Santa Fe Opera

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares189 Views

    Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

    by

    As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Seeing ‘L’Orfeo’ in Santa Fe

      by

      Among the company’s annual summer offerings, Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo,” from 1607 but newly reorchestrated and imaginatively staged, stands out.It’s a change so small, you might not even notice it. But the posters and playbills around the campus of Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico have given Monteverdi a makeover: Gone is the article from “L’Orfeo,” which is being styled this summer as simply “Orfeo.”Few are likely to, and shouldn’t be, bothered by a shift so innocuous. And you could say the same for how the work, premiered in 1607 and the oldest surviving opera still regularly performed, is being presented here: with a deferential new orchestration by Nico Muhly for modern instruments, and a myth-free yet no less magical staging by Yuval Sharon.This “Orfeo,” which premiered on July 29, was the last of Santa Fe Opera’s five productions to open during its annual summer season. A newcomer, having never been staged there before, it is also the highlight of the company’s current offerings, which I saw over the past week.I started with opening night of “Orfeo,” in which the baritone Luke Sutliff jumped in to perform the title role — heroic not just given the circumstances, but also because of his thoroughly assured interpretation and stage presence, and, most impressively, the ability on short notice to pull off the complicated movement of Sharon’s production. (The intended star, the tenor Rolando Villazón, had been injured during the final dress rehearsal but was back by the second show.)Audience members got a taste of Monteverdi’s score before many of them had taken their seats; at different corners of the Crosby Theater campus, in the tree-dappled desert hills outside Santa Fe, small brass ensembles sounded the opening Toccata of the opera, in a touch from the playbook of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival in Germany.But once the show began properly, Monteverdi’s music took shape anew in Muhly’s treatment. Not so noticeably, though; each performance of “L’Orfeo” involves choices about instrumentation and articulation, work that has long been the territory of historically informed performance specialists like John Eliot Gardiner. Here, though, Muhly has written an indisputably clear, easy-to-replicate version of the score for modern orchestras, with enough lushness to satisfy a large opera house in future productions.An injury kept Villazón out of the opening-night performance of “Orfeo,” but he was back for the second show.Curtis BrownMuhly’s version of the score is most remarkable for how unremarkable it seems on the surface. Often, it sounds like “L’Orfeo” as we know it — opera’s foundational tale, of Orpheus and Eurydice — with small adjustments like a string line moved to the winds and more deeply fleshed-out harmonies. Occasionally, though, Muhly adds a flourish and a touch of his own idiom: tremolos of shivering tension; glassy violins giving way to arpeggiated textures; dirgelike calls from low brasses; fluttering winds.He creates, in the end, a personal love letter to Monteverdi that relishes not just a musical conversation, but the making of music itself, which is in the spirit of both the piece and Sharon’s production.Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera and the founder of the enterprising company the Industry in Los Angeles, is the most imaginative opera director in the United States, one who works in a collaborative spirit, across disciplines, sometimes to build a world premiere from scratch. This “Orfeo,” though, joins his Bayreuth “Lohengrin” as one of his tamer productions; there’s no headline-making concept, like the four acts of “La Bohème” performed in reverse or “Götterdämmerung” reduced to a one-hour drive through a parking garage. But here, he achieves a complex, deceptive sleekness while teasing out a single, timeless idea from the tale.His production takes place on an AstroTurf-covered dome, a small, artificial hill among the natural, immense ones seen through the open back of the stage. At the start, a white bed fit for a sanitarium sits on top, occupied by someone visibly sick and dressed in white; it’s La Musica (the pure-voiced soprano Lauren Snouffer), who, after picking up a lyre, is suddenly animated with the potential of music. The stage is then populated with a chorus of singers, who are dressed as if presenting a capsule collection in oranges and magentas in Carlos J. Soto’s characteristically stylish costumes.Orfeo’s story unfolds as a celebration of music and its meaning, its uses in moments of happiness and sadness alike. After the protagonist’s journey to the Underworld — in Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson’s design, the dome opens to reveal a dark, misty grotto animated by light projections — and after Euridice dies a second, permanent death, her voice (the soprano Amber Norelai) is heard through a gramophone that Orfeo holds closely. Who among us hasn’t done something similar, listening to a song we know will amplify our pain?There are comedic touches as well, and joyous appreciations of community and music in an Arcadian ur-society absent of ideology. During the second performance, on Wednesday, that spirit turned from exuberant to assertive as the theater’s surroundings rumbled with thunder, and as the sunset was obscured by brush-stroke streaks of rain in the distance.That night, as Villazón belatedly stepped into the role, he did so with noticeably altered, muted blocking, and his voice was as uncooperative as it has been in recent years. He remains a charismatic presence — funny, touching, magnetic — but his tenor can shift suddenly from smooth, with a warm vibrato, to raw, with a hard edge that doesn’t befit a character whose musical beauty moves the gatekeepers of the Underworld.The mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey’s performance was a high point of “Pelléas et Mélisande.”Curtis BrownThe Santa Fe Opera Orchestra — a group in nimble, lively and consistently excellent form throughout the week — took up “Orfeo” with brisk, dancing energy under Harry Bicket’s baton, and, promisingly, settled more into the score during the Wednesday performance.This season, Bicket is doing double duty, also leading Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” in an appropriately enigmatic yet frustratingly obtuse production by Netia Jones. Seen on Thursday, his conducting produced something like the opposite of “Orfeo”: an atmosphere that moved almost imperceptibly forward, with flashes of color and sensuality.In that production, the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey sang Mélisande with a weighty lower range and a mixture of chilliness and seeping passion. Another commanding stage presence — whether here, or earlier this season as Octavian in “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera — she is emerging as a major artist of her generation.There were other vocal standouts elsewhere throughout the week. That “Pelléas” also included a frighteningly resonant Zachary Nelson as Golaud; his fellow baritone Huw Montague Rendall as Pelléas, often warm and achingly tender, strained only at the top of his role’s range; and the great mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who had the opposite trouble, plush but diminished at the bottom.Two singers in other productions were even more memorable: the bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee and the soprano Ailyn Pérez.Nicholas Brownlee’s Dutchman seemed to preview a promising Wagnerian future.Curtis BrownAs the title character in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” Brownlee — often working against a clumsy staging by David Alden, but supported throughout by the energetic, detail-oriented baton of Thomas Guggeis — projected agony and careworn bitterness throughout the theater, even as he was made, strangely, to sing lying down or on his side. (That was among many baffling directorial choices, including a “Spinning Chorus,” performed by Minion look-alikes in Oompa-Loompa choreography.) Brownlee’s enunciation was clear, his voice booming and blending well with the soprano Elza van den Heever’s mighty and ardent Senta. You could sense a fruitful Wagnerian future unfolding before him.And in “Rusalka,” Pérez has found in the title role a part that rewards the richness of her sound. David Pountney’s elegant production, which treated the “Little Mermaid”-like story as the metaphor it always has been, has her rarely leaving the stage, crossing paths with the likes of Raehann Bryce-Davis’s playfully vicious Jezibaba and Mary Elizabeth Williams’s ferociously alluring foreign princess. At times Pérez was athletic, singing the “Song to the Moon” while climbing suspended chairs as if they were a jungle gym, projecting her longing as she leaned back, holding onto the furniture by a single hand. Through it all, her phrasing remained shapely, controlled and actorly, erupting in agony or passion but just as quickly retreating to a quiet, floating soprano, while in the pit Lidiya Yankovskaya teased out the Romantic elements of Dvorak’s score.In Rusalka, the soprano Ailyn Pérez has found a role that rewards her rich sound.Curtis BrownInevitably in a densely packed series of performances, not everything lands. Santa Fe’s “Tosca,” with de Chirico-inspired sets by Ashley Martin-Davis, propelled with inevitability under John Fiore in the pit. But onstage, the baritone Reginald Smith Jr.’s Scarpia was a villain deprived of nuance; and while there was promise in the tenor Joshua Guerrero’s passionately Italianate Cavaradossi and the soprano Leah Hawkins’s sumptuous Tosca, a bit of vocal unwieldiness betrayed works in progress.Keith Warner’s production had a few novel touches — including a jump scare better seen live than described here — but is mostly a dressed-up version of the familiar tragedy. And he seemed aware of his lineage in the opera’s history as, in the final moments, Tosca shot herself while a doppelgänger, dressed in a costume redolent of Maria Callas’s famous red gown and tiara, walked slowly offstage.It’s a confusing, if unnecessary punctuation that isn’t set up by the staging. But Warner’s heart is in the right place: It is possible to present opera with reverence and a bit of fresh style at the same time. For an example, you need only look to “Orfeo.” More

