own thing. One could regret the loss of French charm but still revel in the fun and wit of this raucous, all-American replacement, and appreciate how comedy can be translated from one musical medium to another. Several standout musical moments featured the clarinet—in one of them, a can-you-top-this duet with Don Andrès at his most grandiose, David Jones, the clarinetist, played the fanciest riff and then ducked back into the band, miming his terror of repercussions. In the raucous wedding scene—which is reprised for the finale as Songbird and Piquillo’s earlier mock ceremony happens for real—you can hear Offenbach’s cancan embedded in the beat. There’s a hint of it in the staging—not Folies Bergère, but just a little, jolly reminder of where this show began.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘Europeras 3 & 4’ Review: John Cage’s Controlled Chaos

Detroit Opera presents two of the avant-garde composer’s rigidly devised but cacophonous works, jumbling together various arias and piano works from music history into a disorienting whole.

By Heidi Waleson

March 12, 2024

Kisma Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Detroit

What happens when you put classic European operas into a Mixmaster on stage? You get John Cage’s cycle “Europeras 1-5,” a series of happenings devised between 1987 and 1991. Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera staging of “Europeras 3 & 4” at the Gem Theatre last weekend, an explosion of controlled chaos, was entertaining and maddening at the same time.

Per Cage’s instructions, “Europera 3” features six singers, two pianists and 12 record players. Each singer selects six arias; each pianist chooses 70 excerpts, ranging from one to 16 bars, from Liszt’s “Opera Phantasien.” The piece lasts exactly 70 minutes. That’s the raw material. When each element will be performed, and where the singers stand on the stage—a grid of 64 numbered squares—was determined through a computer program simulating the chance operations of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination manual. Thus, in performance, the different musical elements, which also include snippets from 78-rpm opera records played on the turntables, have nothing to do with each other.

The resulting musical experience is often cacophonous, and the listener must suspend all auditory expectations. Rhythms, keys and sonorities clash; bits of melody arise from the aural stew and are subsumed again. A singer starts an aria alone; the piano suddenly enters and you expect an accompaniment, but the music is from a completely different work. Opera fans are tempted to play “name that tune”—it’s not the point, and it’s a difficult task given the total lack of musical and theatrical context and how many musical elements are happening simultaneously. I couldn’t resist the game, and recognized only about half of the arias.

Rolfe Dauz and Biba Bell

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Mr. Sharon likens the piece to a circus, and in his cleverly devised staging there was always something to catch the eye, albeit not necessarily in any straightforward way. Cage’s instructions specify that costumes and props, drawn from the company’s collection, also be chosen by chance, making for interesting opportunities. Soprano Kisma Jordan sang “V’adoro pupille,” Cleopatra’s seduction aria from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” while threatening a dancer with a knife and leaving him for dead at the end. Weapons and killing are certainly operatic tropes: Soprano Melanie Spector, singing Marguerite’s ecstatic “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust,” brandished a shotgun and mimed firing it during one stretch of elaborate ascending coloratura. A giant tombstone, a cake and a television remote control were also in the mix.

Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting contributed to the sense of randomness with flashes and roving spotlights, sometimes illuminating the performers and sometimes not. The backdrop, a giant digital clock in an elaborate, old-fashioned gold frame, counted up the seconds. Moníka Essen was the production designer; Suzanne Hanna the costume coordinator. Here, too, the juxtapositions were often unexpected: Baritone Rolfe Dauz sang Papageno’s “suicide” aria from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” costumed as a toreador.

There’s no room for subtlety in this situation, especially when you may be singing your aria upstage, out of the light, and in tandem with numerous other musical happenings, to say nothing of someone riding a bicycle in front of you or sweeping the floor. Jennifer Cresswell proved hard to miss with her big soprano and commanding stage presence; her performance included a lengthy, nonvocal staged sequence involving a set of door keys before she finally burst into Donna Elvira’s furious “Mi tradi” from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Interestingly, baritone Robert Wesley Mason stood out with one of the evening’s quieter pieces—Billy’s imprisonment aria from Britten’s “Billy Budd,” but perhaps that was because it was in English. In opera, everything stops for the tenor, but not here, which meant that River Guard’s performances of classic tenor arias were often drowned in the mayhem. The able pianists were John Etsell and Marina Stojanovksa; black-clad dancers Biba Bell, Celia Benvenutti and Chris Woolfolkcarried props and interacted with the singers; the 78s on the record players produced a low, accompanying rumble of sound.

