Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2005 > December > 15
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Handel’s ‘Messiah’ (and Bach) from ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphon.org.
Old friends G.F. Handel and J.S. Bach join the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on stage this weekend for music of the Christmas season. Conducted by ASO chorus director Norman Mackenzie, the concert Thursday evening proved to be another sparkling facet of the orchestra’s zooming artistic progress.
For the institution, its appeal is spreading far outside Atlanta and the Deep South.
For instance: After last month’s triumphant in-concert performances of Osvaldo Golijov’s opera “Ainadamar,” the ASO and music director Robert Spano have been invited to take the show on tour to Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, in June.
Meanwhile, musicians in the mighty Chicago Symphony have added Spano to the short list of candidates for its music directorship, which comes open this summer. (Although Spano’s ASO contract runs through 2009, conductors are notorious for holding two or more posts concurrently.)
There’s more: ASO president Allison Vulgamore, credited with piloting the orchestra to financial stability and enabling its progressive artistic agenda, is the talked-about candidate to take charge of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a venerable ensemble suffering an administrative crisis.
Hire away Atlanta’s musical leaders? For the moment, it’s all speculation. What’s increasingly clear is that other cities, some mired in orchestral malaise, are starting to want what we’ve got.
Thursday from Symphony Hall what we got was the same sort of concert heard all over: bleeding chunks of Bach’s “Christmas” Oratorio and Handel’s “Messiah.” Yet under Mackenzie’s spirited baton, and with the ASO Chamber Chorus in top form, the evening held many surprises.
Designed for the Lenten season, “Messiah” has been an Advent evergreen since it arrived in Boston in 1818. Mackenzie followed the shallow tradition of performing just part one, the nativity portion of the score, tacking on “Hallelujah” and calling it a show.
But which “Messiah” to perform? A practical man of the theater, Handel in his own lifetime rearranged “Messiah” to suit the specific talents of the available singers and orchestra. The soprano can’t sing low notes? No problem, if you’re the composer: you simply rewrite her arias, tailoring them to encompass her limited range. With annual performances spread over the last few decades of the composer’s life, it’s no wonder there is no definitive edition of the score.
The ASO, following Robert Shaw’s game plan, uses as a starting point one well-documented performance from May 15, 1754. Mackenzie here wasn’t going for literal historical accuracy: that 1754 concert employed just 22 singers; the Symphony Hall stage on Thursday held more than 60 vocalists.
Still, Mackenzie urged the band to adopt a few “historically informed” performance practices. For the strings, these include techniques like spare vibrato, shorter bow strokes and more crisp phrasings. The winds are asked to blow bright, pungent tones. Harpsichordist Peter Marshall’s continuo playing was a thorough delight.
The only serious drawback — and it’s very serious — was the balance of the solo vocal quartet: soprano Leah Partridge, mezzo Nannette Soles, tenor Frank Timmerman and baritone Gerard Sundberg.
While the men delivered their parts with consistency and a bit of flair, the women stumbled. Soles, in particular, had a rough time navigating the vocally treacherous displays in “But who may abide the day of His coming,” which was designed for an operatic coloratura and features a prestissimo section that’s the fastest marking Handel ever wrote.
J.S Bach started the evening. Here the solo vocal quartet more easily matched their parts. Mackenzie shaped the music with intelligence and character, a fresh and fetching performance.
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
Tobias Picker’s ‘An American Tragedy’ at the Met
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NEW YORK OPERA REVIEW
NEW YORK OPERA REVIEW
Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy� at the Metropolitan Opera, through Dec. 28. 212-362-6000, www.metopera.org. (In Atlanta, the opera will be heard live from the Met Dec. 24 at 1:30 p.m. on WABE 90.1 FM.)
New York — Political pundits will never scream about it on television, but there’s an increasingly clear red state/blue state divide in contemporary American opera. The cultural values, however, are divided by opera companies and their composers, not geography.
In essence, it comes down to what a typical listener might term modernist vs. traditional. (Forget for a moment that modernism has been the dominant tradition for the past half century.)