    • 88 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Nico Muhly Modernizes Monteverdi With ‘Irreverent Veneration’

      by

      When a new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” premieres at Santa Fe Opera on July 29, something about it might seem slightly odd.Sure, there will be the usual Orfeo, in this case the tenor Rolando Villazón, and a familiar sight at the podium in the conductor Harry Bicket. If the staging by Yuval Sharon, one of the most creative opera directors at work today, provokes a thought or two — well, that is only to be expected by now.No, what might surprise people most is the sound emerging from the orchestra pit. This will not be Monteverdi as we have heard him; there will be nary a period instrument in sight, neither a harpsichord nor a sackbut, a theorbo nor a cornett. It will be, rather, Monteverdi as newly orchestrated by Nico Muhly and brought right into the contemporary.“It’s a piece of music I’ve always loved, and I love Monteverdi,” said Muhly, a composer whose opera credits include “Marnie” and “Two Boys.” Accepting the Santa Fe commission, to him, “seemed like a really easy ‘yes.’”Santa Fe’s production, titled “Orfeo,” is not intended as a grand revanchist blow against the period-instrument movement that has claimed early music as its own for decades. Bicket, after all, is the music director of the English Concert, once in the vanguard of that movement and still one of its eminent groups. And Muhly was offered the assignment because his love for Byrd, Tallis and the like is not just avowed, but audibly present in much of his own music.Yuval Sharon, left, the director of Santa Fe’s “Orfeo,” and Muhly.Brad Trone for The New York TimesWhat Santa Fe’s “Orfeo” does speak to, though, are the artistic opportunities that are starting to open up as the first generation of period-instrument pioneers pass from the scene, the early-music movement confronts an uncertain future and all the old polemics about how works ought to be performed start to seem passé.At any rate, doing “Orfeo” in the way that Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner and Jordi Savall have would be impossible at Santa Fe. The company has a resident orchestra that uses modern instruments, and even if period instruments could be brought to the desert for the summer, “the size of the building,” Bicket said, “means we would probably have to have, like, five theorbos and three harps and all these harpsichords, which in an open-air theater is not really practical.”Typical repertory companies, too, aren’t able to present the work as it has come to be heard — which is not just a shame, but also a detriment to our collective understanding of opera itself.“It’s not appropriate to call it the first opera, because we know it was not the first opera,” Sharon said of “Orfeo.” “Opera was not a genre at this point, when this piece was created. But in many respects, I think it makes perfect sense to call it the first opera, because it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”This orchestration, Muhly explained, therefore aims to make the work more practical to perform in standard houses, beyond Santa Fe. “I’m not doing anything crazy to it,” he said. “It’s just about it not being this unwieldy thing.”COMPOSERS HAVE LONG been interested in reorchestrating “Orfeo” for contemporary ears; in its treatment of the Orpheus myth, it is, fundamentally, an opera about the power of music.Sharon said of “Orfeo” that “it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe conductor Henry Bicket, who said that in preparing this new production, “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo.’”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe work, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, premiered in 1607. But, according to the musicologist Nigel Fortune, it was largely forgotten after Monteverdi’s death, in 1643, until the late 19th century. Then, Vincent d’Indy, Carl Orff, Ottorino Respighi and Bruno Maderna all tried their hand at a reorchestration. For the Maggio Musicale in Florence in 1984, Luciano Berio convened a quintet of young composers — Betty Olivero and Luca Francesconi among them — to rewrite “Orfeo,” employing electronic tapes and even a rock band. By then, however, the period-instrument revolution was in full flow; when Paul Hindemith presented a scholarly “attempt to reconstruct the premiere” in Vienna in 1954, Harnoncourt and other members of his recently formed Concentus Musicus Wien played in the ensemble.To Bicket, none of those versions, or others, seemed appropriate for use at Santa Fe; they involved cuts, or were too of their own time. But since Santa Fe has had a tradition of presenting a premiere each year, he explained, a new production seemed an ideal opportunity to commission “a young, contemporary composer to say what this century has to say about this music.”And Muhly is an admirer of “Orfeo.” “There are so many moments of slyness, where what you’re getting in terms of plot and what you’re getting in terms of emotional content is coming from literally one tiny little harmonic move, like one strange flat,” he said. “Also, there’s very traditional word painting. You go up to heaven, and he goes up the scale. It’s this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”A rendering of Sharon’s production for Santa Fe.Matthew Johnson & Alex Schweder, visual environment designersOne of the reasons that so many composers have felt able to try their hand at orchestrating or adapting “Orfeo” is that Monteverdi left them the opportunity. Even the most conscientious, scholarly performer of “Orfeo” has to make choices about how to play it, because scores that were published early in the 17th century omit crucial details, especially in the continuo parts that comprise so much of the work.“All of it is a sketch, because there was no international music scene,” Bicket said. “Composers did not have to write information into the score, apart from a vocal line and a bass line and maybe a bit of harmony here or there, because there was an understanding, a style, which was part of being a musician in those days.”“When I do this with my own players in the English Concert,” Bicket added, “we do read the notes, but we are actually reading the rhetoric — and the heart of it is finding the rhetorical gesture.”Many of the conductors who have performed or recorded “Orfeo” have chosen to create their own editions; listen to some of the historically informed recordings of the work, Muhly pointed out, and you can hear divergences far more marked than in period accounts of, say, Beethoven symphonies, sometimes on matters as fundamental as cadences.Bicket leading a rehearsal of “Orfeo.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThere is therefore no one, true “Orfeo” that anybody can be faithful to, and that invites creativity. For Sharon, a production of it can sit easily within his interest in how operas from the past can be recreated today. It’s an urge that — beyond his lauded work with the Detroit Opera and the Industry, the company he founded in Los Angeles — has seen him stage parts of “Götterdämmerung” as a drive-through and led him to present the four acts of “La Bohème” in reverse.“We’re all making a guess as to what it must have been like to have done this piece,” Sharon said of the Monteverdi. “We have to interpret it; we have to decide. What instruments are going to play this? What is the proper performance style for this? There’s no such thing, there’s just the humans that are bringing it to life at that particular moment in time, needing to take this blueprint that Monteverdi and Striggio left us and interpret it in our own way, and for our own time. So I think that makes it eternally an opportunity for constant reimagination.”Even so, Muhly asked for, and Bicket laid down, some ground rules. “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’” Bicket said, and it was stipulated that the vocal and the bass lines should remain unchanged from the primary source. Bicket wrote out a vocal score, filling in the harmonies that Monteverdi left out, noting where chords could be restated or shift in other ways.Otherwise, though, Muhly was left to translate the material into his own compositional language, which he had come to in dialogue with early music and even early instruments; among his published scores is a “Berceuse With Seven Variations” for solo theorbo.“I think because music of the past features so heavily in my own, original music,” he said, “I stepped to this with a form of irreverent veneration.”Muhly described Monteverdi’s score as “this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThat’s not to say the process was easy. While it was in some ways simpler than writing another opera of his own, Muhly said, in others it was harder, requiring him to innovate and defer at the same time. He has adapted the continuo part mostly for a small ensemble of alto flute, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet and harp, and voiced the figured bass in octaves far higher and lower than tradition would suggest. Some of the trickier problems involved echoing the way in which Monteverdi shrinks and expands his orchestration, and making the underworld distinct, yet not “cartoonishly evil.”But what Muhly argues against, and confesses to being “a little bristly about,” is the perception that “a new take or a new interpretation of something in some way erases, or is in conflict, with the previous interpretation.” His version of “Orfeo” is not intended to supplant those that have come before it, still less to render early-music takes on the material redundant. Far from it.“You know what would be great, literally what would be fantastic?” Muhly said. “Let’s just say someone saw this thing and was like, ‘Wow, I’m totally fascinated by this piece,’ goes back and gets any of the period recordings, and it’s a gateway drug that way. Similarly, if someone hears it and is like, ‘I hated that so much, I really want to hear the original again,’ and then they go to the original again, that’s also good. I think that’s just fine.”The more Monteverdi, in the view of Muhly and his collaborators, the better.“It’s really not about me; it’s about you having a great night at the theater,” Muhly said. “I want the music to serve the drama. And that’s always how it should be.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Lewis Spratlan, 82, Dies; Took Winding Route to Music Pulitzer