Melanie Spector and Ms. Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

“Europera 4” had a very different vibe. It was more intimate, with just two singers on a dim stage with chairs placed on three sides—a song recital rather than a circus. The digital clock was still there, this time counting up to 30 minutes. Mezzo Susan Graham and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, their unaccompanied arias overlapping, enacted clashing emotions in song and action—Ms. Graham’s frantic despair as she paced the stage in Dido’s farewell scene from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” contrasted with Mr. Tines’s calm delivery and robotic walk in “Leave me, loathsome light” from Handel’s “Semele.” After their first arias, the two opera stars sat in silence for two minutes before Mr. Tines launched into a powerful “It is enough” from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and started throwing chairs around. Perhaps the most dramatic moment arrived about midway, when Ms. Stojanovska finally started to play, layering Liszt’s elaborate, ebullient take on Verdi’s “Rigoletto” over the somber German pieces of the two singers; a few moments later, a scratchy old recording of a tenor was added to the mix.

There was an autumnal quality to “Europera 4,” particularly since Ms. Graham’s final piece was Cherubino’s “Non so piu cosa son” from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” A diva in her 60s depicting a randy adolescent boy—a role usually sung by a mezzo at the start of her career—could suggest that the days of those operas are gone or that meaning doesn’t matter. “Europeras 3 & 4” presents the audience with the ingredients of opera, shaken and stirred, leaving us to decide what to make of it. For an audience that doesn’t know the arias and the stories, the untranslated texts might be saying anything; the intense emotions they express—fury, frustration, joy, despair, love—are easily flipped by the staging to mean something completely different while their large-scale expressive style slips easily into caricature. With storytelling and emotional content stripped away, what is left? An art form that is chopped into bits and repurposed, a recycling process that has transformed plastic bottles into tote bags, obliterating the living essence of the original.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘La Forza del Destino’ Review: A Light in the Darkness at the Metropolitan Opera

Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Verdi’s revenge drama moves the action to a war-torn present and stars the shining Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen.

By Heidi Walseon

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Soloman Howard and Lise Davidsen.

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

New York

Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, valiantly attempts to impose theatrical coherence on this famously sprawling work, with mixed results. The Met’s previous production, last mounted in 2006, plunged everything into literal darkness; Mr. Treliński opts for metaphorical gloom as well.

Piercing through that darkness was the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsensinging Leonora, her first Italian role at the Met. Ms. Davidsen has triumphed at the house over the past several seasons, unleashing her astonishingly huge clarion sound, innate musicality and theatrical instincts on Strauss’s Ariadne, Chrysothemis and the Marschallin, as well as on Wagner’s Eva in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Based on Monday night, Verdi’s very different style holds no terrors for her. In the final act, for which she was costumed (by Moritz Junge) like a particularly downtrodden mendicant pushing a shopping cart, her “Pace, pace, mio Dio (Peace, oh Lord)” rang out like an announcement—after years of suffering, Leonora’s anguish is still alive and pulsating. The ovation that followed it was such that Ms. Davidsen briefly broke character, acknowledging the applause with a smile, a very rare occurrence these days.

The vocal splendors offered by Ms. Davidsen and tenor Brian Jagde as her unfortunate lover, Don Alvaro, brightened up the whole show. Updated from the 18^th century to the present, Mr. Treliński’s scenario suggests that Alvaro’s accidental killing of Leonora’s father, the Marquis of Calatrava, sets off not just the vengeful rage of Calatrava’s son, Don Carlo, but also a war that pushes the world to apocalyptic ruin. Thus, the crowd scenes, set in a tavern and a military camp, which usually act as a lighter counterbalance to the revenge plot, get a sinister cast. Even the chorus of monks, assembled at the end of Act 2 to send Leonora off to her hermitage, flagellates her with sticks. These scenes feel contemporary, while Carlo’s implacable pursuit of Alvaro and Leonora across years and miles remains firmly—and jarringly—rooted in old-style melodrama. There was a moment in Act 3 where the supertitles could have read: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Lise Davidsen and Brian Jagde.

