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Where’s the ASO Review???
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dear Readers — This AJC blog, which has been called Classical Music and Our Reviews and Concert Reviews, is going away.
The new site for my reviews and articles and commentary is the ATLarts blog, which you can find by clicking right here or by going to www.ajc.com and clicking on “entertainment” at the top, then going to the arts page.
If you’re a regular reader, here’s is the bookmark for the new site:
http://www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/accessatlanta/atlarts/
Any problems, concerns? Email me at pruhe@ajc.com
— Pierre Ruhe
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‘Bach at Leipzig,’ at Aurora Theatre
THEATER REVIEW Itamar Moses' “Bach at Leipzig.” Through Oct. 28. Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, www.auroratheatre.com
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music as lofty, sublime, perfect — “an argument for the existence of God,” as one Bach scholar recently put it. To his contemporaries, however, Bach was competent but not great.
After he died, no one bothered to save his music; hundreds of his scores were discarded as scrap paper. During his life, when important jobs came open, he had to audition like everyone else — and he wasn’t anybody’s first choice.
That’s the starting premise of “Bach at Leipzig,” Itamar Moses’ charmingly, maddeningly daffy play that wears its cleverness on its sleeve, running through Oct. 28 at Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville.
In lucid, precision-timed direction by Danielle Mindess, and with a winning cast, the characters carve for themselves rounded personas: None are especially likable, none are forgettable.
It is June 1722. Leipzig. The revered Johann Kuhnau, music master of the Thomaskirche, dies at the pipe organ. Georg Philipp Telemann, “the greatest organist in Germany” (Jim Adkins, grandiloquent in his silence), is the favorite to capture the prestigious post.
Meanwhile, six nobodies — Moses concocted this cadre, based somewhat on historical figures; Bach never appears — can’t hope to compete on musical merits, so they scheme, swindle, poison, blackmail and counter-blackmail in hopes of landing the job.
All the wannabes are named either Johann or Georg (a point of comic confusion that never tires the playwright). There’s Lenck (Dan Triandiflou), a con man who hopes to restore his reputation through more trickery. Steindorff (Jeremy Aggers) is the pretty playboy who really wants to be a dancer. Kaufmann (Daniel Burnley) stumbles around in a geriatric fog. Graupner (Larry Davis), more talented than the others, still fears the charismatic Telemann.
One by one, each introduces himself by reciting a letter home before joining the thrust and parry of the others. Thus, all of act one is constructed — as we learn at the start of act two — like a six-voiced fugue in music. (The audience is encouraged to applaud Moses’ brilliance.) Act two’s conceit is a play within a play, another opportunity to weave together six or more threads of verbal mayhem.
On occasion, grand ideas about art and society threaten to lift the wordplay and poppycock to a more cerebral plain. Schott (Al Stilo), the traditionalist, argues that Kuhnau had prized craftsmanship, never innovation: “When you deny the musical principles laid down by our predecessors you risk denying their religious ones as well.”
Fasch (Chris Entweiler), the progressive, counters, “That is preposterous! New music might, in fact, reach those who do not like the work of our predecessors …”
But such chewable exchanges go nowhere, evaporating with the next rim-shot gag.
If “Bach at Leipzig” feels a lot like a Tom Stoppard play — think “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” about two insignificant characters yanked out of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” — it’s intentional. Although he credits Stoppard as his influence, Moses can’t match his idol’s balance of theatrical artifice with dramatic substance.
Perhaps that explains why there’s hardly any music in this production (Thom Jenkins gets sound design credit), which further reinforces the notion that “Bach at Leipzig” isn’t about the complexities of art and mankind, but merely a crafty play about itself, clever for cleverness’ sake.
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Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season
RECITAL REVIEW Polina Leschenko, pianist. Saturday at Spivey Hall. www.spiveyhall.org.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Polina Leschenko, a formidable young pianist who until now had been known only within the inner sanctum of the music biz, opened Spivey Hall’s 17th season Saturday night.