      by

      His opera sat unproduced for decades. Then a piece of it garnered one of the field’s top prizes. Then it sat some more.Lewis Spratlan won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for a chunk of an opera that he had completed in 1978 and that no one had ever staged.Then he waited another decade before someone actually put the full opera in front of an audience.“It was awful, not hearing this piece,” he told The New York Times in 2010, when his long wait was about to come to an end. “It’s like a woman being pregnant forever.”The opera, “Life Is a Dream,” with a libretto by James Maraniss, was finally staged by the Santa Fe Opera in July 2010, 35 years after Mr. Spratlan and Mr. Maraniss had begun writing it.Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the premiere in The Times, called it “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”Mr. Spratlan, whose long road to the Pulitzer and the premiere also included his self-financing the concert that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice center in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His wife, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for large ensembles and small ones, as well as solo pieces. He even invented an instrument, which he called the terpsiptomaton and which incorporated metal coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.“When a key is depressed, the ball bearings are released and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe explained in 1980. Amherst magazine described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”Both the instrument and a piece he composed for it, “Coils,” were given their world premiere in a concert in Amherst in 1980. The instrument seems not to have caught on, but the effort showed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.In the chamber piece “When Crows Gather” (1986), which was inspired in part by the arrival of a throng of crows outside his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and end with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Times, “what could be called the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Times described another chamber piece, “Zoom,” this way:“He begins by having the players alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all manner of breathy vocalizations, including sighs, heavy breathing, gasping and panting. Eventually the musical content sweeps away the sound effects, only to career between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A touch of what seems to be the influence of Frank Zappa streams through the last two movements as well, and from there it’s a short step to cartoonish sound effects.”Michael Theodore, a composer who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, studied under Mr. Spratlan at Amherst. “Composing music was always an adventure for Lew,” he said by email, “and he was restlessly and relentlessly inventive.“His compositions have a remarkable range,” he added, “filled with humor in one moment and heartbreaking tenderness in the next. Lew’s musical voice was entirely his own but often contained clever, subtle nods to the music of the past.”The Santa Fe Opera’s production of Mr. Spratlan’s “Life is a Dream.”Ken Howard, via Santa Fe OperaMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1940, in Miami. His father was a salesman, and his mother, Wilma (Howell) Spratlan, taught piano.Mr. Spratlan was still a student at Coral Gables High School in Florida when his oboe playing on a piece by Handel at a 1955 recital caught the ear of Doris Reno of The Miami Herald.“Lewis Spratlan, teenaged oboist, distinguished himself in the Handel work,” she wrote, “which he performed with his teacher, Dominique deLerma, first oboe, and his mother, Wilma Spratlan, piano.”Mr. Spratlan earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory at Yale in 1962 and a master’s in composition there in 1965. Before arriving at Amherst in 1970, he taught at Pennsylvania State University and conducted ensembles there, at Tanglewood and elsewhere.“Life Is a Dream” is based on a 17th-century play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca about a prince banished at birth by his father. The play was brought to his attention by Herta Glaz, a retired mezzo-soprano who was director of the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut. In 1975, that company commissioned him to write the opera, and he recruited Mr. Maraniss, a colleague at Amherst who died last year, as librettist. But by the time they finished the opera, the New Haven company had gone out of business, leaving Mr. Spratlan and his music publisher to shop it to opera companies in the United States and abroad, without success.“We blanket-bombed them,” Mr. Spratlan told The Albuquerque Journal in 2010. “I didn’t have a single response.”So he set it aside for some two decades. But then he scraped together $75,000 to have the second of its three acts performed, in Amherst and then at Harvard — and recorded. It was that recording that he submitted to the Pulitzer board. It is not uncommon for composers to nominate themselves for the music prize, but Mr. Spratlan didn’t have high expectations.“I couldn’t imagine awarding the prize to a fragment of an opera,” he told the Albuquerque newspaper. “So I was startled.”In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, Mr. Spratlan is survived by two sons, Jacob Young Man Spratlan and Daniel Meriwether Spratlan; a daughter, Lydia Ji Yung DeBona; and two granddaughters.“Lew Spratlan was an American original, a hands-on musician, and an inspiring teacher,” an Amherst colleague and fellow composer, Eric Sawyer, said by email. “His creativity only increased with age, with some of his finest work coming in the past few years.”Professor Theodore said that just last year Mr. Spratlan composed a piano and chamber ensemble work, “Invasion,” in response to the invasion of Ukraine. He recalled unusual Spratlan teaching moments from years before.“We’d be hiking through the woods in Amherst while talking about musical ideas, and Lew would begin improvising with his voice to demonstrate a particular concept,” Professor Theodore said. “Brilliant, intricate, and soulful music would come pouring out. Then he’d finish it off with a silly little flourish because he also had a playful, mischievous sense of humor and loved making people laugh.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      A Conductor Comes Into His Own in the Opera Pit