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

Boris Kudlička’s revolving set permits seamless switches between public and private scenes without being too distracting. In Act I, the luxury Hotel Calatrava alternates between a ballroom, where the patriarch/hotel owner/dictator, in military garb, enjoys Nazi-esque salutes from his henchman, and his Art Deco office, where Leonora anxiously awaits Alvaro for their elopement. The set and Marc Heinz’s lighting grow progressively darker all evening: Act 3 is a barbed-wire-enclosed military camp; by Act 4, we’ve arrived at an elaborate, multistory ruined subway station, complete with broken glass, graffiti and wrecked escalators. Video projections by Bartek Macias extend the apocalyptic theme with army helicopters and a bombed-out city and strive for continuity with images of a soldier—presumably Carlo in his obsessive pursuit—hacking through snow-covered woods and riding a train.

While the stage pictures are often striking, the directing doesn’t necessarily clarify the story—a challenging task in any case. Act 3, done at the Met as an unsatisfying conflation of Verdi’s two versions of the opera (1862 and 1869), concludes with an abortive fight between Carlo and Alvaro, after which Alvaro slashes his own face—why? Prior to that, Mr. Treliński turns the colorful military-camp crowd scene into a dour performance for wounded soldiers, featuring a sextet of dancers wearing black rabbit heads (the slo-mo choreography was by Maćko Prusak) and Preziosilla, the fortuneteller/war cheerleader (mezzo Judit Kutasi, vocally bland in her debut, despite her sparkly gown). He then has Preziosilla sing her rousing “Rataplan” to Alvaro, lying wounded in a field hospital, leaving the accompanying chorus nearly invisible behind the barbed-wire fence.

Lise Davidsen (foreground).

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

Along with Ms. Davidsen, the singers sold the show. Mr. Jagde’s heroic, unforced tenor was exhilarating, and he captured the pathos of poor, noble Alvaro, who keeps trying to convince Carlo that the whole thing was an accident. As Carlo, baritone Igor Golovatenko seethed with rage throughout; the Alvaro-Carlo duets were high points. Soloman Howard, a riveting bass, sang both Leonora’s father and Guardiano, the father superior of the monastery where she begs for refuge. That identification between patriarchs perhaps reflected Leonora’s own psychological confusion—the padre’s office had the same desk as her father’s; Guardiano slapped Leonora across the face while interrogating her about her intention to withdraw from the world; and he was costumed as Calatrava for the final trio as he urged Alvaro to learn faith and piety from the dying Leonora. Verdi’s penchant for plots about fathers and daughters is well known, so this fit right in while injecting a hint of doubt into the religious consolation of the finale. Bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi brought a welcome comic energy to Fra Melitone, though—in keeping with the show’s character—his ranting had a nasty edge.

The Met chorus, even when stashed in the background as it frequently was, sounded full and warm. The orchestra was equally on point; the clarinet solo accompanying Mr. Jagde in his opening Act 3 aria was eloquently mournful without being bathetic. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin supported the singers with sensitivity and clarity, and his pacing, though brisk, was organic rather than headlong, bringing some shape to an often mystifying evening.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘The Anonymous Lover’ and ‘Handel: Made in America’ Reviews: New Angles on the 18th Century

Boston Lyric Opera gave the work by Guadeloupe-born composer Joseph Bologne a snappy staging without making a strong case for its score, while MetLiveArts deftly put the more famous composer’s work in a global context.

