LA Opera / Léirmheasanna

LA OPERA’S RECENT REVIVAL of Verdi’s Otello made it abundantly clear why Verdi’s late masterpiece is regarded as the summit of the nineteenth–century Italian opera tradition and—as is now coming to be realized—the first great work in the vein of verismo (seen May 20). As Desdemona, Rachel Willis-Sørensen intriguingly mixed contradictory traits of character. An unbroken serenity and sheen characterize her voice, which complemented our understanding of Desdemona’s purity, but Willis-Sørensen also brought welcome maturity to the character. It was clear that while Desdemona was unwise to press the issue of Cassio, she was capable of resisting her husband, which activated our sympathy for her. Both the willow song and Ave Maria were drenched in pathos, which intensified the agony of the deaths at the end.

The revival of an architecturally kitsch, early twenty-first century production from Parma, Italy could not dim the luster of this finely wrought Otello. The Italian tragedy shone with exceptional, unusual depth, the moor Otello portrayed by black American tenor Russell Thomas, conductor James Conlon carefully guiding Verdi’s opera to its brutal end. Though the staging of the John Cox production by Canadian director Joel Ivany was perfunctory at best and clumsy at worst it did well serve the dramatic focus presented in the pre-performance talk by maestro Conlon, that placed Verdi’s tragedy firmly in the Catholicism of nineteenth century Italy — Iago was evil incarnate, Desdemona was innocence incarnate. It was Otello as a morality play. Desdemona was sung by American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen who brought maturity and seriousness to this young Venetian bride, not infatuation. Her wig was auburn, not the usual blonde. Mme. Willis-Sørensen brings a full-bodied, mature voice to Desdemona (she sings the big Mozart heroines in Munich and Vienna), and consummate artistry in her delivery.

LA Opera's revival of Marta Domingo sumptuous production of La Traviata, set in Paris in the 1920s and choreographed as if were a musical film, was all about Adela Zaharia's brilliant performance in the title role and James Conlon's masterful shaping of the score. The ballets were great, glorious fun and the setting for the final act had a Wagnerian cast to it, with Zaharia ghostly pale on a couch that could have been a bier. Verdi's radiant music at the end was as much a sorrowful apotheosis of a weary spirit as an emotional tragedy.

“The music poured out of him eloquently and ardently, his lyricism never tarnished with harsh excess at the louder dynamics. He’s a singer, not a belter. He showed himself an unselfish partner with Zaharia in the duets as well.”

"I love it,” a woman loudly exclaimed to everyone in earshot as she headed out of the theater. “I loved everything! I loved the music. I loved the singers!” People around me smiled approvingly. Then again, people seated around me had all night applauded arias with gusto and returned from intermission sharing their enthusiastic eagerness for more.

As LA Opera’s fourth mainstage production of the season, this all-new Marriage of Figaro (since 2015) is as distinguished as one could hope to see anywhere – admirably sung, delightful to look at, executed with dedication and in detail, natural and unaffected in its flow. The new production, arriving by way of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, features opulent eighteenth-century décor by Santo Loquasto and costume by Christian Lacroix. It is rare these days, even in conservative America, to see real trees, real furniture, and beautiful things on the operatic stage (nothing outlandish like the 1990 Gianni Versace-designed Capriccio for San Francisco). There is even an alcove in the Countess’ bedroom that resembles the window display of a luxury fashion boutique. The costume design is full of Lacroix touches – flower print on the Count's cape, hot colors for the townsfolk and servants, and the Countess' over-the-top Marie Antoinette-style Rococo gown. It's all very theatrical and haute couture. In my opinion, this Figaro is a much more satisfying and artistically successful Paris-L.A. collaboration than last summer’s lackluster Paris Opera Ballet at the Bowl.

Soprano, Angel Blue, who created some headlines recently for dropping out of her performance in La Traviata at the Arena di Verona in Italy over a blackface controversy, is hands-down the star of the show. As the jealous but devoted titular character, Blue is a virago of emotions, astutely balancing coquettishness, rage, and even humor with impeccable timing, and of course, that sonorous voice! Tenor, Fabiano as her lover who puts himself in jeopardy by protecting his friend, and Bass-Baritone, McKinny as the diabolical (and in this version, an indisputably sexy) Scarpia, who is out to get him on the scaffold and her into bed, are not far behind. Indeed their voices, as well as that of Bass, Wei Wu (Angelotti) are breathtakingly resonant, a quality enhanced by Lohraseb’s proficient, never overwhelming conducting.