      by

      SANTA FE, N.M. — “I was skeptical,” James Gaffigan said while waiting for huevos rancheros during a recent lunch here, where his run conducting a taut “Tristan und Isolde” at Santa Fe Opera ends on Tuesday.Skepticism is not normally the emotion you hear expressed, or at least admitted, when interviewing conductors about their next big post. But Gaffigan, 43, is a congenial, quick-talking musician who is more honest and open than many of his peers. And the post in question — the one he was initially skeptical of — is at the Komische Oper Berlin, where he takes over as general music director next year.Already doing a similar job at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, where his first season included “Wozzeck” and a Romeo Castellucci staging of Mozart’s Requiem, it seemed absurd, he said, to take on a second opera house — especially if it was to be the Komische.Not exactly renowned for its conductors, with the small exception of Kirill Petrenko before he had really become Kirill Petrenko, the Komische has been a playground for directors since its founding by Walter Felsenstein in 1947. For the past decade, it has drawn acclaim under the virtuosic showmanship of Barrie Kosky, the outgoing intendant, who will continue to stage new productions at the house.“It’s been the Barrie show, and that’s why my first instinct was to say no, or I’m not sure,” Gaffigan said. “I thought that whatever I did in the pit, how I developed the orchestra, would be overshadowed.”Gaffigan rehearsing Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in Santa Fe.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesIt’s a hesitation that Philip Bröking, formerly an in-house director who has been promoted to co-intendant alongside the Komische’s former managing director, Susanne Moser, understands, though he makes no excuses for the house’s specific character.“Our choices, and I have to admit these were also my choices, of chief conductors haven’t been as successful as we expected,” Bröking said in an interview. “When Susanne and I got the job as intendants, we asked ourselves, ‘Where can we really improve?’ And we do know that the orchestra has a lot of potential.”But Gaffigan marveled at the orchestra’s flexibility while first conducting them in a streamed concert of Webern, Gulda and Mozart in April 2021, and he agreed to take responsibility for two new productions, four concerts and a number of revivals in each of his four contracted seasons. Kosky, he said, convinced him that a double appointment — one at a newly built Spanish house that concentrates on the standard repertoire, the other among company that is as comfortable in Nono as in Handel, as committed to musicals as to the canon — would be an opportunity, not a burden.“The more I thought about it, I realized they are the most versatile orchestra in town,” Gaffigan explained, adding that his first experience as an audience member at the Komische was a snowy, sold-out Tuesday night of Offenbach’s “Orphée aux Enfers” that showed him just how much its diverse audience trusts in what he called the “wackiness” of the house.“We already have the public behind us because of what Barrie has done, and if we build the musical level even higher, it won’t just be a Regie theater,” he said. “I want people to come for the full package, and I think it’s possible.”Even so, it’s a striking move. Gaffigan’s future had always seemed to lie on the symphony stage, not in the opera pit. Starting his career with junior posts at the Cleveland Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony, he then served as the chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra for a decade, producing an eclectic list of recordings. He also became the principal guest of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and the Trondheim Symphony orchestras, tenures that end this season.Only a few years ago, Gaffigan was reputed to be on the shortlists of more than a few American ensembles searching for new music directors, and his enthusiasm, his keen interest in education and his flair for programming made him a strong candidate.Simon O’Neill, left, and Eric Owens in the Santa Fe production of “Tristan.”Curtis Brown/Santa Fe Opera“He’s certainly somebody who American orchestras have their eye on,” said Gary Ginstling, the incoming president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, who leads the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, where Gaffigan conducts Bernstein’s “Mass” to celebrate the Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary in September. “I think he has a lot of options, and will continue to.”But although Gaffigan has been in the running for a number of American posts, he has decided to step out of the fray for the time being.“I would need it to be the right city in America, with the right vision,” he said. “I don’t want to do the complete Brahms symphonies. Who cares? It needs to be a forward-thinking institution. I don’t want to be repeating the same stuff over and over again, and right now, I don’t see it.”Tired of the old routines, of programs announced far in advance that run through an overture, a concerto and a symphony, Gaffigan is also bothered by orchestras that refuse to reckon with their whiteness.“I hate that something that I love so much is defined as something elitist,” said Gaffigan, a native Staten Islander and public school graduate. “It upsets me that I’m from a country that has so many different types of people, yet when I look into the audience, I only see one type. That hurts me, as an American. I don’t just say it to sound politically correct; it’s something I believe.”Gaffigan may see no good fit for him at home, or none that is open to him, but Bröking said that the conductor’s interest in music not traditionally explored by American ensembles made him a natural choice for the Komische Oper when it was searching for someone to replace its current music director, Ainars Rubikis.“The first phone call with James was in April 2020,” Bröking recalled. “What was very special about this telephone call was that he did not ask: ‘What can my repertoire be? Is it Verdi, is it Puccini, is it Wagner?’ These are the questions you usually get, because as a general music director, you would like to present yourself in the core repertoire, especially in Berlin. He was much more interested in the special situation of the Komische Oper, between the Staatsoper and the Deutsche Oper.”Audience members at Santa Fe, where Gaffigan has developed a reputation as collaborative partner.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesWhat also appealed to the Komische is that Gaffigan, ambitious but far from egoistical, actually seems to practice what so many of his colleagues preach about a consciously collaborative style.“In Berlin, we have some experience with old, master conductors,” Bröking said wryly. “They do fantastic work, of course they do, but half of our orchestra are women, there are many young instrumentalists, and they don’t want to be treated as in former times. They want to communicate, they want to build something together, they want to be a team. This is what James is able to do well.”Gaffigan’s “Tristan” in Santa Fe sounded as though it had been carefully prepared, as indeed it had, with him listening to every historical recording he could find and even getting “crazy into poetics,” as he put it. But it was also evident that he was far less concerned with prosecuting his own interpretation of the drama, than in sustaining the staging that was in front of him.“He’s in service to the whole,” said Zack Winokur, who co-directed the “Tristan” with Lisenka Heijboer Castañón and is the artistic director of the avowedly egalitarian American Modern Opera Company. “It’s an unusual thing with conductors, that it’s not Machiavellian, that it didn’t feel manipulative,” Winokur said of the experience. “It felt actually supportive.”Tamara Wilson, the soprano who made a breakthrough debut as Isolde, agreed that Gaffigan’s style is unusual in the opera world, and happily so.“The first thing that he asked,” Wilson recalled of an early meeting on Zoom, “was, ‘How do you want to run rehearsals?’ For a singer, that’s unheard-of. That is never, ever how it goes. I had an immediate sense of relief, because I knew that this was going to be a collaboration, versus me being yelled at.”She added: “Even listening to the Santa Fe orchestra the first time, you could tell it wasn’t about just doing it and getting it right, making it correct — it was about making it special. And that’s what he does. He makes things special.” More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Climate Change Threatens Summer Stages and Outdoor Performances