By Heidi Waleson

Ashley Emerson and Brianna J. Robinson in ‘The Anonymous Lover’

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

Boston and New York

With opera companies eager to perform works by creators from groups previously underrepresented on their stages, the biracial composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799), is having a contemporary moment. Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a French planter and an enslaved woman, he was sent to Paris to be educated and had a brilliant career there, first as a fencer and then as a violinist, conductor and composer. “L’Amant Anonyme,” his only surviving complete opera, had its premiere in 1780 in the private theater of Madame de Montesson, wife of the Duc d’Orléans. LA Opera presented a socially distanced, streaming-only version in 2020; the Minnesota, Atlanta and Madison opera companies have mounted the work; and Chicago’s Haymarket Opera staged and recorded it in 2022. The latest production, a collaboration of Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia, had its premiere here on Friday at the Huntington Theater as “The Anonymous Lover.”

The piece includes spoken dialogue and ballets in the French opéra comique style; its libretto by Desfontaines-Lavallée is based on a play by Madame de Genlis. The aristocratic principal characters, Léontine (Brianna J. Robinson) and Valcour (Omar Najmi), are afraid to confess their feelings for each other; meanwhile, for four years, Valcour has been showering Léontine with gifts in the guise of an “anonymous lover.” With the aid of their friends Ophémon (Evan Hughes) and Dorothée (Sandra Piques Eddy), and Jeannette and Colin (Ashley Emerson and Zhengyi Bai), a pair of villagers who are getting married, the truth is at last revealed.

Ms. Robinson

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

The BLO version, sung in French, kept the 18th-century setting but tweaked the form. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge wrote snappy new English dialogue, updating the language and situations just enough to make it flow and spark a few laughs; the elimination of the dances streamlined the evening to an intermission-free 90 minutes. The modest production made do with a few pieces of furniture (including a harpsichord), colored lighting by Driscoll Otto, and quasi-period costumes by Leslie Travers. Some important turning points were unclear in Dennis Whitehead Darling’s otherwise efficient stage direction.

Bologne’s music proved charming and mellifluous if not very inventive. Vocal numbers were often internally repetitive—Léontine’s soul-searching arias about whether she can open her heart to love were conventional, and the small ensembles didn’t capture the accelerating cut and thrust of characters at cross purposes. Ms. Robinson’s sumptuous soprano was the most imposing voice of the evening; Ms. Emerson’s sparkle enlivened every scene in which she appeared, especially the strophic chanson, “Jouissez de l’allégresse” (“Enjoy the happiness”), with chorus, intended to send Léontine the message, “To love well is to live well.” Ms. Eddy showed a flair for comedy in her acting; in her aria—a piece interpolated from Bologne’s first opera, “Ernestine,” since the role of Dorothée as written has only dialogue—she exaggerated its mournfulness for comic effect. Mr. Najmi and Mr. Hughes pushed their voices; Mr. Bai’s pitch was insecure. David Angus, leading the 34-member orchestra, which was positioned upstage behind a scrim, began well with the sprightly Italianate overture, but his conducting for much of the rest of the show was rhythmically dull and unarticulated, and didn’t help make a case for this rediscovered score.

***

“Handel: Made in America,” presented by MetLiveArts at the Metropolitan Museum last week, looked at the representation issue from a different angle. In collaboration with director Pat Eakin Young and scholar Ellen T. Harris, Terrance McKnight, the WQXR radio host, constructed a program inspired by the luxury objects in the museum’s British Galleries of decorative arts, linking 18th-century global trade, colonialism and slavery with the artistic flourishing in London of musicians like George Frideric Handel during the same period.

Terrance McKnight

PHOTO: HANJIE CHOW

Acting as narrator, Mr. McKnight deftly tracked these connections through his own life story—studying classical piano and accompanying hymns in his pastor father’s Baptist church; finding black male solidarity at Morehouse College, where Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony annually performed Handel’s “Messiah” with a Morehouse graduate as tenor soloist; finding a kinship with Handel, who temporarily lost the use of his right hand after having a stroke in 1737, when Mr. McKnight suffered a similarly catastrophic, potentially career-ending injury.