[Angel Blue as] Floria Tosca was nothing less than a triumph and the kind of singing you only dream about.

It’s quite a feat for Stone and his associates to so brilliantly chronicle the mental decline of their poor bedeviled title character, made even more impressive by the inclusion of the omnipresent ghost of a young girl stabbed to death at the banks of the river who periodically returns embodied by dancer Jessica Gadzinski (alternating with Shauna Davis) performing the angular Nijinsky-esque choreography of my ubertalented friend Kitty McNamee, former artistic director of LA’s groundbreaking Hysterica Dance Company. Everything about this reawakened Lucia di Lammermoor is impressive, from its soaring performances, Clachan’s glorious set, James Francome’s versatile lighting, Blanca Anon’s whimsical costuming, and, especially, the exceptional projections designed by Luke Hall. There are also more than a few laughs along the bloodsoaked road to operatic misadventure and misfortune, one particular supertitle provoking more than a scattered guffaw from the savvy opening night audience as the pious Raimondo does his best to raise spirits by telling the cursed and bloodied survivors of the ill-fated love story that “God condemns violence.”

As Lucia, soprano Amanda Woodbury commands secrets of the old singers – not the light songbirds of Lily Pons, Dessay or Mado Robin, but the Amazonian warbirds of Sutherland and Sills – unleashing trills and coloratura runs and cadenzas with a forceful tone and absolute precision. The house hung intently on her mad scene. She showed that with just two poignant, exquisitely uttered notes (in Lucia’s “Spargi d’amato pianto”), she could hold a house spellbound and produce a dramatic effect no one could guess from perusal of Donizetti’s ‘nothing’ score. Tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz sings with ardor and pathos as Edgardo. Baritone Alexander Birch Elliott’s Enrico sounds almost too noble for a caddish character. Lending sympathetic supporting roles are Madeleine Lyon’s Alisa, Eric Owen’s Raimondo and Anthony Ciaramitaro’s Arturo. Honorable mention also goes to L.A. Opera’s new chorus director Jeremy Frank, who enlivens many scenes with choruses that are fully engaging and energetic whereas in the past seasons they often sounded like Sunday school singing, accurate but uninvolving.

GRAMMY-nominated composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Cerrone's new opera In a Grove, featuring a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, will receive its world premiere performances by Pittsburgh Opera from February 19 - March 3, 2022. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, and Metropolis Ensemble, In a Grove is based on a short story of the same name by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and follows seven witness testimonies to a murder, each clashing in perspective, offering a searing investigation into the impossibility and elusiveness of truth. LA Opera will present the west coast premiere of In a Grove in a future season. Sited within a ghost forest in the Pacific Northwest in 1922, the opera unfolds within a barren, haunted landscape devastated by wildfire. Into a terrain of broken dreams, marred by violence and obfuscated by smoke, comes a young woman who upends conventional notions of gender and narratives of victimhood, claiming agency for herself. Transpiring within a frontier territory driven by class struggle and fear of the other, this retelling of Akutagawa's tale-famously adapted as the film Rashomon-manifests a world in which the environment is under siege, and wildly veering personal truths vie with absolute fact, shattering what one thinks they know. Four singers are double cast, each assuming the character of both witness to and participant in the crime. A medium communicates with the ghost of the victim, straddling the thin line between the living and the dead, with no more access to the truth than anyone else. Electronic vocal processing will be used as characters speak for others, altering the facts, whether via blurrings of memory or intention. The Pittsburgh Opera cast includes Yazid Gray as The Woodcutter and The Outlaw (Luther Harlow), Andrew Turner as Policeman and The Man (Ambrose Raines), Madeline Ehlinger as Leona Raines and Leona's Mother, and Chuanyuan Liu as the Priest and the Medium. Nine instrumentalists, accompanied by a bed of site-reactive electronics, also function as characters, or facets of them, each in concert with a different testimonial. Christopher Cerrone discovered Akutagawa's short story In a Grove in the fall of 2014 while beginning to research a follow-up to his 2013 opera, Invisible Cities, which was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music. He explains, "In Akutagawa's story, I found a complex and multifaceted tale where the whole notion of objective truth was impossible; we, the readers, are left to decide for ourselves what happened. I thought this story, with its unique structure, would make the perfect opera. The shifting perspectives and changing repetitions of a single event would allow me to use the language of music to create an opera where the events are told and retold in pristine emotional detail; where the shifting and faulty memory of characters can be reinforced by vocal distortion and reverb." ADVERTISING Cerrone continues, "Having been introduced to Stephanie Fleischmann's lyrical and impactful libretti, I enlisted her to join the project. She brought a new nuance and complexity to the story - coloring in the details of our characters' lives. Now set in the Pacific Northwest in the rubble of a wildfire, our adaptation - a feminist retelling - focuses on the tragedy of conflicting personal truths. Every main character confesses to the murder of a man named Ambrose (a nod to the American writer Ambrose Bierce, an inspiration to Akutagawa); it is their inability to communicate with one another that drives the engine of the opera's conflict. As the subsequent years have passed, our society feels at a precipice where basic facts can no longer be agreed upon. As a result, the tale of this opera feels increasingly urgent." The shifting viewpoints of Akutagawa's classic short story lend themselves eloquently to music's ability to conjure, via repetition and variation, the ways human perception is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, composer Christopher Cerrone's music balances lushness and austerity, immersive textures, and telling details. This dynamic new adaptation melds the dramatic impact and interiority of Cerrone's unique voice with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann's charged, poetic text to produce a powerful interrogation into how we see, hear, remember, and believe. Director Mary Birnbaum's concept for In a Grove takes inspiration from James Turrell and Fujiko Nakaya, artists whose work renders subtle changes in perception: Viewers will enter a space already activated, via sound, light and fog - a tool used to obscure, to manipulate, perspicacity. Designed to inhabit a relatively intimate black box, the environment will feel as if it is progressively closing in around the audience, drawing them into the metaphysical space of the grove, a place where the ground shifts beneath their feet. This is a space of ambiguity and clarity, of beauty and menace, fragility and strength - in which a visceral sense of immediacy is amplified by the shifting psychic terrain and vast emotional space of the music.