      by

      ASHLAND, Ore. — Smoke from a raging wildfire in California prompted the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to cancel a recent performance of “The Tempest” at its open-air theater. Record flooding in St. Louis forced the cancellation of an outdoor performance of “Legally Blonde.” And after heat and smoke at an outdoor Pearl Jam concert in France damaged the throat of its lead singer, Eddie Vedder, the band canceled several shows.Around the world, rising temperatures, raging wildfires and extreme weather are imperiling whole communities. This summer, climate change is also endangering a treasured pastime: outdoor performance.Here in the Rogue Valley, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is seeing an existential threat from ever-more-common wildfires. In 2018 it canceled 25 performances because of wildfire smoke. In 2020, while the theater was shut down by the pandemic, a massive fire destroyed 2,600 local homes, including those of several staffers. When the festival reopened last year with a one-woman show about the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, wildfire smoke forced it to cancel almost every performance in August.“The problem is that in recent years there have been fires in British Columbia and in the mountains in Washington State and fires as far as Los Angeles,” said Nataki Garrett, the festival’s artistic director. “You have fire up and down the West Coast, and all of that is seeping into the valley.”Even before this year’s fire season began, the festival moved the nightly start time of its outdoor performances later because of extreme heat.Wildfires, which generate smoke that pollute air quality over long distances, have already begun burning this year in parts of Europe and the United States. In July, the Oak fire raged near Yosemite National Park.David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRecord rainfall in the St. Louis area caused flash flooding. Among the effects: The Muny, a major outdoor musical theater, had to cancel a performance of “Legally Blonde” because of flooding on its campus.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressAshland is not the only outdoor theater canceling performances because of wildfires. Smoke or fire conditions have also prompted cancellations in recent years at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado; the California Shakespeare Theater, known as Cal Shakes; the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in Nevada and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif., among others.“We are one giant ecosystem, and what happens in one place affects everywhere,” said Robert K. Meya, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, which stages open-air productions against a striking desert backdrop each summer, and which, in an era of massive wildfires near and far, has installed sensors to gauge whether it is safe to perform.The reports of worsening conditions come from wide swaths of the country. “Last summer was the hardest summer I’ve experienced out here, because fires came early, and coupled with that were pretty severe heat indexes,” said Kevin Asselin, executive artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which stages free performances in rural communities in five Rocky Mountain West states, and has increasingly been forced indoors. “And the hailstorms this year have been out of control.”Road signs in Ashland, Ore., guide drivers along wildfire evacuation routes.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesIn southern Ohio, a growing number of performances of an annual history play called “Tecumseh!” have been canceled because of heavy rain. In northwest Arkansas, rising heat is afflicting “The Great Passion Play,” an annual re-enactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. In Texas, record heat forced the Austin Symphony Orchestra to cancel several outdoor chamber concerts. And in western Massachusetts, at Tanglewood, the bucolic summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, more shade trees have been planted on the sweeping lawn to provide relief on hot days.“Changing weather patterns with more frequent and severe storms have altered the Tanglewood landscape on a scale not previously experienced,” the orchestra said in a statement.On Sunday, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of the nation’s first major climate law, which, if enacted into law, would seek to bring about major reductions in greenhouse pollution. Arts presenters, meanwhile, are grappling with how to preserve outdoor productions, both short-term and long-term, as the planet warms.“We’re in a world that we have never been in as a species, and we’re going into a world that is completely foreign and new and will be challenging us in ways we can only dimly see right now,” said Kim Cobb, the director of the environment and society institute at Brown University.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an important driver of the local economy, but smoke and heat associated with climate change have become a growing challenge.Kristina Barker for The New York TimesSome venues are taking elaborate precautions. The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wis., now requires performers to wear wicking undergarments when the heat and humidity rise, encourages actors to consume second act sports drinks, and asks costume designers to eliminate wigs, jackets and other heavy outerwear on hot days.Many outdoor performing venues say that, even as they are bracing for the effects of climate change, they are also trying to limit the ways that they contribute to it. The Santa Fe Opera is investing in solar energy; the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is planting native meadows; and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is using electric vehicles.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which before the pandemic had been one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, is, in many ways, patient zero. The theater is central to the local economy — the downtown features establishments with names like the Bard’s Inn and Salon Juliet. But the theater’s location, in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, has repeatedly been subject to high levels of wildfire smoke in recent years.At the Santa Fe Opera, which offers majestic desert views at sunset, concern about wildfire smoke prompted officials to install air quality sensors. Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesThe theater, like many, has installed air quality monitors — there’s one in a niche in the wall that encircles the audience in the open-air Allen Elizabethan Theater, where this summer “The Tempest” is alternating with a new musical called “Revenge Song.” The device is visible only to the keenest of eyes: a small cylindrical white gadget with lasers that count particles in the passing breeze.The theater also has a smoke team that holds a daily meeting during fire season, assessing whether to cancel or proceed. The theater’s director of production, Alys E. Holden, said that, ever since the time she opposed canceling a performance mid-show and later learned a technician had thrown up because of the air pollution, she has replaced her “show must go on” ethos with “If it’s too unsafe to play, you don’t play.”This year the festival reduced the number of outdoor performances scheduled in August — generally, but not always, the smokiest month.Air quality monitors, now in use at many Western venues including the Santa Fe Opera, can help presenters protect not only audience members but also performers. The opera is particularly concerned about its singers.Ramsay de Give for The New York Times“Actors are breathing in huge amounts of air to project out for hours — it’s not a trivial event to breathe this stuff in, and their voices are blown the next day if we blow the call,” Holden said. “So we are canceling to preserve everyone’s health, and to preserve the next show.”Wildfire-related air quality has become an issue for venues throughout the West. “It’s constantly on our mind, especially as fire season seems to start earlier and earlier,” said Ralph Flores, the senior program manager for theater and performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has a 500-seat outdoor theater at the Getty Villa.Air quality concerns sometimes surprise patrons on days when pollution is present, but can’t be readily smelled or seen.“The idea that outdoor performance would be affected or disrupted by what’s happening with the Air Quality Index is still a fairly new and forward concept to a lot of people,” said Stephen Weitz, the producing artistic director at the Butterfly Effect Theater of Colorado, which stages free shows in parks and parking lots. Last summer the theater had to cancel a performance because of poor air quality caused by a faraway fire.The coronavirus pandemic also remains a concern, prompting crew members in Santa Fe to wear masks as they met before a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen.”Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesAnother theater there, the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, is now working with scientists at the affiliated University of Colorado Boulder on monitoring and health protocols after a fire more than a thousand miles away in Oregon polluted the local air badly enough to force a show cancellation last summer. Tim Orr, the festival’s producing artistic director, recalled breaking the news to the audience.“The looks on their faces were surprise, and shock, but a lot of people came up and said ‘Thank you for making the right choice,’” he said. “And when I stepped offstage, I thought, ‘Is this going to be a regular part of our future?’”Planning for the future, for venues that present out of doors, now invariably means thinking about climate change.The Santa Fe Opera’s stunning outdoor location is one of its great attributes, but also makes it vulnerable to climate change.Ramsay de Give for The New York TimesOskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which produces Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, said that the 2021 summer season, when the theater reopened after the pandemic shutdown, was the rainiest in his two decades there. “I could imagine performing more in the fall and spring, and less in the summer,” he said.In some places, theater leaders are already envisioning a future in which performances all move indoors.“We’re not going to have outdoor theater in Boise forever — I don’t think there’s a chance of that,” said Charles Fee, who is the producing artistic director of three collaborating nonprofits: the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland. Fee has asked the Idaho board to plan for an indoor theater in Boise.“Once it’s 110 degrees at 6 o’clock at night, and we have these occasionally already, people are sick,” he said. “You can’t do the big Shakespeare fight, you can’t do the dances in ‘Mamma Mia.’ And you can’t do that to an audience.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The Composer Huang Ruo on Illusion and Betrayal in ‘M. Butterfly’