The excellent, all-black musical forces—four opera singers, a 14-voice chorus and a 13-member chamber orchestra, led by conductor and harpsichordist Malcolm J. Merriweather—became the extension of this exploration and the thorny question of how black American performers think about the music of Handel, given that the trafficking of their ancestors helped pay for the creation of his operas. (As Mr. McKnight noted, the Duke of Chandos, one of Handel’s principal patrons, as well as many investors in and subscribers to his Royal Academy of Music, were invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company.) Lightly staged by Ms. Young, they became the community, singing spirituals, arias and choruses that, for all their stylistic differences, treated similar themes. In one incisive pairing, tenor Noah Stewart’s harrowing rendition of “Total eclipse” from Handel’s “Samson,” depicting the blinded Samson plunged into darkness, was followed by bass-baritone Davóne Tines, soprano Latonia Moore and the chorus singing the rousing spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in which the constellations in the night sky mark the path to freedom.

Music, Mr. McKnight suggested, belongs to everyone; he quoted Langston Hughes’s advice to black artists: “[We] express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” That self-assertion was palpable as mezzo J’Nai Bridgesembodied youthful fury in “Come rouse yourselves to vengeance,” an English translation of Sesto’s aria from “Giulio Cesare”; even more so in Mr. Tines’s commanding rendition of “I, Too,” Margaret Bonds’s setting of Hughes’s famous poem, which includes the line, “Nobody’ll dare say to me ‘Eat in the kitchen’ then.” The celebration and juxtaposition of the riches of both the classical canon and black American song allowed the music to speak for itself.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Prototype Festival Review: Originality in Opera

The annual festival returned with an uneven slate of new works, from Huang Ruo’s oratorio ‘Angel Island’ to Heather Christian’s lively ‘Terce: A Practical Breviary.’

Heidi Waleson

Jan. 16, 2024 at 5:30 pm ET

A scene from ‘Angel Island’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

New York and Brooklyn, N.Y.

At its best, the annual Prototype Festival, coproduced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, whose 11th iteration runs through Sunday, revels in original forms and challenging subjects. “Angel Island,”Huang Ruo’s haunting oratorio, which had its New York premiere at BAM Harvey in Brooklyn last week, fit the bill, evoking the spirits of the hundreds of thousands of Asian people who arrived at San Francisco’s Angel Island during the first decades of the 20th century. Detained under harsh conditions for months or even years, a consequence of draconian 19th-century laws restricting Asian immigration to the U.S., they carved poems into the wooden walls of the barracks.

For a non-Chinese speaker, the poems, set in a repetitive minimalist style and performed by the Del Sol String Quartet and 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, had an incantatory effect. English translations in the projected supertitles—“twisting seascape,” “like a trapped pig held in a bamboo cage,” “you were buried beneath clay and earth”—were just the starting point; the hypnotic, nonlinear musical settings plumbed the authors’ despair. In the final part, as a singer struck a Chinese gong, the poem—about being deported—became a chant of futility.

Interspersed sections—featuring two unseen narrators reading grisly, racist historical documents accompanied by quartet scherzos—were too long and lacked the musical punch of the choral movements. Matthew Ozawa’s staging was only intermittently effective. Dancers Jie-Hung Connie Shiau and Benjamin Freemantle represented a contemporary descendant of Angel Island migrants investigating the past and the unwelcoming America, respectively; the choristers, with uneven acting skills, were the detainees; and the stylized choreography by Rena Butler didn’t always connect. Bill Morrison’s flickering black-and-white film images were most striking when they aligned with the emotion of the music, such as ghostly figures superimposed on the steps of the old barracks, or the sea flowing over a rock until it disappeared.

A scene from ‘Adoration’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

In Mary Kouyoumdjian and Royce Vavrek’s more traditional “Adoration,” which had its world premiere at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, a teenager uncovers a foundational lie about his family. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the opera weaves together the imagined past, the actual past and the present. For a high-school assignment, egged on by his teacher, Simon superimposes a news story about a terrorist who hid explosives in his pregnant girlfriend’s airplane luggage on his own family tragedy: Years before, his Lebanese father (Sami) and Canadian mother (Rachel) died in a car crash. His racist grandfather (Morris) insisted that Sami crashed the car on purpose.

