Past Production Reviews
9“As Lady Macbeth, Lisa Algozzini charted the gradual degradation of a woman forced to reflect her husband’s ambitions back to him. Her “La luce langue” — haunted, fearful and quivering with uncertainty — became an elegy for people that she and Macbeth had not yet murdered, and “Una macchia” had a raw guilt to it…her performance was filled with gripping details.” (also featured in the New York Times' Top 5 Things to Do This Weekend)
“None of that would matter without great voices and acting, and Lady M [Macbeth] has both, starting with Lisa Algozzini. The diminutive Italian-American soprano makes the title role a tightly wound ball of dark energy. Her rich, powerful voice carries Lady Macbeth's unbridled ambition to the skies, whether she's rising from bed, pushing her husband to violence, or mourning an imaginary (or lost?) child. Baritone Kenneth Stavert matches her in strength, intensity and Verdi-worthiness as the thane Macbeth”
When New York’s Heartbeat Opera presented their “version” of Beethoven’s Fidelio four years ago, the reception was overwhelmingly positive. I felt skeptical and opted out of going and have regretted it since. I got another chance when, during the second week of February of 2022, the company brought their production back, this time to the Grace Rainey Rodgers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I am gladdened – and enriched – at having finally caught up with it. Beethoven’s support and passion for the concepts of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” first put forth in 1790, are well known. He was drawn to a play called “Léonore, ou l’Amour Conjugal” by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which depicted a devoted wife’s attempts to gain access to the prison in which her husband is being held for his political beliefs. She does so by disguising herself as a man, becomes a guard, and eventually frees him from both the prison and injustice. The play was as much about “l’amour conjugal” as it was about political suppression, and while Beethoven and his librettist had to sidestep the Austrian censors by stressing the former over the latter, no amount of fiddling with it could mask its message about freedom in the face of suppression.
Heartbeat Opera’s reimagining of Beethoven’s Fidelio has the political bite that Beethoven’s only opera had from the beginning. Its premiere in 1805 was hardly a success: the opera’s length was a factor, but another was that Vienna, where the performance took place, was occupied by Napoleon’s forces. The French had little interest in German opera in general, let alone one in which love triumphs over tyranny.
Heartbeat Opera’s contemporary makeover of Carl Maria von Weber’s story of a struggling marksman moves the story from 17th-century Bohemia to modern rural Texas.
“Lisa Algozzini has the dramatic soprano capacity for Lady M [Macbeth]”
“Lisa Algozzini’s Lady M [Macbeth] was bold, brittle and fearless. Only when her fate was sealed did her veneer crack. Algozzini soared through the vocal challenges of the role, capturing both the sparkle in the Brindisi and the terror in ‘Una macchia è qui tuttora!’ as she tried to rid herself of that damned spot…Macbeth recedes into the background as Lady M [Macbeth] takes center stage.”
