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    Review: A ‘Rodelinda’ Brings Promise of Handel on the Hudson

    R.B. Schlather’s new staging of this opera, with the excellent musicians of Ruckus, is the first of several Handel productions at Hudson Hall.Huge if true, as they say: The new production of Handel’s “Rodelinda” that opened on Friday at Hudson Hall is just the first in a series of annual Handel stagings there to come.For the next several years, Hudson, N.Y., has the potential to become a Baroque opera destination, even for those accustomed to the rich offerings of New York City. Sure, you can catch Handel down the river in Manhattan, but regularly programmed stage works of his are likely to be found only at the Metropolitan Opera or Carnegie Hall, two cavernous spaces not exactly suited to the precision and immediacy in which this composer’s music thrives.Hudson Hall is far from a traditional opera house; with no pit and seemingly indifferent acoustics, it was used in the 19th century for speeches by the likes of Emerson and Susan B. Anthony. But, outfitted with 281 folding chairs arranged around its boxy room’s tight proscenium on Friday, it was surprisingly ideal for the intimacy of Handel — despite having the look, as my companion told me, of “Waiting for Guffman.”The result was nothing so cringe-worthy as the kind of town hall community theater satirized in that movie. With smart direction by R.B. Schlather and excellent performances from the early-music group Ruckus, this is a “Rodelinda” worth of a multiyear commitment to Handel.Schlather, an American director who should be as well known in the United States as he is in Europe, is a trusted steward of this repertoire, having staged unconventional Handel productions at a Lower East Side gallery and at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. He also, crucially, was at the helm of a beloved, immersive “The Mother of Us All” at Hudson Hall in 2017.Futterer in the opera’s title role, the wife of a king who has fled after his throne is usurped.Matthew PlacekHis “Rodelinda” has enough dramaturgical sense to know that the opera — while melodramatic, about murderous and ultimately pointless palace intrigue in medieval Italy — can be a bit baggy in its second act, from which Schlather cut the most material for his more streamlined, two-and-a-half-hour production. But throughout, he is also largely restrained, with few interventions. His scenic and costume designs are redolent of the Victorian age (a nod to Hudson Hall’s era of moralistic speechmaking), though not meticulously devoted to specificity or accuracy with the aesthetic.Schlather’s intelligence comes through best in other details. His unit set of a single room may be a good money-saver, but it also casts “Rodelinda” as a kind of surreal purgatory between reigns, romances and stages of grief. (Hauntingly, the lone window looks out to a black void.) And he stages the arias — moments of reflection that stop action yet spin out rich psychology through repetition — as addresses rather than as inner thoughts, lending Handel’s small cast the preternatural honesty and self-awareness of Sally Rooney characters.Crucially, in the finale — after deaths both supposed and real; after lovers are spurned, separated and reunited — Schlather seats the six surviving characters at a table, where their exhausted faces betray the traumatic reality of Handel’s rejoicing, relieved music.In that scene, and throughout the evening, it was clear that Schlather had spent a lot of time with the singers on dramatic care. Action can move slowly in a Handel opera, but his production is one in which there is always something to see in the performers’ evolving expressions, whether they are directly involved in the action or simply observing it from across the room.The soprano Keely Futterer, in the title role, looks immediately as if she’s just been through a great tragedy and is staring down another as she desperately holds on to her child, Flavio (a silent role that Myles Fraser shares with Tessa K. Prast). But she is a strong character with a plush, powerful sound to match, at one point, as a power move, brazenly taking and drinking the wine of the man who usurped her husband’s throne. She ornamented her melodies with adventurousness, though those flourishes sometimes got lost in wide vibrato or proved unwieldy. The mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce was affectingly ardent and unsure as her husband, Bertarido.Williams, left, as the imperious Garibaldo, with Buchholz as Eduige.Matthew PlacekAs the two villains, Grimoaldo and Garibaldo, the tenor Karim Sulayman and the bass-baritone Douglas Williams had the finest vocal outings of the night. Sulayman’s Grimoaldo was appropriately barking yet small, the depiction of a true insecure beta. Here, as is often the case with him, he was driven as much by theatrical instinct as by beauty, holding them in elegant balance and smoothly flowing between the two. Williams’s Garibaldo, by contrast, was a mighty presence, booming and characterfully wicked, imperious in holding his strength and sexuality over others.The gift of a space like Hudson Hall is that, without too much effort by either the audience or the artists, you can hear every nuance of Handel’s music and its interpretation. But that can be double-edged, revealing any faults in what is already a vulnerably exposing style. So you could sense, on Friday, the relatively soft enunciation of the mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz’s Eduige, for example, or the pinched countertenor of Brennan Hall’s Unulfo.Lapses like those, though, were outweighed by the truly up-close performances of the evening’s stars: Ruckus. Their command of the score was immediate, precise and fleet in the overture, but also jittery, with questioning flashes of darkness and uncertainty. With a mercurial, almost improvisatory spirit that responded to the drama in real time, they played with the fieriness and emotional charge of verismo.It’s no surprise that, a few rows in front of me, someone in the audience was rocking along to the music. As Schlather brings Handel back to Hudson Hall over the next several years, let’s hope he brings Ruckus, too.RodelindaThrough Oct. 29 at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y.; hudsonhall.org. More

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    Rhiannon Giddens’s ‘Omar’ Premieres at the Spoleto Festival

    Three productions, including the premiere of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s “Omar,” distort time in approachable yet provocative ways.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Wander the streets of this Southern city, and you might notice a warping of time and place: a Porsche parked in the driveway of a fastidiously preserved antebellum mansion; a memorial to the American Revolution neighboring one to the secession that spurred the Civil War; a horse-drawn carriage taking tourists past cobblestone streets on their way back to a Carnival cruise ship.Time is no more stable among the three opera productions at the Spoleto Festival USA, which continues here through June 12. A world premiere, “Omar,” is both specific to history and freely anachronistic; while, on another stage, a classic love story, “La Bohème,” is told in reverse; and, nearby, the Crusades are given a modern critique by way of the Baroque in “Unholy Wars.”In all, opera is treated as an act of liberation — a fitting debut for Mena Mark Hanna, the festival’s new general director, who comes from a scholarly background that involved interrogating colonialism’s legacy in classical music. He inherited “Omar,” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, but he made it this year’s centerpiece, and surrounded it with works that, like it, are approachable yet refuse to accept or adhere to convention.“Omar” is a homecoming of sorts for Giddens, a conservatory-trained singer who made her reputation as a folk musician of omnivorous inspiration. This project, she recently told The New York Times, is “a return to opera, but on my own terms.”She wasn’t kidding. Only a musician like Giddens could have created “Omar,” for which she wrote the libretto and composed in recorded drafts — she sang and accompanied herself — that were then orchestrated by Abels, with an ear for subtle connections and propulsive drama. Their score, nimbly handled by the conductor John Kennedy and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, is a melting pot inspired by bluegrass, hymns, spirituals and more, with nods to traditions from Africa and Islam. It’s an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.Giddens and Abels’s sweeping achievement is all the more remarkable because of the intimate story it tells: of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in what is now Senegal and sold into slavery at a market in Charleston — a history he later documented in an autobiographical essay while living in North Carolina, still as property but with relative peace.A rich American portrait emerges from Said’s life, in Giddens’s interpretation of that essay. He bore witness to the dangerous Middle Passage of the slave trade and represented a largely unacknowledged community of Muslims brought to the United States. Giddens imagines him on the sidelines of a family being torn apart at the slave market. And, in a tribute to a pillar of Black American life, he is often surrounded by a chorus.That ensemble — tireless members of the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus — carries this opera, in a way that inevitably recalls Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” which is set in Charleston and is often spoken of as the Great American Opera, despite its complicated legacy as the work of white men who long provided crucial work for Black singers. Works like “Omar” — such as Anthony Davis’s recently revived “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — offer an alternative: fresher, more honest depictions of Black life on an operatic scale.Although “Porgy” is firmly in the repertory, “Omar” at least has the opportunity to stake a claim alongside it: Next season, the opera will travel to Los Angeles and Boston, then San Francisco, Chicago and, appropriately, North Carolina. Moving, joyous and in its final moments intensely spiritual, it should not have trouble winning over audiences, as it did on Friday.Kaneza Schaal’s production is as plain-spoken as the libretto, yet absorbingly vivid in Christopher Myers’s scenic design, for which he made prints from Said’s manuscripts in English and Arabic, as well as from woodcuts of slavery documents and runaway ads. Characters wear language on their clothing, and words cover walls; the look of the show propels the story as much as the score does toward the climax of Said’s burning need to write.Language is crucial to the plot as well. Said, sung by the tenor Jamez McCorkle with delicate lyricism in prayer and steely power in adversity, arrives