The unwieldy journey to the truth involves commenters in cyberspace, Simon’s uncle Tom, and his teacher Sabine, whose motivations are more than meets the eye. Yet Ms. Kouyoumdjian’s music was slow and deliberate throughout the opera’s 90 minutes, reflecting the dreamy process of exploration but missing any dramatic spark of suspense or revelation. Mr. Vavrek’s overly detailed libretto, set for intelligibility, had the upper hand, and the solution to the mystery proved as unsavory as the original lie.

Miriam Khalil, a big-voiced soprano, shone as the enigmatic Sabine and got the most elaborate vocal writing; Marc Kudisch brought a tough forthrightness to Morris; Omar Najmi embodied Simon’s adolescent confusion; Karim Sulayman’s sweet tenor belied the calumnies heaped on Sami; Naomi Louisa O’Connell and David Adam Moore were solid as Rachel and Tom. Music director Alan Piersonbalanced a live string quartet, electronic processing, and a recorded murmuring choir. Director Laine Rettmer made clever use of live and pre-recorded video and a simple revolving set by Afsoon Pajoufar to switch between time periods.

“Chornobyldorf,” given its U.S. premiere at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, is described by its Ukrainian composer/directors Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeikoas an “archeological opera in seven novels.” It is an imagined post-apocalyptic excavation of the people and culture of Chernobyl, the city famous for the nuclear-reactor disaster of 1986. Fragments of the past were assembled into seven narrative sections, some clearer than others, with 13 performers and video by Dmytro Tentiuk. Orchestral and folk instruments such as the dulcimer and bandura, an elaborate percussion setup, and electronics were massaged into effusions that regularly headed into earsplitting territory (earplugs were distributed at the door, always a bad sign). Singers switched from the nasal, dissonant harmonies of Eastern European folk music to a Bach Mass and a round adapted from a Mahler symphony. The dancers were mostly semi- and sometimes entirely naked. There were striking moments, but not enough of them to enliven the intermissionless 135 minutes.

Wende, the composer and performer of the song cycle “The Promise,” given at HERE, is a charismatic artist with a broad vocal and expressive range and a winning personality. Her material, co-composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, wasn’t always as good. The songs, which plumbed the dark places of a woman’s soul, included an exploration of life as a horror movie and a heartfelt renunciation of motherhood. They ranged from snarly rap to intimate ballads, and finally emerged into hope with the repeated line “It’s not light yet, but it’s getting there.”

Also brimming with full-on female energy, the shortest and liveliest Prototype show was “Terce: A Practical Breviary,” an hourlong riff on the Medieval 9 a.m. breviary Mass addressing the Holy Spirit, in this case the Divine Feminine. Created and led by Heather Christian, and performed by 38 singing, dancing and instrument-playing women wearing creatively embellished and distressed choir robes, it was a jubilant community celebration of female work, striving, disappointment and devotion. To be part of the audience, arrayed in an intimate circle around the performers in Brooklyn’s Space at Irondale, felt like being invited to join the coolest convent ever.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘Carmen’ Review: A Misguided Modernization at the Met

Carrie Cracknell’s production, which had its premiere on New Year’s Eve, sets the opera in the present-day U.S. while offering few fresh insights into Bizet’s classic

Heidi Waleson

Rafael Davila and Aigul Akhmetshina

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

New York

Director Carrie Cracknell, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut with a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” on New Year’s Eve, is known for modernizing and giving a feminist edge to classic texts. Her 2022 film of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” for example, artfully interpolated contemporary dialogue into the 19th-century setting and made its protagonist the narrator, even the architect, of her own story. However, “Carmen,” one of the opera canon’s hoariest chestnuts, proved impervious to Ms. Cracknell’s efforts. Updated to present-day America and stripped of its touristic Spanish flourishes (no flamenco or gypsies, a rodeo stadium instead of a bullfighting arena), this “Carmen” offered no new insights into the freedom-craving title character and her hapless, murderous lover, Don José.