She’s a perfect fit for the classical music calendar at the 400-seat jewelbox theater, about 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. Spivey is consistent in booking a range of esteemed classical artists at the peak of their careers — and also consistent in discovering the next generation of esteemed classical artists, still on the rise.
A photogenic 26-year-old Russian, brimming with life and virtuosity at the keyboard, Leschenko is in the latter group.
Trained in her native St. Petersburg and in Belgium, her first international exposure came as a protege of the willful, exacting, legendary Argentine pianist Martha Argerich … and any friend of Martha’s is probably worth knowing.
For her Atlanta debut, however, Leschenko’s program felt weirdly out of balance. She placed a growling monster of music at the end, Franz Liszt’s B minor Sonata. While the piece is only about 30 minutes long, its hulking presence loomed from the start.
After striding to the keyboard and tossing back her long brown locks, she was barely seated (on a plain upright chair) when she launched into the first of three transcriptions, Bach-Busoni’s Chaconne, a pure and cosmic violin tour of earth and heaven reworked for the more metaphysical piano.
At the start, she coaxed a rich, delicate, crisp sound from the Steinway, going easy on the pedal. And as the Chaconne shakes its earthly bonds and spirals up into the stratosphere, her played became elastic, almost improvisatory, pushing and lingering and rushing and pulling. It wasn’t so much an original interpretation as a personal one.
That none of this seemed forced or mannered suggested Leschenko is a true stage animal, a virtuosa with a knack for storytelling, for drawing in the audience. I was completely on board.
Yet she seemed to be having problems either with the piano itself or, more troubling, with her right hand. In a largo by Bach-Feinberg, the upper reaches of the instrument were underpowered, which interrupted the singing line and threw the harmonies a little out of whack.
It got more noticeable after that. In Liszt’s “Paganini” Etude No. 6, she blurred several hyper-difficult passages. Under her fingers, she made Chopin’s “Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brilliante” sound like an especially tricky and regal puzzle, made to be solved rather than as a means to heart-felt expression. Still, it was impossible to resist her lyricism and the wispiness of filigree passages.
At intermission, she asked to change instruments — a rare request for a visiting pianist — swapping Walter for Emilie. (Spivey’s two grand pianos, each with unique traits, are named after Mr. and Mrs. Spivey, the hall’s benefactors.)
Liszt’s monumental and monumentally strange Sonata, from 1853, is more abstract and nonlinear and hallucinogenic than almost anything written before — in short, it’s a visionary masterpiece that still challenges even the most complete of pianists.
Leschenko had the measure of the music, at turns grandiloquent, demonic, full of bombast and tenderness. Wonderfully, she seemed to be making up the music as she went along, capturing the ferocity of the opening themes and peeking inside the slow andante section with equal intuition. (In concert, she’s much more spontaneous-sounding than on her new CD of the Sonata, on the AvantiClassics label.)
Yet her performance, for whatever reasons, never congealed into a convincing whole, a pity since this young pianist showed flashes of the sort of brilliance and musicality that should propel her from unknown to rising star.
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ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Robert Spano, is as sharp a concert programmer as any conductor in the business.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, he assembled what on first glance seemed like disparate music by Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin and Cesar Franck. Yet in juxtaposition, and by Spano’s coherent interpretations, they felt tightly locked, each work referring to the others, where the concert as a whole amounted to much more than its parts.
Berlioz and Franck, born a generation apart, were both French-speaking Romantic composers whose affinities were less with the French than with the darker, more philosophical Germanic musical traditions.
Berlioz and Chopin, contemporaries in Paris, violated compositional formalities and pushed their instruments — the piano for Chopin, the whole orchestra for Berlioz — into uncharted worlds. Horn calls within the Franck and Chopin works, and supernatural spirits in the Franck and Berlioz, were small details that took a new potency in this collection.
They opened with Franck’s “The Accursed Huntsman,” which is cinema before the invention of the movie camera.