in Charleston unable to understand anyone. Giddens cleverly renders his first owner’s text as Said would have heard it; he and the slaver, Johnson, sing discrete lines in counterpoint, never in the same language, until, under the threat of violence, Said lets out an acquiescent phrase, his first words in English.Johnson is sung by the baritone Malcolm MacKenzie, who returns — after Said escapes his cruel plantation — in Act II as the more benevolent owner Owens. He respects Said’s passionate faith but all but forces him to convert to Christianity. This casting decision makes a clear point: Kind or not, a slaver is still a slaver.Those two men may be in control of Said’s life, but he is more guided by dreams of his mother, Fatima (the mezzo-soprano Cheryse McLeod Lewis), who was killed in the raid that led to his kidnapping; and Julie (the soprano Laquita Mitchell, a smooth-voiced and soothing presence), who escapes from the slave market in Charleston but urges Said to meet her in Fayetteville, N.C., at Owen’s property. When they reunite there, she explains why she was helping him to begin with, in the opera’s finest aria, which begins with the line “My daddy wore a cap like yours.”When she gives Said a new head wrap, to replace the one that had been ripped off his head at the slave market, he realizes that he must reconcile his religious devotion with the existence he is bound to, and tell his story in writing. The opera then ends with a long choral meditation, with singers spread throughout the auditorium, conducted by McCorkle from the stage. When the curtain — which before the show had been decorated with a projection of Said’s face — comes down, his likeness is joined by a dense collage reflecting the accumulation of his experience, with images that resonate across time to the present.George Shirley was the Wanderer, a new character created for Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème.”Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USAIf “Omar” looks forward, then Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème,” which opened on Saturday, does the opposite, presenting the opera’s four acts in reverse. (The production, which premiered at Detroit Opera last month, will travel next to Boston and Philadelphia.) With no intermission and small cuts to streamline it for a brisk hour and 45 minutes, it was moved along by Kensho Watanabe’s lush yet flowing music direction and John Conklin’s minimal, quickly adaptive set design.To help situate the audience, Sharon introduces the Wanderer, a spoken role played by the 88-year-old George Shirley, the first Black tenor to perform in a leading role with the Metropolitan Opera. As the acts rewind, he stops the action to ask questions that make Puccini’s tragedy more about the why than the what of it all. Rodolfo could have gone back inside in Act III; Musetta could have remained silent at Café Momus; Mimì could have just left Rodolfo’s apartment. This is a production of decisive moments.More than ever, “La Bohème” was also an opera of objects. A bonnet, a muff, a coat — these things are so crucial to the tragic climax that when they are introduced earlier in the story, they too begin to feel like turning points. And, in Sharon’s reading, amid the stormy lovers — Rodolfo (Matthew White) and Mimì (an aching Lauren Michelle); Marcello (Troy Cook) and Musetta (Brandie Sutton) — there is one steady relationship: Colline (Calvin Griffin) and Schaunard (Benjamin Taylor), playful companions who here might be a little something more.Raha Mirzadegan, Coral Dolphin, Karim Sulayman and John Taylor Ward in “Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by Sulayman. Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USA“Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by the tenor Karim Sulayman that opened on Sunday, also recasts the familiar. A child of Lebanese immigrants, Sulayman is interested in how Europe has historically decided what constitutes the Middle East, and how it is depicted in Western art. To examine the Crusades, he has turned to Baroque music, with new, mostly prerecorded interludes composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian.The production — directed by Kevin Newbury, and incorporating dance (performed by Coral Dolphin and choreographed by Ebony Williams) and animated projections (by the artist Kevork Mourad) — unfolds in effectively three parts: an exploration of the Middle Eastern “other” in Western works; a dramatic account of Monteverdi’s “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda”; and a mournful denouement that attempts to make peace with a musical tradition both violent and sublime.Sulayman performs throughout, joined by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward and the soprano Raha Mirzadegan, who embody the doomed lovers in “Combattimento,” a story Sulayman recounted with gripping fervor and expressivity that rendered surtitles unnecessary. He ends the evening — at just 70 minutes, still a song too long — with what seem a tired choice: Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga.” But here, at the end of a personal journey through lyrics like “She is Black but beautiful,” the aria feels like an urgent plea from Sulayman to be left alone to reflect.Reflect and, perhaps, break free from the long, knotty tendrils of history. It’s a struggle that would have been familiar to Omar Ibn Said, one that plays out in the streets of this city — even throughout this country, in our or any time. More