Michael Levine’s heavy, ugly sets overpowered the story. Act I offered a looming, full stage-height wall (the factory) with a chain-link fence in front, positioned so far downstage that the chorus scenes were cramped and chaotic. Lillas Pastia’s tavern in Act 2 became a giant tractor-trailer, its spinning wheels and the arrangement of flashing neon lights surrounding it simulating, not very persuasively, a speedy drive down a highway. Escamillo overtook it in a red sports car, accompanied by three pickup trucks full of men waving automatic weapons; the car and pickups then backed out the way they had come to leave room for Carmen and José’s meeting on and around a pair of gas pumps.

A scene from ’Carmen’

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

For the smuggler’s hideout in Act 3, the now-crashed tractor-trailer lay on its side and rotated far too many times, with Guy Hoare’s lighting picking out whoever had an aria to sing and leaving the rest in gloom. (The smugglers appeared to be running guns taken from the factory, perhaps into Mexico? Unclear.) The bleachers for the rodeo in Act 4 made more sense, although this set also rotated more often than necessary. Shadowy projections by rocafilm/Roland Horvath on a scrim before each act were too vague to offer much insight. Tom Scutt’s costumes fit the scruffy context, especially Carmen’s tiny denim cut-off shorts and turquoise cowboy boots. Choreographer Ann Yee supplied some low-key dance moves for the women partying in the truck.

Ms. Akhmetshina

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Ms. Cracknell’s directing did little to explore the toxic relationship between the two protagonists. One got no sense of their mutual attraction, nor of Don José’s suppressed violence. Perhaps the point was that even the wimpiest-seeming men think that they are entitled to bend women to their will by whatever means necessary, but that’s too subtle a message for this opera. There was no theatrical sense of risk-taking or impending doom; everyone seemed to be going through the motions rather than living the drama. The one directorial choice that did read clearly was the actual murder: Carmen picks up a baseball bat to defend herself and Don José wrenches it out of her hands and slugs her with it—the physically stronger male easily appropriating any and all weapons. However, even here, Bizet already stacked the deck: Don José’s pleading music makes him the more sympathetic character of the two in the scene, giving him an out, so the idea of the inherently abusive man didn’t track with the actual opera.

In the title role, the young Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina had the vocal goods—a throaty, low sound with a hint of steel—and she didn’t overplay Carmen’s seductiveness, but her performance was low energy, lacking the character’s magnetism and seeming more acted upon than acting. Tenor Rafael Davila stepped in for the scheduled Don José, Piotr Beczała, who was ill, and gave a serviceable performance, despite some pitch excursions at moments of high emotion.

The cast standouts were Kyle Ketelsen’s Escamillo, whose crisp diction and snappy delivery galvanized attention, and Angel Blue’s poignant yet strong-minded Micaëla—her Act 3 aria was the evening’s high point. Effective in the supporting roles were Sydney Mancasola and Briana Hunter, peppy and ready to rumble as Frasquita and Mercédès; Michael Adams and Frederick Ballentine, with lively ensemble timing as the smugglers Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado; and Benjamin Taylor and Wei Wu as the soldiers Moralès and Zuniga. The Met Chorus meandered rhythmically and physically through the production, and conductor Daniele Rustioni and the Met Orchestra, though noisy, never generated the drive and excitement that keeps “Carmen” at the top of the operatic hit parade.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

‘Rodelinda’ Review: Handel Well-Handled at Carnegie Hall

The English Concert, an ensemble led by Harry Bicket, returned to the New York venue for its annual performance of an opera by the Baroque master, turning in one of its finest productions to date.

Conductor Harry Bicket (at the harpsichord, back to camera) and Lucy Crowe PHOTO: STEVE J. SHERMAN

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 13, 2023 at 3:54 pm ETSHARETEXT

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Length (5 minutes)

New York

Since 2013, an annual highlight of the Carnegie Hall season has been the luxurious Sunday afternoon featuring the period-instrument ensemble the English Concert, its artistic director and conductor Harry Bicket, and an impeccably cast and performed Handel opera. Dec. 10 brought one of their finest efforts to date: “Rodelinda,” starring soprano Lucy Croweand countertenor Iestyn Davies. Though I couldn’t help visualizing the Met’s landmark Stephen Wadsworth production, this concert performance stood firmly on its own with just music stands and a few bits of blocking.