In 14 minutes, the music is a pictorial, literal setting of a once-popular tale where a German count defies God’s command to rest on the Sabbath and goes hunting. He’s chased by demons, flames flickering at his feet. If you know the story ahead of time, it’s all there, every click of the horse hooves, ever backwards glance to evade hot pursuit.
The ASO’s reading was terrific, starting with the call to the hunt and ringing church bells played by the orchestra’s crack French horn section.
Garrick Ohlsson, a regular guest on this stage, was soloist for Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto. The American pianist is a formidable Chopin specialist because he doesn’t go looking for stereotypes — of the Romantic martyr, of the genius introvert, of the weepy poet, of the proto-avant gardist.
Virtuoso pianists looking for these characters will finds them, and more. Ohlsson instead takes the notes at face value. In the concerto, the textures were scrubbed clean, the emotions honest, the lyricism pure and youthful — reminding us that the piece was composed by a 19-year-old. What was missing was a sense of mystery. It was perhaps a little too fresh faced and earnest.
Ohlsson returned for an encore: Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27 no. 2, beautifully judged, rather sunny in disposition, perfectly taped at the end. This is how popular pianists continue to build their audience capital.
The concert ended with five episodes from Berlioz’s “Romeo et Juliette.” Labeled by the composer a “dramatic symphony,” it’s not so much Shakespeare put to music as the tempestuous, serene, melancholy, reactionary and euphoric impressions of Monsieur Berlioz when he read the play. (The program originally included six excerpts, with bass Denis Sedov — the Colline from last week’s ASO “La Boheme” — singing a Friar Laurence aria. But as they say in times of war and orchestral rehearsal, stuff happens. Sedov withdrew for “artistic reasons” and the Berlioz was reconfigured.)
The violas, in recent years the ASO’s weakest section, got the star-crossed tale started with ferocious spunk (and in tune) — which raises the question of why they can’t play with this much intensity on a weekly basis.
Yet on this highly strung program — under Spano’s often tense baton — the orchestra couldn’t maintain its focus throughout the rather dry selections of “Romeo et Juliette.” The energy levels flagged during the “Love Scene” and never recovered — a situation likely to be remedied in subsequent performances.
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Conductor Runnicles Goes Home to Scotland
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Donald Runnicles, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor since 2001, will today announce he’s becoming Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow, his publicists at New York’s 21C Media announced.
It’s a three-year contract, and his duties begin officially in the autumn of 2009 — just after he ends his tenure at the San Francisco Opera, where he’s been music director since 1992.
Although he’ll retain his other part-time gigs — in Atlanta (fewer than 6 programs a season) and principal conductor of New York’s Orchestra of St. Lukes and music director of the Grand Tetons Music Festival, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming — the BBC Scottish becomes his most significant post. He’ll lead the orchestra a minimum of eight weeks a season.
A rare conductor who holds his baton in his left hand, and re-seats the cellos and basses accordingly, Runnicles is known to favor the heavy Germanic repertoire — Wagner and Strauss — although he’s consistently more interesting in colorful, atmospheric or rhythmically gauzy 20th century music that’s away from the Teutonic center. His conducting of the US stage premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint Francois d’Assise,” at the San Francisco Opera, was among the most critically acclaimed performances, globally, of the past decade.
The Messiaen, Ravel and Britten pieces he’s conducted with the ASO, likewise, are among the highlights of his time here. Contemporary music is also a specialty. Two years ago, he conducted the world premiere of John Adams’ opera “Doctor Atomic” in San Francisco, and will perform it again next season with the ASO, to be recorded by Nonesuch.
Around the time of the “Doctor Atomic” premiere, Runnicles seemed likely to snag the BBC’s flagship ensemble, the prestigious and well-funded BBC Symphony Orchestra, based in London. But after months of talk and speculation, that gig went to another maestro.
The BBC Scottish is arguably the best of the Corporation’s regional orchestras. It will provide Runnicles with countless opportunites for international exposure, including tours, CDs (many attached to the cover of BBC Music Magazine) and concerts at the BBC Proms, the celebrated London music festival. Also, Runnicles’ mother still lives in nearby Edinburgh.
