Dialogues des Carmelites: il ne reste que l'Agneau de Dieu

I went to the last performance (of only three!) of the run of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites which closed out the Met's season. The production and orchestra were solid, but it was the vocal performances that gave the evening its intellectual and emotional intensity. John Dexter's classic production is strong and stark, though it's hard for me to put myself in the place of audiences who saw it as revolutionary. Before the opening bars of the score are heard, we see the nuns all prostrate in the cruciform position. The grille, the rood screen, the prison bars all descend, making effective minimalist surroundings for naturalistic presentation. I quite liked the airy form of the grille, the incorporation of the cross into its pattern, emphasizing the voluntary rather than the absolute nature of the nuns' enclosure. The stage is marked--defined--by an ever-present cross. Its shape is obscured only at a handful of moments: it is in shadow while Blanche is in her father's house, cut off by the library with its Fragonard-like painting. Again it is partially hidden during the prioress' death scene, though she is in its light. During the martyrdom, the crowds mill in the transept, blind to it. I really liked this use of space suggesting the form of grace, the force of it even (especially?) in the mundane.

On ne meurt pas chacun pour soi: Dialogues des Carmelites

Ensemble, Act II. Photo (c) Dell'Arte Opera

Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites is a work that I love: its structure is (to me) something of a marvel, its music is gorgeous and gripping, and its characterization, both through the music and the libretto, is brilliant. I was delighted, therefore, to hear it live for the first time, performed by the Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble. (Information on further performances is here, for all the rest of you complaining about the tragic brevity of the Met's run in spring.) With limited resources, they gave a performance notable for the commitment of its principals. Dell'Arte's orchestral forces were small, but sensitively led by Christopher Fecteau. The brass was afflicted with wobbles, but the ensemble as a whole did a fine job of sustaining dramatic momentum. Sets and costumes were minimal, but Victoria Crutchfield's direction was thoughtful, with the choreography of the nuns representing the tensions within their common life, as well as the affections and habits that bound them together.

L'heure exquise: French art song on CD

Mucha, "Music"

After several days of cooler temperatures, New York City is poised to plunge back into baking, exultant heat. Much as I love the summertime, there seems to be, in the city, a disturbingly fine line between weather that is glorious and weather that has you sticking to things and wishing you weren't. To accompany hours of delicious languor, or to sweep through sticky afternoons like a cool breeze, my listening of choice this summer has been French art song. I'm not sure why, but it seems to fit. So here, without further ado, a brief commentary on a selection of discs old and new.

The most recent album I found was Clair De Lune, Natalie Dessay's disc of Debussy songs. Dessay's intelligence and sensitivity are great assets to the interpretation of these vivid, romantic songs. The playing of Philippe Cassard made the piano part always wonderful, and sometimes breathtaking. I was not without reservations, though: the distinctive characteristics of each piece seemed a bit flattened by Dessay's approach. The longer selections on the disc shone: the "Chanson d'Ariel" and "La Demoiselle Elue" (the latter with Karine Deshayes) were highlights. Bonus points to those responsible for the cover design reminiscent of Alphonse Mucha's paintings.

Life, Death, and What Comes After at Opera Manhattan

Kala Maxym (c) Opera Manhattan

Opera Manhattan's spring festival packs an emotional punch, or rather three. The triple bill features short twentieth-century operas in widely differing styles, united by their focus on emotionally and psychologically fragile female central characters (not to say their emotional and psychological disintegration.) In the hands of Opera Manhattan's artists, these were presented as narratives of strength, as well as weakness. The evening began with Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine," Kala Maxym reprising her role as Elle, which she also sang with the company in February. Tristan Cano played the piano rendition of the score with impressive nuance in tone, supporting the emotional trajectory of the piece, sometimes articulating the truths which the singer cannot. The monodrama was staged by Sarah Fraser, between a sofa and a disarranged bed. Letters are scattered over the floor--some lost among the bedclothes--relics of the relationship. Maxym's characterization was thoughtful and vivid; especially at the outset, "Elle" is anxious, fretful, preoccupied, distracting even herself from the central reality. There was the suggestion of vacillation between her public and private selves, as she wandered from the living room to the bedroom, and the boundaries between past and present blurred. Maxym's French was intelligible and expressive, and she used variation of tone color to powerful emotional effect. Strong and passionate in recounting the dream sequence, with warm high notes, she also demonstrated sensitive diminuendo, notably in speaking of the hotel at Marseilles where she and her lover had been happy. There are things, she says, which cannot be imagined without breaking the heart.