“Rodelinda” (1725) is one of Handel’s greatest operas. There’s not a dull moment in its three hours of music, and through inventive arias, taut recitatives and an unusual level of character development it constructs a powerful argument about the endurance of marital love. Nicola Francesco Haym’s adapted libretto, drawn from historical and literary sources, humanizes a political story and centers it on the heroine. Rodelinda, a queen whose husband, Bertarido, has been driven from his throne, is in the power of Grimoaldo, the usurper, who wants to marry her. Bertarido is thought to be dead; he has allowed that error to persist so that he can secretly rescue his wife and son.

Rodelinda has eight arias, and Ms. Crowe skillfully made each one display a different facet of the heroine’s character. In just the first moments of the opening act, she lamented her (supposedly) dead husband with a lustrous, intimate tone and then rejected Grimoaldo’s marriage proposal with steely defiance. Ms. Crowe ornaments her vocal lines spectacularly, yet always with purpose. In one of the afternoon’s high points, Act 2’s “Spietati” (“Pitiless man”), Rodelinda agrees to marry Grimoaldo if he will kill her son in front of her, because she cannot be both the wife of the usurper and the mother of the true heir. It’s a dangerous gamble, and Ms. Crowe’s purposely jittery delivery in the aria’s A section and her wild ornaments in the da capo exemplified that risk for both the character and the singer.

Mr. Bicket and Iestyn Davies PHOTO: STEVE J. SHERMAN

Mr. Davies was an equally persuasive Bertarido. His softly radiant countertenor is ideal for this unhappy exile; his first aria, “Dove sei” (“Where are you”), about his longing for Rodelinda, was effortlessly delicate, with subtle crescendos and not a moment of vocal strain. His last repeat of the word “Vieni” (“Come”), sung on a gently rising spiral, was a moment of perfect beauty. Bertarido is soon to be even more unhappy—he thinks Rodelinda is unfaithful—but in his aria comparing the sounds of nature to his tears Mr. Davies never took that emotion over the top. For “Vivi, tiranno” (“Live, tyrant”), Bertarido’s heroic moment near the end, normally a clarion display, Mr. Davies made his distinctive vocal timbre work for the character—the nice guy ends up the winner.

As Grimoaldo—who starts out as a tyrant but has second thoughts—Eric Ferring captured the character’s vacillations with his freely lyric tenor and clear diction. Mezzo Christine Rice’s Eduige—who wants to marry Grimoaldo but has been rejected—brought a witty slyness to her arias plotting revenge. Brandon Cedel’s booming bass-baritone made him a perfect heavy-duty villain—Garibaldo, the consummate bad guy, advocates tyranny and cruelty and ends up dead—even if he lacked some of the vocal flexibility in ornamentation that the other singers displayed. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s more operatic countertenor as Unulfo, who is secretly loyal to Bertarido and supplies moments of calm and hope, made an interesting contrast to that of Mr. Davies, though his reliance on the music lessened his impact.

As always, the English Concert and Mr. Bicket, leading from the harpsichord, were the heart of the show. The band never let the music sag: Even in the most heart-rending laments, one could always feel the pulse underneath. Driven from the continuo section, colored with the occasional moments of flute, recorder and oboe, and subtly calibrating dynamics, this orchestra breathed with the singers. In Unulfo’s comforting “Fra tempeste” (“Amid the storms”), which has a similar lilting rhythm and accompaniment figures to the famous “Messiah” aria “O thou that tellest,” Mr. Cohen seemed to ride the billows of the orchestra. And in the Act 2 finale, “Io t’abbraccio” (“I embrace you”), the opera’s only duet—as the just-reunited Rodelinda and Bertarido are to be torn apart again—everyone onstage seemed to be singing. The voices twined and soared, a walking bass in the low strings supplied a visceral anchor, and the violins sighed above. In an afternoon of sublimity, this was a heart-stopping moment.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).