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ASO’s complete ‘La Boheme’
OPERA REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Performance repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At the wrenching emotional crux of Puccini’s “La Boheme” — in the final minutes of Act 3 — the lovers Mimi and Rudolfo bicker and reconcile, then reveal to each other what might be everyone’s greatest fear: they don’t want to be alone.
It’s a ravishing few minutes of hope and pathos, although the orchestra has already confirmed that the worst scenario is inevitable, for we’ve already heard Mimi’s music run through with the icy shiver of death.
Here soprano Norah Amsellem, as the tubercular seamstress, sang exquisite pianissimos, throbbing with expression yet hushed to a whisper.
The scene was given a crystallized, hypnotizing, almost-perfect realization Thursday in Symphony Hall, as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra opened its 63rd season with a complete performance of Puccini’s 1896 masterpiece.
Instead of the statements of artistic policy that typically greet each new season — a program headlined by a symphonic standard and spiced with ear-friendly contemporary music, for example — the ASO and music director Robert Spano are recording the complete “Boheme” this weekend in “live” performances for Telarc (with a closed-door patch session Sunday evening to fix mistakes).
The evening began with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” where the ASO chorus lined the aisles, sang with full brio and gave the non-choristers among us a chance to know what it’s like to blend our voices with theirs, one of many small pleasures of the evening. (Actually, the evening began with a video advertisement from one of the ASO’s sponsors, the insidious creep of commercialization into the concert hall.)
This “Boheme,” stage-directed by James Alexander, came with a few props (tables and chairs, a wood stove), the singers in evening dress and the orchestra on stage, larger and louder than you’d typically hear in an opera pit. The singers acted the melodrama at the front, which meant they were behind the conductor’s back. They could see him via TV monitors at their feet; he could not see them, which led to many tiny problems of coordination between soloist and orchestra.
Perhaps this explains why Act 1, most of which is deliriously gorgeous, lacked drama. Tenor Marcus Haddock, as Rudolfo the poet, sang with strong pipes and a sweet voice when soft and low. Up near the ceiling of his range, it got pinched and unpleasant.
Amsellem, for all her intermittent vocal beauty, also sounded rather shrill when she had to open up for long lines of sustained intensity, which was often. Beyond their Act 3 bliss, neither singer offered much depth of personality. They gave off more light than heat.
Charisma came from the opera’s “B” couple, Musetta and Marcello. Soprano Georgia Jarman is a catch. Aggressive and sexy in manner, she had a clear, agile voice and delivered Musetta’s famous waltz as the show-stopper it’s meant to be.
Baritone Fabio Capitanucci, as Marcello the painter, likewise had the complete package: a vibrant personality, a handsome voice, a theatrical way with the texts.
The two other bohemians — bass Denis Sedov as Colline and baritone Christopher Schaldenbrand as Schaunard — also performed with distinction. Kevin Glavin had a wonderfully goofy turn as the landlord demanding the rent.
In at least one way, this “Boheme” was a milestone performance. The ASO Chorus, with about 170 members, plus the Gwinnett Young Singers, sang the opening scene of Act 2 — a gaggle of street vendors, shoppers, soldiers, parents, children and more — with the choral discipline and seismic force they’d reserve for the “Hallelujah Chorus.” It was surely the loudest and best prepared “Boheme” chorus in the 111-year history of the opera.
Orchestrally, as everyone anticipated, the performance was a revelation. As the dirt-poor bohemians burn Rudolfo’s manuscript to keep warm, the flames flicker bright in the orchestra, then we hear the flames flicker out. Or the ghostly falling snow of Act 3. Or the instant of demented terror — a full orchestral scream — when the landlord knocks. Or the final stab of Mimi’s death.
Spano revealed every nuance of Puccini’s glittery, embroidered score — every bit of it amplified in our consciousness, a performance not soon forgotten.