Pittsburgh Opera has announced that it will stage the world premiere of Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera “In a Grove.” “In a Grove” is based on a short story of the same name by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and follows seven witness testimonies to a murder, each clashing in perspective; the work is famously the inspiration for Akira Kurosawa’s legendary 1950 film “Rashomon.” The opera has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, and Metropolis Ensemble. The cast includes Yazid Gray as The Woodcutter and The Outlaw (Luther Harlow), Andrew Turner as Policeman and The Man (Ambrose Raines), Madeline Ehlinger as Leona Raines and Leona’s Mother, and Chuanyuan Liu as the Priest and the Medium. Antony Walker conducts a production by Mary Birnbaum. “In Akutagawa’s story, I found a complex and multifaceted tale where the whole notion of objective truth was impossible; we, the readers, are left to decide for ourselves what happened. I thought this story, with its unique structure, would make the perfect opera. The shifting perspectives and changing repetitions of a single event would allow me to use the language of music to create an opera where the events are told and retold in pristine emotional detail; where the shifting and faulty memory of characters can be reinforced by vocal distortion and reverb,” said composer Christopher Cerrone in an official press statement. “Having been introduced to Stephanie Fleischmann’s lyrical and impactful libretti, I enlisted her to join the project. She brought a new nuance and complexity to the story – coloring in the details of our characters’ lives. Now set in the Pacific Northwest in the rubble of a wildfire, our adaptation – a feminist retelling – focuses on the tragedy of conflicting personal truths. Every main character confesses to the murder of a man named Ambrose (a nod to the American writer Ambrose Bierce, an inspiration to Akutagawa); it is their inability to communicate with one another that drives the engine of the opera’s conflict. As the subsequent years have passed, our society feels at a precipice where basic facts can no longer be agreed upon. As a result, the tale of this opera feels increasingly urgent,” added Cerrone.

“The role of Trovatore (Manrico) is brought to life by the gifted tenor Limmie Pulliam (Othello, Pagliacci). His tone was remarkably broad and powerful, conveying Manrico’s urgency and desperation. In his two most tender love songs, Pulliam expressed his torment of being torn between romantic passion and family duty flawlessly.”

“Musically, the night was a raging success. Debuting in the role of Manrico, Limmie Pulliam’s silky tenor was exquisite in the pianissimo passages and resonant in the character’s impassioned arias.“