      by

      Huang, who wrote the music for the operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, says its exploration of race, gender and power still resonates today.The question from the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo came out of the blue: Would David Henry Hwang, the American playwright, consider adapting his Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” for the opera stage?It was 2013, and Huang, who had worked with Hwang on an Off Broadway revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” was eager to collaborate again. The playwright agreed, and in late July, almost a decade after their first conversation, “M. Butterfly” had its premiere at Santa Fe Opera.Like the play, the opera tells the story of René Gallimard, a civil servant at the French embassy in Beijing, who falls in love with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer who seems to be the ideal woman. Gallimard eventually discovers that Song has been a man — and a spy — all along.“M. Butterfly” upends Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of Cio-Cio-San, a betrayed young geisha, waiting in vain for the return of Pinkerton, her American husband. It gives power to Asian characters instead of Westerners, and the fluidity in gender roles counters sexist tropes in Puccini’s opera.Kangmin Justin Kim as Song Liling in the Santa Fe Opera production of “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaIn an interview from Santa Fe, Huang said the discussions of race, gender and power in “M. Butterfly,” which runs through Aug. 24, spoke to the present moment, more than three decades after the play’s premiere. He also talked about his early immersion in Chinese opera, the impact of the pandemic on the production and Asian representation in the arts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me about your first encounter with the play “M. Butterfly.”When I was at Oberlin, in my college days, the first play that I saw in America was “M. Butterfly.” It left a very deep impact. I knew Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the opera, but I did not know “M. Butterfly.” I thought it was a misspelling. I went in expecting to see “Madama Butterfly” but walked out with a totally opposite and different story.Why turn the play, which was successful on Broadway and inspired a 1993 movie, into an opera?I saw several versions of the play, and I often felt it needed to be told in musical form because it was so related to Puccini and to the reversal of “Madama Butterfly.” I felt in opera I could freely integrate — to twist and to turn, to create all the drama with the music. Some plays should never be touched or turned into opera, but I felt this was one of the rare cases where it could work.You grew up on Hainan island, the southernmost edge of China, immersed in traditional Chinese opera and other music. What was that like?In every village in Hainan, there is a communal open-air space, like a square. People would bring their clothes during the day to dry under the burning sun or put the rice out to dry. At night, people would sit there, the guys would take their shirts off, to get cool and to fall asleep.Occasionally there were Hainanese opera troupes that came to the village to perform. And at that moment, the open square became an improvised theater. Every family would bring their own food and chairs. And my grandmother would take me to sit there, to see opera.How did those early experiences inform your artistic philosophy?My grandmother was never sent to school because her family was poor and she was a woman. But she got her education through watching opera. Opera was for everybody: men and women, the elderly and the young. She learned all these stories and moral lessons, and she taught me those as well.Kim, left, and Mark Stone as René Gallimard in “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaHow did the story of “Madama Butterfly” influence your approach?Puccini’s opera shows a submissive, young Asian woman who will do everything — even change her faith — to be put in a cage, to serve as someone’s wife and even bear a child. And it shows her foolishly wanting him to come back, only to be abandoned and to have her only child, her only hope, brutally taken away. Pinkerton was portrayed by Puccini as this white man who doesn’t know or respect Eastern traditions or culture, and just abuses Cio-Cio-San, and takes advantage of her, both physically and psychologically.The big picture is this kind of imbalance between East and West, and the smaller picture is the interplay of male and female, and Asians being treated as subhuman. That is entirely reversed in “M. Butterfly.”Can you give an example of how Puccini’s music influenced the score of “M. Butterfly”?The overture of “Madama Butterfly” is very fast and energetic, in a minor key, that sounds very Western. I turned the overture upside down. I used the Puccini motif, and I reversed it. I made it quasi-pentatonic, to make it more Eastern. And then I have an opera gong, crash cymbal and all these instruments go along with it. So it’s quite unrecognizable if you don’t know the Puccini well, but I felt that in that way it’s related to the Puccini, and it also became new, just like “M. Butterfly” itself.The premiere of “M. Butterfly” was delayed for two years because of the pandemic. How does it feel to open in this moment?It’s even more timely now, because of the pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. Asian Americans are again being treated with subhuman stereotypes and racial hate. They’re being treated as others, not as equals. With “M. Butterfly,” we are showing people this is the history of humanity — that this is not just an exotic story happening in the past.What has it been like witnessing the spike in hate directed toward Asians in the United States, particularly in New York City, your longtime home?You just don’t know when and where you might get attacked. For example, I took my kids out biking after the severe attack on a Filipino woman in Times Square last year. I basically disguised them, and disguised myself, so we all had masks, and they had helmets on, and I had a hat, so we all looked less Asian. That was the first time I felt I had to disguise myself in America.Normally Asians and Asian Americans want to be seen and heard. We have been complaining for a long time that we are invisible. But that was the moment that I wanted to be invisible. I did not want to be seen or identified. Is that normal? Is that real? I don’t think that’s normal, but that felt so real at that moment.What do you want audiences to take away from “M. Butterfly”?I want people to understand the story, but also to ask questions. That, to me, is the best opera can do: Not to provide answers, but to provoke questions. And to leave the audience asking questions about their own background, their own journey. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ Metamorphoses Again, as an Opera

