Category Archives: Arts

Fresh from giving the neighborhood trick or treaters a halloween that will, hopefully, haunt their dreams for the remainder of the year, we ventured to Boston this past weekend for our first visit to Odyssey Opera. The young company, already causing stirs with its bold and daring choice of repertoire, devotes its seventh season to the exploration of the Tudor dynasty in opera, and ushers in November with (of this we are fairly certain) the American premiere of Giovanni Pacini’s Maria, Regina d’Inghilterra.  Like Mercadante, Spontini, and (quite unfairly) Meyerbeer, references to Giovanni Pacini are often a footnote when discussing his more famous contemporaries such as Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi. Kept alive nowadays only by the unusual revival of his opera Saffo, it may come as a surprise to most that Pacini wrote over 80 operas, many of which served as vehicles for the famous opera stars of the era. A complete unknown today, he was once as established as any of the illustrious Italian composers who dominate the standard repertoire offered by opera companies around the world to this day. Odyssey Opera’s presentation of Pacini’s Maria, Regina d’Inghilterra gave its audience the rare opportunity to judge the composer’s merits in the flesh, and despite the opening night’s warm reception, it is clear that Pacini’s musical language falls in an awkward musico dramatico crack of history. His musical language is more phlegmatic than Donizetti’s, certainly less melodic than Bellini’s, and lacks that dramatic swagger that sets Verdi apart from the lot. That said, his orchestral voice is elegant and empowered, pointing north of the Alps, and prepares musical Italy for the later works of Verdi. More importantly, his fellow composers were influenced, even in reactionary fashion, to the work of this seasoned and talented musician, thus even the casual awareness of his musical language becomes a valuable asset in understanding the great masterpieces of his day.  

Amy Shoremount-Obra (Queen Mary), Kameron Lopreore (Riccardo Fenimoore)
and James Demler (Gualtiero Churchill). Photo: Kathy Wittman

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The Atlanta opera closes its 39th season, one of its boldest and most far reaching to date, with Verdi’s perennial favorite middle period work, La Traviata. For Tomer Zvulun, it must feel a bit like a victory. Now in his 6th year as Artistic Director for the Atlanta Opera, Mr. Zvulun’s gamble to expand the company’s mainstage core repertoire, as well as the introduction of the Discovery Series, has seemingly reached stable ground. This season offered stagings of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, Bernstein’s West Side Story, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Parker’s Yardbird and Piezolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires. Wrapping up this maverick season with such a slice of standard repertoire may seem like a compromise, but Mr. Zvulun’s set up is, if anything, compelling. This Traviata unravels in a beautiful belle epoque staging, under the supervision of a world famous director, and features the introduction of three young and well-recommended international artists to the stage of the Cobb Energy Center. In theory, this Traviata should serve as the crowning statement of what has been achieved thus far, and the glorious future that is to come. In practice, the opening night performance of April 27th served a more sobering message.

Parigi, o cara…. Mario Chang (Alfredo) and Zuzana Marková (Violetta). Photo by Nunnally Rawson.

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As the small gathering of protesters held their ground outside the theater, an historic tableau greeted the Atlanta premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking this past Saturday. On the stage of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, holding hands with the cast and the production team was the composer himself, as well as the real Sister Helen Prejean. The audience, which not long before had held its breath in stunned silence at the opera’s final scene, showered the creators with unabated and enthusiastic applause. As the crowds prepared to confront the growing pre-Super Bowl traffic, a palpable air of agitation clung throughout the lobby. Random dialogue covering the subject matter, the musical value of the piece, and other aspects of the production could be heard as most patrons made their way out the door. Atlanta is no stranger to Heggie’s music – it has been a mainstay of the song repertoire in our recital venues such as Spivey Hall. That said, this marked the first time the Atlanta Opera audience had the opportunity to grapple directly with the monolithic issues found in his first opera. In the case of your friends at newoutpost, while thoroughly familiar with the score through various broadcasts and the available commercial recordings of the piece, this was also our first opportunity to experience the work in the flesh, and we found the event to be extraordinarily stimulating.

There’s a moment in Bellini’s Norma that never fails to punch me in the gut. As the opera reaches its final ensemble, the Druid High Priestess Norma, who by now has confessed her crimes to her people and has accepted her fate, turns to her father and tells him that she has borne children with the enemy and begs for their lives. After some vacillation, her father agrees, and Norma says “Ah, tu perdoni, quel pianto il dice! Io piu non chiedo, io son felice!” (You forgive me, your tears have told me. I want nothing more, I am happy). From the pit, Bellini’s orchestra provides a steady pulse that delicately sweeps at the structure, like the tide slowly washing away the majestic sand castle he has spent over two hours building, and over this a melancholy figure rises in the woodwind section as the father forgives his child and acquiesces: It doubles as a gesture of forgiveness and redemption while also signaling the tragic denouement of this extraordinary woman. In the rare instances that I have had the pleasure of experiencing Norma live, this scene has invariably inspired the tears to stream clear past the cheek, and it was no exception last Sunday October 21 when North Carolina Opera mounted a concert performance of the Bellini masterpiece. During the curtain calls, the lady sitting next to me, who had been rather talkative and kept zippering and un-zippering her purse during the entire affair, turned to me and said:

“I saw you crying…it really hit you, didn’t it?”

I agreed.

“You must have liked it a lot”

With an awkward grimace I replied: “You can hum this music and it will make me happy.”