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Fringe Atlanta’s Most Excellent Debut
CONCERT REVIEW
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Viva la revolucion! Fringe Atlanta, the latest fine-arts group based in the affluent northern suburbs, made a stunning debut Saturday night. Despite the modest ambition suggested by the name, they positioned themselves near the center of the city’s classical music scene. They set a new standard, and I won’t be surprised to see the group, and the concept, take off.
Question is, in artistry and funding, can they sustain it?
Fringe’s aim is to present tried-and-true classical music in what might be called MTV-generation attitudes to entertainment. Advised to “Feel free to get your groove on,” the audience of about 200 people attempted this feat while listening to music by Zoltan Kodaly and Franz Schubert. The results were successful beyond all expectation.
The evening moved from buffet to main course. In the church lobby hung paintings and sketches by local artist Lori-Gene, mostly wispy, hallucinogenic images of classical musicians in motion. Mellow ambient-electronica was spun by Jennifer Mitchell, a local deejay with a serious club following. Beer and wine, served on the patio and consumed inside, helped loosen the knots that some people associate with an evening of chamber music.
Then the lights dimmed and, on a big screen over the altar, we watched a half-hour distillation of Chen Kaige’s 2002 film “Together,” charming and glib, where virtuoso violin playing is as competitive and ruthless as high school football. It got our adrenaline pumped.
Next came short video interviews, done like an info-mercial, with stylized lighting effects, on-screen graphics and conversational chatter (these little films were uncredited in the program notes). Here the performers made the case for themselves and the music.
Co-founder Fia Durrett is a 28-year-old freelance violinist who plays in the Atlanta Opera orchestra and elsewhere, like most of the others. She emphasized her pop-culture bona fides: at home, she doesn’t listen to classical music but prefers rock bands like U2 and Coldplay.
It was a savvy bit of publicity aimed at the captive audience. In this energized atmosphere Durrett and cellist Roy Harran took the stage for Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello, a 1914 work of folkish Hungarian instincts and world-weariness, where an ancient culture felt itself on the precipice of extinction. (Interesting choice, given Fringe’s doctrine that classical music needs to be “rescued.”) Their playing was wonderfully alive and polished, at once detailed and with a wide-angle, cinematic sweep.
Another info-mercial introduced Schubert’s time-suspending Quintet in C, from 1828. In the lucidity of their conception, their spirituality and hunger to communicate, these five musicians — violinists Michael Heald and Durrett, violist Joli Wu and cellists Charae Krueger and Harran — put many of the moonlighting Atlanta Symphony Orchestra chamber ensembles to shame.
Yet for all the novelty of the approach, there’s nothing particularly edgy, radical or modernistic about Fringe. They aim to please with traditional artistic values. Their creative synthesis involves combining what’s normal inside a concert hall (performances of the old classics) with what’s normal in the rest of society (the TV-driven media culture). In this world, a pretty face and appealing persona is as important in selling the product as musical chops, and that’s bound to have rippling ramifications, for better and worse.
For now, though, on a relatively generous $30,000 budget, Fringe has its priorities in the right place and more concerts in preparation. Its next mixed-media event is scheduled for December 1.
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Opera Review: Love Stinks?
OPERA REVIEW
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
People who don’t go to the opera often imagine that the art form is about remote subjects with no contemporary relevance. But consider these two scenarios.
In a familiar public place, a woman whom you might recognize waits for a man she’s never met. This could lead to love, Rose imagines of her blind date. On the other hand, perhaps the guy is gay.
In another place, which could be in the distant past or the far-away future, another woman has been swept off her feet by a prince; he turns out to be a selfish lout. The morning after consummating the affair, he jilts her. Given this fella’s low quality, her suicide seems like an over reaction.
The first description is a slice of the action from “At the Statue of Venus,” a monologue for soprano and piano by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrance McNally. It premiered in 2005.
The second opera, Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” was first performed in 1689 at a girl’s school in London. It’s a cautionary tale.