Menotti (via G. Schirmer)

The second opera on the program was Giancarlo Menotti's rarely performed "The Medium" (synopsis here.) The eerie score (for a chamber orchestra of 14) was played in a piano reduction by Kathryn Olander. The opera had its genesis after Menotti attended a seance at the home of acquaintances who were bereaved parents. To his surprise, the composer noted that the mother seemed to see and speak with her daughter: "It was not she who felt cheated, but I." The drama is vivid in quotidian detail, its libretto, also by Menotti, dense with underlying significance. The choreography of Opera Manhattan's production, John Schenkel, was intelligent and eloquent of the characters' emotional histories. Mr. and Mrs. Gobineau, habitués of the seances, emerged as repressively pragmatic, insistent that everything be performed within its proper parameters, lacking the imagination to be disconcerted when this becomes literally impossible. Mrs. Nolan, the newcomer, was sung and acted with great eloquence by Anna Petrie. The mute Toby was given a passionate and nuanced portrayal by Parker Scott. His body language was extraordinarily expressive, and he had good chemistry with Monica (Megan Candio,) who plays on the threshold of adulthood. Candio has a sweet-toned soprano, and gave a touching performance as the naive Monica. She took a few minutes to warm up fully, but gave a haunting account of the dark lullaby. The scene where she and Toby waltz was of (for me, literally) breathtaking sensuality, and the way they found each other was beautiful. We never learn the true name of the mentally fragile medium who is so afraid of her own dead. To Monica she is simply Baba; to her clients she is Madame Flora; to the audience she remains an enigma. We know only that she has seen too much, and learned to survive. This complex role was sung with lots of character and hybrid style--much use of Sprechstimme in dialogues--by Elizabeth Moulton. Thanks to the force of her presence, the seance was genuinely eerie; thanks to her dark mezzo, her drunken, desperate monologue was mesmerizing. Confronted with her unimaginable reality--that the dead who sink down into the earth can speak--she is finally shattered by the weight of all she has lived through.

The undoing of women? Pasatieri and Poulenc at Opera Manhattan

The ambitious Opera Manhattan Repertory Theatre is filling this weekend with a triple bill of dramas for "women on the verge." The project pairs two shorter works of Thomas Pasatieri--his 2007 song cycle Lady Macbeth, and 1980 monodrama Before Breakfast--with Francis Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. As well as being seasonally appropriate (for those who are, like myself, heartily fed up with foil-wrapped chocolates and paper sentiments for February 14th) the program was musically rich, and emotionally devastating.

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

I am more familiar with the text of each of the works presented than with the musical settings created for them. The insinuating melodies of Lady Macbeth, sensual and almost jazzy, had me considering Shakespeare's well-known words from a new angle. Sofia Dimitrova created a portrayal of a woman trapped in an unbearable situation, for whom power is an aphrodisiac. Pasatieri subverts "Ye ministers of night, unsex me here" with unmistakably sexy music, which echoes throughout the remainder of the songs, even as Lady Macbeth descends into madness, fighting all the way. Dimitrova's plush, rounded soprano embraced the eroticism of Lady Macbeth's daring the powers of hell and earth to stop her, balanced between confidence and desperation. Even in fixation on her guilt ("All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand") it is far from certain that she is not, still, aroused by the promise of greater freedom implicit in the metallic, vital smell of blood.

Tragic Women and Sexy Ladies: Susan Graham at Carnegie Hall

The recital which Susan Graham brought to Carnegie Hall last night united a wide variety of moods and musical styles around famous female figures from literature, and a few literary females. From Purcell to Poulenc and beyond, Graham gave vivid life to the personae of the songs. With beautiful legato phrasing and dynamic control, she created a series of emotionally rich portraits, with Malcolm Martineau as her worthy partner. Purcell's "Tell me, some pitying angel," set to the text of seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish poet Nahum Tate, is a richly imagined monologue for the Virgin Mary. Based on the episode where her son, at the age of twelve, is lost (to her) for days in the crowds of Jerusalem, this text has Mary, with some bitterness, meditating on the contrast of this desperate human problem with the grace she had been promised. There is no general rejoicing now, and no angel responds to her cry. Purcell's magnificent musical architecture, and Graham's directness, both in fierce outcry ("Gabriel! Gabriel! He comes not") and interior reflection ("I trust the God; but oh! I fear the child") saved it from religious sentimentality.

