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    An Opera Festival That Keeps Faith With Shutdown’s Innovations

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    Festival O, back for the first time since 2019, featured two works of dazed horror and a rare staging of Rossini’s “Otello.”PHILADELPHIA — When the pandemic goaded the performing arts to pivot to video, some institutions fared better (and more creatively) than others. Opera Philadelphia was among the most intrepid in America, commissioning a series of short films that embraced a new medium.The company produced a sober version of Tyshawn Sorey’s song cycle “Save the Boys,” as well as “The Island We Made,” a meditative nocturne by the composer Angélica Negrón, filmed by Matthew Placek and starring the drag diva Sasha Velour. The composers Courtney Bryan and Caroline Shaw contributed pieces, and Rene Orth delivered a vibrant dose of K-pop.But even, or especially, for adventurous arts groups like this one, the transition back to primarily live performance has presented a challenge: How to maintain — and even expand on — the lessons learned and experiments ventured over the past few years when returning to the kind of work made in the before times.Opera Philadelphia, once again, offers a way forward. As part of Festival O — its signature burst of productions each fall, and the first since 2019 — the company on Saturday premiered “Black Lodge,” which posited that film and live performance can productively coexist.The order of operations here was unusual: As Michael Joseph McQuilken, who wrote and directed the film element, writes in a program note, “It’s an exceedingly strange task to ‘movie a score’ … one tends to score a movie.”David T. Little’s music and Anne Waldman’s text, and even the tempos and timings, were set by the time McQuilken came on board. He wasn’t without leeway, though: Little and Waldman weren’t telling a clear story that McQuilken would need to depict, but were, rather, obliquely suggesting a grimly poetic vision of a man trapped in a post-life purgatory, reliving brutal encounters with the woman who haunts him.The music — for a rock band and amplified string quartet — embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial “nu metal” style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down. Played live under the big screen on Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Center, this grinding score occasionally lightens for moments of mellower mournfulness. But every register, moan to scream, is handled with indefatigable goth aplomb by the charismatically wailing Timur, the film’s star and the frontman of the band, Timur and the Dime Museum.Drawing on David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, McQuilken’s accompaniment is a fast-cut horror-movie nightmare of ominous fluorescent-lit clinics, severed digits, screams in the desert, guns and hypodermic needles.The mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi, right, with Muyu Ruba in a raven mask in “The Raven,” based on Poe.Steven PisanoThis imagery, coupled with this sound world, evoked turn-of-the-21st-century music videos, which tended to feature starkly contrasting settings within a single piece; enigmatic or nonexistent narratives at a distance from the lyrics; luridly distorted colors; surreal staginess. There’s a reason, of course, that those music videos were three or four minutes long, as opposed to the 60-ish of “Black Lodge,” which is trippy — and wearying. (The film will stream on Opera Philadelphia’s website, at operaphila.tv, starting Oct. 21.)The theme of dazed horror at the border between life and death, past and present, continued in the festival’s production of Toshio Hosokawa’s atmospheric chamber monodrama “The Raven,” based on the classic Poe poem.“Black Lodge,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects, was presented as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, but “The Raven” felt far more in the fringe-theater tradition. Directed by Aria Umezawa, it was a collaboration with the local performance company Obvious Agency, which provided a participatory prelude to the Hosokawa.On entering the grand old Miller Theater on Saturday, the audience was divided into groups, each of which was then led away by a performer acting as a facet of Lenore, the lost love in Poe’s poem. Heading backstage, my group’s leader played Healer Lenore, a self-help guru who used a question-and-answer session to cleanse us of daemonic energy — or at least make peace with it.The tone of this half-hour was goofy, with a recurring joke on Matt Damon’s name. Perhaps this was the point, but the scrappy clowning couldn’t have had less in common with Hosokowa’s eerie, deadly serious contemporary-Noh score, often hushed, occasionally ferocious.With the audience arranged onstage on three sides around the performers — the orchestra of 12, led by Eiki Isomura, completed the rectangle — the mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi was intense both in rasped quiet and full cry. The Lenores, including one stalking the paper-strewn playing space in a mask that was part bird, part medieval plague doctor, hovered about, but too little was done with the most obvious and elegant ghostly spectacle here: a small bunch of people in a vast empty theater.Daniela