And this is true. Yet further scrutiny reveals complications.

Awaiting the arrival of the Druids!

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Last weekend, the Minnesota Opera closed its 55th season with its first production of Massenet’s unjustly underperformed opera, Thais. Newoutpost’s ties with the mid-western company are strong (this blog, in fact, debuted with their production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda back in the winter of 2011), and coupled with our desire to take part in this significant musical event, we embarked in yet another brief musical pilgrimage to beautiful St. Paul. We attended the penultimate performance given on Saturday May 19th, and taking into account the audience’s reaction as well as the artistic values on display that evening, we can happily declare the presentation a complete success.

Gerard Schneider as Nicias, Kelly Kaduce as Thaïs, and Lucas Meachem as Athanaël in Minnesota Opera’s new production of Thaïs. Photos by Cory Weaver

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To close the month of April and welcome May, the Atlanta Opera presented one of its most compelling casts and offered a memorable reading of Bizet’s immortal masterpiece, Carmen.

In a bold decision, the company handed the direction of this revival (the production premiered in our city in 2012,) to director Brenna Corner, a member of the Atlanta Opera Studio. Ms. Corner was thus pitted against director Jeffrey Marc Buchman, who’s work at the time of the production’s premiere, we recall, left the door open for corrections. While some details in the direction of the current revival, such as the over-sexualization of the heroine during the first act, as well as introducing a mentally deranged Don Jose in the opera’s final scene can be classified as a misfire, the comparisons to the premiere generally favor Ms. Corner, who focused a great deal of attention to the development of her principals clashing personalities, and thus underlined the dangerous consequences of their pairing. From the pit, Carl & Sally Gable music director Arthur Fagen led the performance at a careful pace, adjusting his tempi to the needs of his singers (specially Ms. Abrahamyan) and making due with some uncharacteristic mishaps from the Atlanta Opera Orchestra (the french horn solo during Micaela’s aria being particularly cringe worthy). We credit him for keeping the totality of the performance intact.

Gianluca Terranova as Don Jose and Varduhi Abrahamyan as Carmen. (Photo by Jeff Roffman).

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Following the successful Parisian debut of his Lucie di Lammermoor at the Theatre de la Rennaissance in August of 1839, Gaetano Donizetti moved swiftly to establish himself in the nineteenth century’’s most prestigious musical capital by announcing four additional premieres in the city of lights. While two of these, L’Ange de Nisida and Le Duc d’Albe, where ultimately abandoned (L’Ange is incidentally scheduled to receive its premiere this July at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) the remaining works made their way to the stage. At L’Opera, the composer refurbished his Poliuto within the confines of grand opera convention under the new title Les Martyrs, which coupled with the tragedy of Lucie, further underlined the composer’s facility in the dramatic realm. Between them, however, he offered a work of contrasting light-hearted and dazzling verve, which debuted at the Opera Comique in February of 1840. This was La Fille du Regiment, an opera that not only served to showcase the composer’s versatility in both tragic and comedic subjects, but also peddled his unapologetic argument to the French audience to embrace him as one of their own. Despite the initial critical reception (with my school-days hero Hector Berlioz leading the pack,) the opera became a mainstay in Paris and Francophone regions, receiving multiple presentations at the Comique and hallmarking traditional patriotic holidays such as Bastille day. The opera’s current outing at the Atlanta Opera, which your friends at newoutpost were fortunate to experience in its second presentation on Tuesday February 17, serves the company as a veritable palate cleanser between the brooding Byronic drama of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Hollander and Bizet’s savage Carmen. By all accounts, the company has done much to restore the piece back to its original scale and presented the work as the light, frothy affair it was intended to be.

Salut a la France! Andriana Chuchman (Marie), Santiago Ballerini (Tonio), Tyler Simpson (Hortensius) and the men of the Atlanta Opera Chorus. Photo Credit: Jeff Roffman.

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On Saturday November 4th, the Atlanta Opera opened its 38th season by unveiling a new production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”. “The Flying Dutchman,” or “Der Fliegende Hollander,” is the only Wagnerian work that the Atlanta Opera has staged in its thirty eight year history, and as we walked out of the auditorium following Friday night’s performance, your friends at newoutpost could not contain the flood of thoughts that we humbly offer here as the introduction to our write up.

We want to frame what follows by proclaiming that, as residents of this city for the past twenty seven years, we consider the Atlanta Opera our home, and we want to see it grow into the fantastic arts institution we know it can become. This is Atlanta’s third stab at producing Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in the past 15 years, and already the feeling of dread that the company is unlikely to dig deeper into the Wagnerian repertoire has already begun to set in. Be it due to economic constraints, the operas duration, union restrictions, or whatever the case may be, it is a sad fact that many bets would be lost if the Atlanta Opera were to suddenly stage any other selection from the great composer’s canon. Many quietly fear that the pattern of the past twelve years, the recycling of the standard repertoire sprinkled with odd excursions into esoteric operas to somehow claim variety will continue, and a recent visit to another regional company underlined the impression as being shared by more than just locals. In conversation with a rather cheeky member of the administrative staff who, upon learning our city of origin, smirked and said “Atlanta? I hear they do a lot of Don Giovannis there!” we realized that there was enough truth in the statement to make the burn sizzle.

Senta (Melody Moore) cannot focus on the task at hand while Mary (Olivia Vote) manages the women of the village. Picture by Jeff Roffman for The Atlanta Opera.

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