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Opera Review: Love Stinks?
OPERA REVIEW
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
People who don’t go to the opera often imagine that the art form is about remote subjects with no contemporary relevance. But consider these two scenarios.
In a familiar public place, a woman whom you might recognize waits for a man she’s never met. This could lead to love, Rose imagines of her blind date. On the other hand, perhaps the guy is gay.
In another place, which could be in the distant past or the far-away future, another woman has been swept off her feet by a prince; he turns out to be a selfish lout. The morning after consummating the affair, he jilts her. Given this fella’s low quality, her suicide seems like an over reaction.
The first description is a slice of the action from “At the Statue of Venus,” a monologue for soprano and piano by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrance McNally. It premiered in 2005.
The second opera, Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” was first performed in 1689 at a girl’s school in London. It’s a cautionary tale.
To wit: “The moral,” writes Ellen T. Harris in her definitive book “Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas,” “is that young girls should not accept the advances of young men no matter how ardent their wooing or how persistent their promises.”
This before-and-after double-bill on the dating life was performed over the weekend by Capitol City Opera, a shoe-string budget troupe that, year after year and with only local talent, consistently exceeds all reasonable expectations for community opera. (“Dido” was prepared with two casts; I attended Friday night.)
Putting together the 20-minute “Venus” and the hour-long “Dido” made almost perfect sense. (Among other links overt or subtle: In Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the basis for Nahum Tate’s trenchant libretto, Aeneas’ mother is the goddess Venus.)
In “Venus,” McNally’s words sketch a woman who is emotionally complicated, self-absorbed, outwardly confident but still a vulnerable little girl inside. With a pretty, light voice and go-for-broke acting, soprano Sherri Seiden pulled it off brilliantly, at turns hilarious, neurotic, tender or on the verge of tears.
Heggie’s music — edgy or glittery or sentimental, often tuneful — is the real star. He gives the soprano freedom of self-expression with chatty, conversational phrases or long, lyrical lines.
The piano part becomes Rose’s pulse, her libido, her psyche. By constantly shifting meters and creating multiple textures moment by moment, Heggie’s piano part helps compress the action — the opera’s 20 minutes is really just an instant in Rose’s head — much like the cinematic effect of jumpy edits from a hand-held camera, or, like David Hockney’s famous Polaroid photocollages, which convey at once a static snapshot and movement.
Pianist Russell Young played the piano in “Venus” with virtuosity and insight. With equal clarity, he then conducted a six-member instrumental ensemble in “Dido and Aeneas.”
If only “Dido” had been as ideally presented. With mixed success, Michael Nutter’s staging reached for timeless elegance, drawing inspiration from scenes painted on ancient Greek kraters.
The trouble came with the mismatched love couple. Perri Montane’s Queen Dido sounded and looked a generation or more older than her Aeneas, sung by William Scott Mize, a tenor with the best legs in the cast and a thin, raspy voice. Neither got inside their character, and like everyone else in Nutter’s overly stylized production, they felt disconected from each other and from the audience. Lost were the opera’s layered themes, of nobility, fate, loyalty, sacrifice.
Still, for community opera, it was a handsome achievement, and others in the cast offered many surprises. Soprano Emily Parrott was youthful and pure as Belinda, Dido’s confidant. Laurie Swann’s Sorceress was appropriately menacing in voice and manner. Amusingly, as the witches danced, played and plotted their queen’s destruction, Nutter had them stab one another till, finally, they’d all killed each other, round-robin style.
Countertenor Clarke Harris was chillingly effective as the Spirit who tricks Aeneas into fulfilling his destiny (the founding of Rome) and thus dumping Dido — the plot twist that brought the love-sucks evening full circle.
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By Larry Barsalou
September 17, 2007 11:29 AM | Link to this
Although I typically agree with Pierre’s Ruhe’s assessments of productions and performances, I disagree with his assessment of Capital City’s Dido and Aeneas. Of course he has a right to his opinion, but I flat out disagree with it this time, and everyone I talked with in the audience held a different opinion as well. In general, I think that the audience resonated strongly with the beauty, detail, and clear stylization of the sets. The whole production was highly artistic in this regard, and created a “flowing tableau.” The approaches to playing Dido and Aeneas seemed designed to contribute to the tableau as well. It sounds like Ruhe would have preferred something sparser and more psychological, but that’s not what Baroque is about. Capital City totally went for the Baroque spirit and implemented it spectacularly. Bringing in the Maxfield Parrish dimension was a brilliant connection. What do I know, but I would encourage Capital City to continue in the style that they are developing. I suspect that the large majority of audience members will go there with them.