When commissioning new works, opera companies in Detroit, St. Louis and Dallas, for instance, have hewed to the traditional — linear storytelling; politically noncontroversial topics; good-vs.-evil plots with clear resolution; and, crucially, dissonance used mainly for psychological or cinematic effects, but never woven into the fabric of the score.
By this reckoning, the modernist style might include everything else. At the San Francisco Opera, John Adams’ latest opera, “Doctor Atomic,� premiered in October. Onstage, it was blue state all the way, highlighted by edgy, politically charged commentary on an opaque topic — the morality of dropping the atom bomb on the Japanese — and a plot that flickered between realism and meditation.
Quality is not determined by musical styles or politics, of course, but a composer who takes an artistically “retro� approach should, in theory, have an easier time than one who is trying to reinvent the genre.
The latest salvo in this cultural struggle comes from New York, where the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned Tobias Picker’s “An American Tragedy,� which runs through Dec. 28. With a poorly paced libretto by Gene Scheer, it’s a deluxe, mostly old-fashioned opera that tries hard to place the familiar American epic onstage, involving a man’s ambition, set within a framework of class structure, religion, morality, money and sex.
Like the George Stevens’ film “A Place in the Sun,� the opera is based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1920s novel about an amoral young man and the two women who represent the poles of society. He satisfies his lust with a factory girl, whom he impregnates, while also wooing a rich and beautiful socialite. With ambitions of joining the moneyed class, he drowns the to-be mother, stands trial, repents to his Christian zealot mother and, finally, takes his seat in the electric chair. The 1951 film version holds much more emotional uncertainty than Picker’s opera. The delectable, 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and her strong family embody the American dream and contrast with the hopelessness of Shelley Winter’s dreary poverty. Montgomery Clift’s crime is horrible, but you can root for him anyway. Hollywood’s take on Dreiser was subtle, faceted, compelling.
Picker’s music ennobles his characters with no such power. “American Tragedy� is his fourth opera. The composer here writes vocal lines that pleasingly follow the contours of speech but just as often sours on an awkward or vocally ungrateful turn. Orchestrally, he hectors, rather than seduces, with jarring chordal progressions and bland rhythms. From the opening, he jackhammers the mood of the final tragedy. Across three hours, Picker fatigues the listener’s ear.
Still, the Met knows how to deliver a grand show. Almost all the roles are well cast, and in Francesca Zambello’s taut direction and James Conlon’s conducting the disciplined Met orchestra, the story unfolds with unflagging concentration.
Handsome, meek and vocally serviceable, baritone Nathan Gunn looks and sounds the part of confused killer Clyde.
As the factory girl Roberta, Patricia Racette is blessed with a pretty, girl-next-door soprano with lovely top notes and no sexiness in her sound. (Racette played a similar, youthfully naive personality in Picker’s first opera, “Emmeline.�)
Onstage, Racette is just as likable as her opposite number, glamorous mezzo Susan Graham, who sings Sondra gorgeously and affectionately but here looks too matronly to play the ingénue. Musically, Clyde and Sondra’s romance could have been fresh, joyous and love-struck, a welcome contrast to the gnawing doom. Picker didn’t exploit that opportunity.
Smaller roles, too, hold impressive voices, notably low-lying mezzo Dolora Zajick as Clyde’s missionary mother. Mezzo Jennifer Larmore (a Marietta native) sings the cameo role of Clyde’s aunt, all affected mannerisms and snarky tones. If only Picker had given them all something better to sing.
Atlanta Opera general director Dennis Hanthorn, by the way, attended opening night. “It’s audience-friendly and dramatically strong,� he said, emphasizing the opera’s traditional approach. “It’s the sort of new opera that might work in Atlanta.�
“An American Tragedy� is the first Met premiere since John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby� (1999), another score mired in thrice-familiar musical idioms, with little new to add beyond a great plot. So perhaps the paradox is that these traditional-style operas have greater immediate appeal but compromise an artist’s struggle to be original, to find his own voice. And it’s reflecting a cultural divide, like politics in America. Operatically speaking, are we on the right track? Audiences and critics are divided.
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