To wit: “The moral,” writes Ellen T. Harris in her definitive book “Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas,” “is that young girls should not accept the advances of young men no matter how ardent their wooing or how persistent their promises.”
This before-and-after double-bill on the dating life was performed over the weekend by Capitol City Opera, a shoe-string budget troupe that, year after year and with only local talent, consistently exceeds all reasonable expectations for community opera. (“Dido” was prepared with two casts; I attended Friday night.)
Putting together the 20-minute “Venus” and the hour-long “Dido” made almost perfect sense. (Among other links overt or subtle: In Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the basis for Nahum Tate’s trenchant libretto, Aeneas’ mother is the goddess Venus.)
In “Venus,” McNally’s words sketch a woman who is emotionally complicated, self-absorbed, outwardly confident but still a vulnerable little girl inside. With a pretty, light voice and go-for-broke acting, soprano Sherri Seiden pulled it off brilliantly, at turns hilarious, neurotic, tender or on the verge of tears.
Heggie’s music — edgy or glittery or sentimental, often tuneful — is the real star. He gives the soprano freedom of self-expression with chatty, conversational phrases or long, lyrical lines.
The piano part becomes Rose’s pulse, her libido, her psyche. By constantly shifting meters and creating multiple textures moment by moment, Heggie’s piano part helps compress the action — the opera’s 20 minutes is really just an instant in Rose’s head — much like the cinematic effect of jumpy edits from a hand-held camera, or, like David Hockney’s famous Polaroid photocollages, which convey at once a static snapshot and movement.
Pianist Russell Young played the piano in “Venus” with virtuosity and insight. With equal clarity, he then conducted a six-member instrumental ensemble in “Dido and Aeneas.”
If only “Dido” had been as ideally presented. With mixed success, Michael Nutter’s staging reached for timeless elegance, drawing inspiration from scenes painted on ancient Greek kraters.
The trouble came with the mismatched love couple. Perri Montane’s Queen Dido sounded and looked a generation or more older than her Aeneas, sung by William Scott Mize, a tenor with the best legs in the cast and a thin, raspy voice. Neither got inside their character, and like everyone else in Nutter’s overly stylized production, they felt disconected from each other and from the audience. Lost were the opera’s layered themes, of nobility, fate, loyalty, sacrifice.
Still, for community opera, it was a handsome achievement, and others in the cast offered many surprises. Soprano Emily Parrott was youthful and pure as Belinda, Dido’s confidant. Laurie Swann’s Sorceress was appropriately menacing in voice and manner. Amusingly, as the witches danced, played and plotted their queen’s destruction, Nutter had them stab one another till, finally, they’d all killed each other, round-robin style.
Countertenor Clarke Harris was chillingly effective as the Spirit who tricks Aeneas into fulfilling his destiny (the founding of Rome) and thus dumping Dido — the plot twist that brought the love-sucks evening full circle.
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Atlanta, America’s New Opera Capital?
Classical Con Blasto blog
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Let’s see, in the month of September, residents of a major U.S. city can attend five opera productions. These include a world premiere; a local premiere of a recent work by a celebrated young composer; and three old favorites, each of them in a new production. And one of these last productions will include a famous conductor, a top orchestra, a starry cast of singers and will be recorded by an award-winning, internationally distributed label.
Are we talking Chicago, Houston, San Francisco?
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New ‘Solomon’ Opera from Sharon Willis
OPERA REVIEW Sharon Willis' "The Seduction of King Solomon." Friday at the Interdenominational Theological Center. www.americoloropera.org
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Talented Atlanta composers who complain they can’t get their music performed — you know who you are — should pay attention to Sharon Willis, Atlanta’s opera composer.
Seven years ago, Willis, a Clark Atlanta University music professor, formed a community troupe, Americolor Opera Alliance, for the purpose of staging her own works.
In that time, she’s been a model of industry: she’s written, produced and premiered seven evening-length operas, most of them exploring the tangled themes of ambition, racism and the African-American struggle — from Atlanta’s first black millionaire (“The Herndons”) to the slave who traveled with the Lewis and Clark expedition (“The Great Divide”). In creative drive and chutzpah, no other Atlanta composer can match her.
Her latest, “The Seduction of King Solomon,” premiered Friday in the chapel of the Interdenominational Theological Center. It’s a retelling of the biblical Israelite ruler’s wisdom, splendor and his ultimate sex-and-idolatry downfall.
At three hours long, with a cast of 32 local singers, plus dancers, narrator and assorted extras, “Solomon” is a typical Willis creation: she’s made room for the whole community. Homemade costumes, screens draped with colorful fabric and a few pharaoh-era props — a golden throne, tall columns, warriors with faux-leather breastplates and feather-capped helmets — served as the visuals.
Like her earlier operas, too, Willis’ libretto is sprawling, earnest and devoid of irony. Rare among 21st century composers, it seems, she doesn’t do post-modern artifice; she doesn’t use opera to delve into psychoanalysis, philosophy or the agony and euphoria of the human spirit.
Musically, she blends traditional opera styles, spirituals, Gershwinesque songs and, in some of the slow numbers, R&B pop ballads. While no tunes stick in the head, the music is singable.
And by including West African djembe drums among her nine-musician ensemble, she rejects now-fashionable notions of pictorial authenticity: just as Bach made Christ a German Lutheran in his Passions, so Willis sets the ancient Holy Land in some idealized black America of the Deep South.
For all that, the score’s cragginess is its defining element. Like the best folk art, the whole show feels homemade, sincere, outside the mainstream.
The principal singers were uniformly appealing, if not all up to the vocal challenges. Baritone Jonathan Blanchard, as Solomon, wavered out of tune but held a commanding presence. As Queen Ameera, soprano Reisha Jones mostly pouted on stage, but she was wonderful in the aria “Am I Not the Pharoah’s Daughter?,” with its pleasing high notes and falling chromatic scales.
The opera’s musical highlight came in Solomon’s most sensational action: two harlots each claim a baby as their own; the wise king calls their bluff and offers to split the infant with a sword; the real mother sacrifices her claim to save the baby’s life.
Soprano Bernice Hogan Hall, as the honest harlot, had the best voice in the cast, powerful, clear and ringing. She sparred to great effect with Kimberly Edwards-Hall, as the lying harlot. (Interesting comparison: in George Frideric Handel’s 1749 oratorio of “Solomon,” he reveals each harlot’s character in the music, one sweet and patient, the other jumpy and neurotic. Willis depicts both woman in musical parallel, where only their words set them apart.)
Still, this potent little scene raised several questions. How would Willis’ opera sound with skilled singers and a much smaller cast? What if the operas were much shorter, with less spoken dialogue and more to-the-point arias? While offering fewer opportunities for local singers, Willis’ operatic voice might fully blossom.
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Latest comments
I find it unacceptable that any subscription concerts of the ASO are deemed unworthy of a first night review. No review in print or posted on the internet for Thursday, October 11? What gives?... read the full comment by Peter Stelling | Comment on ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing Read ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
I attended the concert and thought it was brillantly done. The horns sounded great as the strings were well in tuned. Very well down ASO. Bravo!!!... read the full comment by Chopin | Comment on ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing Read ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
Regarding the Leschenko recital last night: I was quite surprised and pleased over the attendance. I’d like to talk to Sam about how so many students came to be there, as well as black adults. This pleased me. I was... read the full comment by Hugh | Comment on Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season Read Russian Pianist Opens Spivey Hall Season
This is in response to Pierre Ruhe’s review of Atlanta Opera’s TURANDOT. (See article: “Atlanta Opera will sing praises to new Cobb home”, AJC September 30, 2007): Since the premise of “victory or death” that... read the full comment by Peter Stelling | Comment on ASO's complete 'La Boheme' Read ASO's complete 'La Boheme'