Mack as Desdemona and Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello in Opera Philadelphia’s “Otello.” Steven PisanoAnother ornate space, the Academy of Music, holds the big productions, usually one per year, that anchor Festival O amid the smaller pieces. This time it was “Otello” — not Verdi’s 1887 classic, but Rossini’s far rarer version, from 1816, which Opera Philadelphia deserves great credit for staging.And for staging so admirably. Rossini’s serious operas are serious undertakings: long, notoriously difficult for singers and without obvious means for orchestras to show off. But conducted with steady energy by Corrado Rovaris, the company’s music director, the work felt both spacious and vigorous.The libretto’s differences from the Verdi (and Shakespeare) are sweeping, not least in the absence of the crucial handkerchief and in the importance Rossini places on the character of Rodrigo, who gets some of the most daunting music. The tenor Lawrence Brownlee, Opera Philadelphia’s artistic adviser, was up for the challenge: He has one of the sweetest sounds in the bel canto world, and tautly ringing high notes. If his tone sometimes paled in fast passagework at the final performance on Sunday, he was always winning.Rossini, as was his wont, features a slew of leading tenors; here the trio was filled out by Khanyiso Gwenxane, his voice bold and forthright as Otello, and Alek Shrader, sounding newly robust and insinuating as Iago.Desdemona is, in this version, a fully formed protagonist, something like Donizetti’s Lucia, and the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack gave the character nobility and eloquence, her voice flexible enough to handle the coloratura and relish the text. She blended perfectly with the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, as her maid Emilia, who had a slightly lighter, less earthy, no less classy voice. (Rossini loves to show off tenor-tenor and mezzo-mezzo combinations, reaping excitement from the slightest distinctions.)The story, of course, takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, but for no obvious reason the director, Emilio Sagi, updated it to an unclear location in early 20th-century Europe — maybe England, maybe Switzerland — and to the whitewashed great hall of a manor house, with a huge staircase.The staging added little to what was essentially old-fashioned emoting. But with a fine cast and a steady hand in the pit, that was enough. More

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      Lend Me a Jukebox Opera. Yuks and Tenor Required.

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      “Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,” the head of the Glimmerglass Festival said. Coming soon: Ken Ludwig’s “Tenor Overboard.”Comic operas tend to be crowd-pleasers: At last, a break from all the tragic deaths and doomed lovers. The problem is there aren’t that many to choose from. Opera companies can program “Così Fan Tutte,” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” or “L’Elisir d’Amore” and a handful of others only so many times.So Francesca Zambello, the artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival, came up with a novel idea. “I just said, ‘Let’s do a Rossini comedy that doesn’t exist yet,’” she said in a recent video conversation.In other words, a jukebox opera — “Tenor Overboard,” which is to have its premiere at the festival, in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Tuesday and run through Aug. 18.While the jukebox format is common enough on Broadway, it is much rarer in opera houses. Baroque opera lends itself to the genre better than most styles, from the “pasticcio” of yore, which recycled pre-existing works, to “The Enchanted Island” in 2011, a Metropolitan Opera commission in which the librettist Jeremy Sams inserted music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and others into a plot borrowed from Shakespeare plays.Undaunted by this relative dearth, or maybe stimulated by it, Zambello called the playwright Ken Ludwig last summer to ask if he would be interested in writing the libretto for the project. He was a good candidate on two counts: He wrote the book for “Crazy for You,” the Tony-winning Gershwin jukebox musical, and his most famous play, “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a farce involving an opera star in the 1930s. (His new “Lend Me a Soprano,” with lead female characters in the same basic plot, opens at the Alley Theater in Houston in September.)Ludwig, an opera buff, jumped on the opportunity to collaborate, sort of, with Rossini. He decided to set “Tenor Overboard” in the 1940s and to cram it with what he called “the great tropes of comic opera.”“Often they are stories about love that can’t be fulfilled because the older generation is trying to stand in the way of the sexual urges of the younger generation: ‘You can’t marry that boy,’” he said in a video chat. “I also wanted a storm — they often change the story, as they did in ‘Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers.’”Rossini “was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Adrianna Newell for The New York TimesLudwig cooked up a story involving two New York sisters, Gianna (Reilly Nelson) and Mimi (Jasmine Habersham), trying to escape their domineering father and an arranged marriage for Mimi. They end up joining — in cross-dressing disguise, a narrative device beloved by Shakespeare, opera and screwball comedy alike — an all-male quartet called the Singing Sicilians on a ship sailing to Sicily. Naturally, mayhem ensues.“Tenor Overboard” relies more on theatrical dialogue than on the usual operatic recitative, so Ludwig’s libretto had to be fairly extensive — and funny. “Rossini has given you moments that clearly land comically because he was such a comic genius,” Ludwig said he told the singers. “And I’ve tried to write a libretto that is comic in the same way, and in the same way my plays normally have that sense of rhythm.”Ludwig also retooled the supertitles that accompany the arias, which are sung in Italian, trying to give some of them “rhyme and rhythm,” as he put it. “Opera supertitles do need to convey to people something and you want people to be looking at the stage,” said Zambello, who is directing the production with Brenna Corner, “but these also have a little bit of extra Ludwig humor.”From left, Matt Grady and Gavin Grady, with Stefano de Peppo. “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Francesca Zambello said.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalAfter a general synopsis had been agreed upon, the hardest part was still to come: It had to be filled with music — which, in the end, came from 15 different sources.“We wanted to be absolutely sure that we weren’t just rehashing famous arias of Rossini,” Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass’s music director, said on Zoom. “Yes, we have the ‘Barbiere’ duet, but we wanted this piece to also represent lesser-known music by Rossini.”Colaneri became part detective, tracking down obscure versions of obscure operas online and in libraries, and part MacGyver, adapting some vocal scores to make them work in their new context. The text of the “Barbiere” duet, “Dunque io son,” that Colaneri referred to, for example, was slightly adjusted to make sense in the story. And because Ludwig’s main couple is made up of a mezzo and a baritone (a nod to “Dunque io son”), some transposing was required — Rossini tended to pair a tenor and a soprano for the love duets of his comic operas.Another challenge was the scene introducing the Singing Sicilians, whom we first meet at a Y.M.C.A. — because why not? Colaneri looked at male quartets in Rossini operas but couldn’t find anything suitable. So he turned his attention to short pieces the composer wrote for “soirées musicales” after he stopped writing operas, and spotted the patter song “La Danza” (recorded by Luciano Pavarotti, among others).Colaneri had to write a vocal arrangement for two tenors, a baritone and a bass — and more. “It has to work again in the second act because two of the men are replaced by the two women who are in disguise as men,” he said. “They’re singing in the female range, but I designed the piece so that it could work with mixed vocal styles.”“Some people would say, ‘How can you transpose Rossini?’” Colaneri said. “But Rossini did this himself all the time.”For Act 2, Colaneri had to find a basso buffo aria for the sisters’ father, Petronio (Stefano de Peppo). Instead of the popular “A un dottor della mia sorte,” from “Il Barbiere,” he chose “Io, Don Profondo” from “Il Viaggio a Reims” (an opera Rossini himself had harvested for parts, reusing some of it in “Le Comte Ory”). “To me, it’s the greatest of these buffo arias,” Colaneri said. “Rossini kind of went over the top with it. We knew we were going to have Stefano and that he would be able to pull it off.”Contreras and Reilly Nelson in this jukebox opera.Karli Cadel/The Glimmerglass FestivalColaneri and his cast also had to deal with the vocal embellishments and ornamentation that are part of performing Rossini. The conductor suggested that the singers listen to Ella Fitzgerald’s live version of “How High the Moon” for an example of masterful improvisation, which he described as “harmonically off the charts.” He also worked closely with them to come up with ornamentations that fit their register and roles. “You can’t write ornamentation for someone until you hear what they can do,” Colaneri said. “You have to kind of suss that out.”As with most comedies, speed and timing are of the essence onstage and even off — “Tenor Overboard” was hatched in about a year. “Rossini wrote his operas sometimes in a month so why shouldn’t we?” Zambello said.Fans should be reassured that they will laugh with Rossini, not at him. “We are seeking to perform these pieces with all the musical integrity necessary to make them come off,” Colaneri said. “We’re taking it all musically very seriously, and putting a spin on it.”Still, it’s clear that Zambello wants this work, part of her last season as the head of the Glimmerglass Festival (she remains the artistic director of the Washington National Opera), to be unabashedly festive. “It’s Italy, Sicily, food — things that people love.”When asked if she was willing to embrace Ludwig’s love of farcical shenanigans and have someone hurl a plate of spaghetti for a laugh, Zambello smiled. “I’m resisting that,” she said. “But I think it’s going to work its way in.” More

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      Review: Two Tenors. Many, Many High Notes.

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      Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres came together for a sky-scraping Rossini concert at the 92nd Street Y.Fans of N.F.L. RedZone — the TV channel that whips around the country each Sunday during football season to show you, it promises, “every touchdown from every game” — will have felt a familiar sensation on Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y.There, with the tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Michael Spyres belting out Rossini as if their lives depended on it, the audience got what Brownlee called from the stage the “barnstormers” of the bel canto repertory — and only the barnstormers. Out the window were the plots, the characters, the sets. What was left was an operatic RedZone: the highest stakes, the highest notes — we’re talking up to E flat or F over C — over and over, in dizzying profusion.This was a lot of fun, particularly because Brownlee and Spyres are two of the finest, most sky-scraping bel canto tenors in the world today — though, while Brownlee has long been a Metropolitan Opera star, the astonishing Spyres has just occasionally appeared in New York.Their rousing recent duo album, “Amici e Rivali,” from which the Y program was adapted, posits them as the inheritors of two distinct Rossinian traditions. Brownlee, his tone slender and silvery, sounds (we imagine) something like Giovanni David; Spyres, with a voice beefier and more baritonal, though no less agile, evokes Andrea Nozzari, with whom David often faced off onstage in the early 19th century. (Having multiple leading tenor roles in a single opera was commonplace with this composer.)In concert as on the album, the main joys were the rarities, from the likes of the Crusades drama “Ricciardo e Zoraide” and the Tudor potboiler “Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra.” The duet “Donala a questo core” from “Ricciardo” was a thrilling combination of slow-burning lyrical verses and fiery shared coloratura.I wish that the Y program had followed “Amici e Rivali” and included more from “Ricciardo” and less from “The Barber of Seville.” The concert’s long opening sequence from that chestnut did prove that Spyres could handle the baritone role of Figaro, and his famous “Largo al factotum,” with tongue-twisting, very-low-to-very-high aplomb; not for nothing is his new solo album called “Baritenor.”But Brownlee wasn’t showed off best in Count Almaviva’s thanklessly glittering “Cessa di più resistere,” while a six-hand piano transcription of the “Barber” overture — with the evening’s game accompanist, Myra Huang, joined by Thomas Lausmann and Bryan Wagorn — seemed more fun for the players than the audience. (And other than to give these poor guys and their cords a rest, and to burden Huang still more, no one needed another overture transcription, of the one from “Guillaume Tell,” later on.)The two singers each got a stand-alone number from Rossini’s delightful song repertory, with Spyres particularly melting and burnished in the passionate “L’Esule.” And a closing suite from “Otello” — very different than Verdi’s version — found both in rich, fluent voice in the arias “Che ascolto?” (Brownlee) and “Ah! sì, per voi gia sento” (Spyres) and the explosive duet “Ah! vieni, nel tuo sangue.”I wish we had gotten a taste of the French Rossini, provided on the album through “Le Siège de Corinthe.” But that language did arrive in the form of an encore interloper by Donizetti: the unavoidable showpiece “Ah! mes amis” from “La Fille du Régiment,” with Brownlee and Spyres gleefully trading off the notorious, numerous high C’s.Lawrence Brownlee and Michael SpyresPerformed on Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan. More