      by

      David Henry Hwang has returned to his Tony-winning play with a libretto for Huang Ruo’s new work. But can its story change with the times?SANTA FE, N.M. — “M. Butterfly” has been a Broadway hit, a watershed in Asian American representation, a film, and recently a revised version of the original play.Now, with the premiere on Saturday here at Santa Fe Opera of an adaptation by the composer Huang Ruo, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, the play’s author, the butterfly has returned to its operatic chrysalis.It was inevitable, really. Hwang’s Tony Award-winning script, from 1988, came to him when he saw that he could use the Orientalist stereotypes of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” as a mirror to explore how, for two decades, the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot (renamed Rene Gallimard in the play) carried on an affair with the Chinese opera singer and spy Shi Pei Pu (renamed Song Liling), only to discover, amid a lurid espionage case, that “she” had been a “he” all along.Hwang’s smash exposé of empire and race, gender and domination, could always be read as a reflection on the Puccini and the biases it still perpetuates as well as a gloss on the real-life tale. Find the right composer who could blend its elements with metatheatrical flair while maintaining the elusive quality that so marks the play, and the opportunity was obvious.Huang, a Chinese-born professor at the Mannes School of Music, whose works have often integrated Eastern and Western influences into a distinctive personal style, was almost certainly the best bet to be that composer.But the opportunity is missed.“M. Butterfly” had plenty of potential to fly at Santa Fe. Delayed for two years on account of the pandemic, James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, by Greg Emetaz, and moving easily between the personal and the geopolitical, as Gallimard’s fate entwines with that of the imperial pretensions of the French and Americans in Vietnam, and Song’s shifts with that of the Chinese Communist Party. Carolyn Kuan conducts with empathy, if not the rhythmic precision that the thudding score needs.James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, our critic writes.Curtis BrownThe cast is an exemplary one, too. Mark Stone makes for a suitably worn, confused Gallimard, and he sings his thorny vocal lines with impressive shape. The more minor parts are neatly delivered, especially Hongni Wu’s amused Comrade Chin and Kevin Burdette’s connivingly bureaucratic ambassador to China.All must bow to Kangmin Justin Kim, whose drag performances as Kimchilia Bartoli must have helped him portray Song with the extraordinary conviction he displays here. More than credible singing Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì” and other soprano excerpts from the Puccini, this astonishing countertenor’s alluring, ringing tone, and the sensitivity as an actor that he shows in toying with Gallimard’s delusions and exploring Song’s own sexuality, announced an artist to watch closely.The problem with “M. Butterfly” is a deeper one, and it’s the same difficulty that Hwang grappled with when he rewrote the script for its return to Broadway in 2017: As times change, can “M. Butterfly” change with them and still be true to itself?That’s not to say that Hwang’s earlier themes are irrelevant now; far from it. Violence against women of Asian descent remains outrageously persistent, and there is still considerable value in confronting the Butterfly stereotypes that sustain it, especially in an opera world that remains stubbornly — no, offensively — reluctant to reckon with its many racisms, including in “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot.”But the play itself helped to expose related intricacies of sexism, racism and imperialism that have since become familiar, and the story has worn. Gender norms, for one thing, have shifted dramatically enough that the old question of whether Gallimard knew that Song was a man is barely titillating at all. By now we should also know that Gallimard’s desires are problematic; if we don’t, “M. Butterfly” still achieves its goal of showing us that we should. Either way, it’s hard to engage much with the bumbling, repressed central character, and the opera barely asks us to.Stone, left, and Kim in the opera, which has a distance from the original material, with a knowingly analytical air.Curtis BrownSo what is left? “M. Butterfly,” the play, always had ambiguity and illusion at its core, and this operatic version tries to break down binaries still further, especially through Song’s character. Fluidity washes; power blurs as East meets West; metaphor piles onto metaphor. There is a distance from the original material here, and the opera takes on a kind of knowingly analytical air.It’s more of a disquisition than a drama, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a big third-act aria for Song, “Awoke as a Butterfly.” She sings it as the Party tries to send her to France to spy on a lover she thinks has long forgotten her, and as the stage turns to black, you hope that her motivations are at last about to become more than dimly apparent. Is she just a Party stooge? Is she in love? What does she want from him?“I pretend to know, pretend to know the truth,” she sings. “I know the truth and so I pretend.”Alas, no luck.Huang Ruo’s music offers few such subtleties, though unlike in his earlier opera for Santa Fe, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” it declines to weave Chinese instruments into the orchestra. The intrigue here lies in how he deals with the musical legacy of “Madama Butterfly,” and, wisely, he has been careful with it.There’s no sense of pastiche, no resort to parody; direct quotation is limited to the few moments when Song is performing as Cio-Cio-San. When there are references, they are oblique or distorted, and they tend to follow Hwang’s story in inverting the original material, asking us who the Butterfly in the story really is. There’s a humming chorus, for instance, or at least a chorus that hums, but it intends to evoke Gallimard’s memories, not those of his lover.But much of the score otherwise tires as its pounding chords and thumping cross-rhythms alternate and overlap with more static, suspended passages. If there is plenty of tension, there is little variety, and this arid music rarely gives us insights that the words do not. It needed to; for without them, this Butterfly is lost.M. ButterflyThrough Aug. 24 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Review: A ‘Tristan und Isolde’ Plays Out in Shadows and Light

      by

      At Santa Fe Opera, Wagner’s work is being presented for the first time, in a striking, modest staging that makes space for the music.SANTA FE, N.M. — The play of light has always been part of the show at the Santa Fe Opera: its majestic, open-sided theater in the foothills making drama out of the darkening of the sky and the brightening of the stars, even the flash of a hopefully distant storm.But in Santa Fe’s admirably understated, lovingly faithful new “Tristan und Isolde,” the summer house’s first Wagner for more than 30 years and its only foray thus far into the composer’s dramas beyond “The Flying Dutchman,” light moves center stage.Day and night lie at the heart of “Tristan,” the former representing the glaring, intrusive reality from which Tristan and Isolde struggle to escape in their love, the latter their “wondrous realm,” as Tristan sings of it, of freedom, of passion and ultimately of oblivion.There was a time when that metaphor was treated as at least somewhat expendable; in deference to singers’ stamina, Wagner’s longest disquisition on the philosophical metaphor, in Act II, was traditionally cut.But the incompatibility of the worlds of light and dark are taken as an organizing principle in Santa Fe’s “Tristan,” with subtle projections by Greg Emetaz that build on smart lighting by John Torres. Co-directed by the hotshots Lisenka Heijboer Castañón and Zack Winokur, it contrasts bright white with pitch black, and often dwells in the shades in between.The result is filled with striking, poignant images. We meet Tristan as a towering silhouette, for instance, a projection onto which Isolde can fix her grievances; that image finds its echo hours later, as the shadow of absent Isolde paces the walls of Tristan’s hallucinating mind.Much of the first act takes place in a cramped box of light, as Isolde is entrapped on her voyage to wed King Marke. When she narrates her failure to kill Tristan earlier, to avenge his murder of Morold, her fiancé, spotlights track her as she explores the encroaching murk. Tristan, when he finally deigns to see her, is already in the shadow of night. No potion is necessary for them to fall in love — only to reveal what they both already know.Wilson, left, with Simon O’Neill as Tristan in the production, which features scenic design by the firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero and costumes by Carlos J. Soto.Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaThese kinds of touches are gently allusive, suggesting more of an atmosphere than pretending to some grand interpretation. But that’s the point. Heijboer Castañón, a Dutch-Peruvian director whose credits include assisting Pierre Audi on this opera in Amsterdam, and Winokur, gaining renown as the artistic director of the insurgent American Modern Opera Company, offer something of a welcome to a work that is often treated warily or, ironically, or rendered illegible in impenetrable symbolism.Heijboer Castañón and Winokur offer no drastic interventions in the plot, just a delicate understanding of it as a tale of intimacies, friendly and erotic alike. What few props exist are lightly used. The spare set, from blueprints by the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, consists of four angled walls of mottled gray — cutouts evoking a castle tower, say, but no more than evoking it. Carlos J. Soto’s costumes hint at abstraction, rather than declaim distance as a goal.There is a refreshing feeling of trust to it all, a sensible desire not to get in the way of what clearly remains to these young collaborators a basically human story — and a willingness, perhaps above all, to make space for the music.And why not?James Gaffigan, typically lively on the podium for what is his first run of a full Wagner opera, sparked up a feisty intensity that supplied the energy the staging tended to resist, pushing the drama hard but not harshly. His was a take on the score both muscular and swift, blessedly so for a show that ended well after midnight.Greater experience might bring more deliberate harmonic and thematic direction, perhaps more purpose to transitions and more of a willingness to linger, just as making Wagner a habit rather than an exception here might, in time, sand down some of the rougher edges of the orchestra’s playing. Either way, the signs are promising for Gaffigan, who takes charge of the Komische Oper in Berlin next year.Never mind the future when it comes to the soprano Tamara Wilson. Renowned as a Verdian, she is slated to sing Elsa in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Lohengrin” next spring and Sieglinde in Vienna shortly thereafter; this Isolde, amply powerful yet ideally precise with the text, confirmed her as quite the Wagnerian already.Jamie Barton as Brangäne, a portrayal our critic describes as “magnificent.”Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaCornered, angry, spiteful, fearful, anxious, excited, enraptured, serene, each in turn — Wilson’s portrayal, like that of Jamie Barton’s magnificent Brangäne, was as authoritatively acted as it was movingly sung, an embodiment of the role in a production that fixed relentless attention on its principals.Simon O’Neill, a ponderous stage presence, suffered from that unsparing focus in the first two acts; in his third he surpassed himself, but the sharp, compressed quality of his voice still seemed less suited to Tristan than to some of the roles he has taken on in service to Wagner.The unstinting loudness of Nicholas Brownlee, otherwise a fine Kurwenal and the Dutchman in a David Alden production scheduled for next season here, made O’Neill’s frequent trouble slicing through the orchestra all the more plain; the affecting ease of Eric Owens’s King Marke likewise pointed up the tenor’s stilted, self-conscious delivery.But with Wilson dominating it by force of voice and clarity of personality, this is a “Tristan” that anyway seems rightly to imply — for it insists on nothing — that it should be “Isolde” to which we shorten the name of this singular work. And it is to Isolde that the final coup is reserved; as the music of her transfiguration resolves, the set’s walls open for Wilson to stride calmly to the back of the theater, and into the night.Tristan und IsoldeThrough Aug. 23 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More