Berlioz' La mort d’Ophélie takes as its text the scene depicted by countless pre-Raphaelites: the madness and death of Ophelia, who drowns, singing, amid her flowers. Here, even as Gertrude (the narrator) seems to seek to evade horror in description, the piano creates an eerie and uneasy atmosphere, with harmonies plaintively unresolved. Ophelia's own melody is echoed by singer and piano in turns, until it dies into silence. After this second extended scene, we were given a set created from the Mignon-inspired melodies of six composers (making me think I really should try Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre again.) First, Schubert's "Heiss mich nicht reden," a Lied the apparent simplicity of which belies its haunting beauty. From Schumann's Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister was taken one of the less frequently excerpted songs, "So lasst mich scheinen," which Martineau and Graham handled with admirable delicacy. This restraint was also very welcome in the selections by Liszt ("Kennst du das Land") and Tchaikovsky ("None but the lonely heart.") Graham did full justice to the extravagant sensuality of the former, and the romantic melancholy of the latter, but rather through expressive phrasing and vocal coloration than overt theatricality. The set concluded with two contrasting settings of the same text, Duparc's wistful "Romance de Mignon" and Hugo Wolf's tempestuous, intense "Kennst du das Land." It is to Graham's credit that she explored so effectively the range of possible moods and meanings within the enigmatic verse.

Harmonie du soir: Karita Mattila at Carnegie Hall

Karita Mattila's Saturday night recital offered an evocative selection of sensual art songs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (full listing here.) Partnered with Martin Katz, Mattila spun hypnotic melodies of fin-de-siècle seduction. I was bewildered, however, both by the number of empty seats and by the behavior of those who were there. In the first half of the program, applause from all levels came after each song, persistent, but sounding almost perfunctory. There was welcome silence during the Sallinen set, and then applause after two of five songs by Joseph Marx. I wanted to tell the applauders to take a glass of absinthe and relax, and let Mattila and Katz work their magic uninterrupted.

Poulenc, date unknown

The first half of the recital was devoted to cycles by Poulenc and Debussy, both structured around the texts of a single poet to whose work the composer was specially drawn. Poulenc's Banalités, with texts by Apollinaire, comprised a series of vignettes united by wry wit rather than mood, from the lightly satirical "Chanson d'Orkenise," to the sensually languorous "Hôtel," through the poems to place that are "Fagnes de Wallonie" and "Voyage à Paris." The last song in Poulenc's cycle, "Sanglots," moves the furthest from realism, taking the listener through a series of romantically morbid images. The virtues of Katz' sensitive accompaniment were on full display here, as he let single notes and richly rolling chords convey equal intimacy of despair. Debussy's Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, setting poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, continued our odyssey into impressionistic treatments of romantic love. Although Mattila's voice sounded somewhat exposed and fragile at the top, she sang with beautiful coloration of tone throughout, and admirable attention to text. (I was glad of having the texts open on my lap, for I didn't catch every syllable, but she treated the many examples of wordplay or extended metaphor with intelligence.) Here, too, Katz was her worthy partner in drawing out the expressive richness of Debussy's harmonies.

Se vuol ballare: operatic histories of the French Revolution

Verily, Gentle Readers, opera follows me around, even into the fastnesses of the library. I have been spending the past week immersed in the historiography of the French Revolution, and uncovering some intriguing aspects of opera history in the process. The eighteenth-century opera house was a theater of political representation and an arena for political debate; the disappearance of the ancien regime glories of Lully and Rameau were precipitated more by changes in public mood than changes in musical taste. The public debates over the style of Gluck vs. that of Piccini were as heated as more overtly political disputes (if not quite at the level of the mid-century querelle des bouffons.) The 1774 premiere of Iphigenie en Aulide caused furor not only because of its style, but also because of its subject matter. (Go here to hear Clytemnestre defy the authority of a king and father.) Piccini's rococo dramas were immensely popular. His Italian style, however, was decried by those who wanted natural simplicity and national character in their music. Here an excerpt from Piccini's 1760 work "La Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola:"


As seen in the above clip, the opera flirts with social transgression despite the subtitle: La Cecchina, a sweet-tempered maidservant, is in love with a marquis. Shall their union be prevented by class boundaries? Fortunately not... as she turns out to be the daughter of a baron. Rousseau himself penned a musical drama entitled Le Devin du Village, extolling sentiment and simplicity. Gretry, meanwhile, was quoted with inflammatory effect at a military banquet, where an aria from Richard Coeur-de-Lion ("O Richard, o mon roi") was sung in commiseration with Louis XVI at "the universe being arrayed against him." And so, indeed, it might have seemed to be. The much-touted changes in mentality which facilitated the social revolutions of the end of the century find eloquent utterance in Mozart. After years of defying tyranny in opera seria, Mozart has Figaro kick over the cart, with a little help from Beaumarchais: