Opera Carolina / Umsagnir

Whenever a relative opera novice or occasional toe-dipper tells me how he or she cried at the end of La bohème, I want to send them to La fanciulla del West. Of course I choke up at the end of Bohème – who doesn't? – but for a good bawling session, the fabulously maudlin finale of Fanciulla is the place to be. The plot doesn't bode well. Taking place in California in 1849 during the Gold Rush, our heroine, Minnie, runs a saloon for, and teaches bible to, the miners, who adore her. She becomes enamoured of a bandit, Ramerrez (disguised as Dick Johnson), and must deflect the advances of the Sheriff, Jack Rance. At the close of Act 2, she wins Ramerrez's life in a poker game with Rance (in which she cheats), but Ramerrez is recaptured and about to be lynched until Minnie arrives, whooping like a Valkyrie, and convinces the miners et al to return the love she has always shown them by setting him free. Ramerrez and Minnie ride off into the sunset singing "Addio mia California", the miners weep, realizing they will never see her again, and Puccini leaves the orchestra silent. Audience sobbing ensues. So it's campy, but also very sophisticated orchestrally, with dips into French impressionist harmonies and moments of transparent scoring amidst the fiery situations. And there are plenty of gigantic numbers and the most strenuous, soaring vocal lines for soprano and tenor Puccini ever wrote. Despite the miners' singing "Hello, Minnie," "Whiskey" and "“Doo dah, doo dah day," which invariably evokes laughter, one gets carried away with the "great symphonic poem," as Arturo Toscanini called it, and the plight of Minnie and her "bandito di strada," ridiculously translated here as "road agent." And the poker game has to be seen and heard to be believed. The New York City Opera opened its fall season very ambitiously with four performances at the 1100 seat Rose Theater. It is a co-production with opera houses in Lucca, Cagliari and North Carolina; with luck it won't bankrupt any of them. Ivan Stefanutti's set design consists of three risers (on logs – a nice, old-westish touch), projections of mountain ranges and snow (looking oddly like screen savers) and moveable staircase, tables, and so forth. His costumes are another story, with Minnie in weird denim culottes and slightly too form-fitting bodice, Ramerrez in a too-tight vest, too-loose chaps and what looked treacherously like a codpiece. Not to mention Rance, in a huge fur coat and electric blue suit! Soprano Kristin Sampson and tenor Jonathan Burton were perfectly matched: huge, bright voices with secure high B flats, Bs and Cs (the love duet was performed without cuts, the first time I've ever encountered that other than on recordings) and decidedly unsubtle delivery, which nonetheless thrilled. Kevin Short bullied his way through Rance's music, but certainly left a grand impression. Kenneth Overton's Jake Wallace, who sings a beautiful "song" about homesickness in Act 1, whose melody returns for the grand finale, was deeply touching. The dozen smaller roles, all of them well defined by Puccini, were all well taken and with so much ensemble work, made a grand sound. James Meena, the general director of Opera Carolina, led a loud, in-your-face performance which led to aural overload, but the NYCO Orchestra and Chorus were close to brilliant in their accuracy and enthusiasm. Stylistic complaints abound (and I've only hinted at what went on with the surtitles), but when all is said and done, this new production is miles ahead in fervor and song than was presented at the Met a few years ago. So check your disbelief at the cloakroom, leave your six shooter at the door, and hie thee to the next available performance of this opera.

Opera Carolina subscribers have never been as fervid about Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky as their Charlotte Ballet counterparts. On opening night of Opera Carolina's Eugene Onegin, you could calculate the difference by gazing at the empty seats at Belk Theater. Artistic director James Meena, with a generous deployment of musicians from the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, gave an admirable account of the score. Scenic designer Peter Dean Beck engineered a setting that evoked the look and feel of the Metropolitan Opera's Onegin, brimming with wintry birch tree trunks. Still, the new Opera Carolina production wasn't quite engineered to change subscribers' minds. In the early going, Alexy Lavrov's performance as Onegin paled in comparison with what I experienced from the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky in New York. The baritone's difficulties were compounded when the projected supertitles, wayward all evening long in tracking the action, failed altogether at the climactic moment when Onegin gave his polite and heartless answer to the passionate declaration of love that young Tatyana had written to him the night before. We lost some valuable nuances there

In his first performance of one of the most daunting spinto rôles in the repertory, tenor Peter Scott Drackley sang Verdi’s music for the Egyptian warrior Radamès with enviable assurance, mastering a tessitura that some of his fellow interpreters of the part are grateful to merely survive. The part’s difficulty is compounded by the character’s sole aria being positionsd in the opera’s first scene, moments after the singer’s initial appearance on stage. If this test unnerved Drackley, trepidation was not discernible in his singing of ‘Se quel guerrier io fossi!’ His timbre and vocal amplitude reminiscent more of Carlo Bergonzi than of Mario del Monaco and Franco Corelli, he simultaneously sang with brawn and lyricism. Untroubled by its three top B♭s (and the numerous recurrences of the tone throughout the opera), he phrased the romanza ‘Celeste Aida, forma divina’ expansively, regarding it as a private reverie rather than a stentorian declaration. Already suspecting Amneris’s duplicity, this Radamès exhibited caution in the terzetto until Aida’s arrival, when his hushed ‘Dessa’ signaled a change in his deportment. Radamès’s joy upon being named commander of the Egyptian army was unmistakable, but, here and in the cantabile in Act One’s final scene, Drackley also limned the soldier’s cognizance of the risks of his love for Aida. Returning victorious in the triumphal scene, this Radamès’s thoughts again turned to Aida, his request for pharaoh’s pardon for the Ethiopian prisoners born of his empathy for Aids’s suffering. Radamès joining his beloved on the bank of the Nile, unaware of being observed by her father, Drackley voiced ‘Pur ti riveggo, mia dolce Aida’ ardently, passion at last subjugating patriotic loyalty. His horror upon discovering Amonasro’s plot and Aida’s part in it was devastating, the top As with which Radamès lamented his unintended treason thrillingly sung. Drackley was a worthy adversary for Kim in the Act Four duet with Amneris, his defiance boldly but honorably articulated. After his serene ‘La fatal pietra sovra me si chiuse,’ Drackley movingly conveyed Radamès’s anguish at finding Aida concealed in the tomb in which he must perish. In the final duet, the tenor’s voice rose beautifully to the pianissimi above the stave. Crucially, Drackley sang Radamès’s music with his own voice, never forcing the tone or distorting his timbre’s innate luster by attempting to emulate another singer’s portrayal.

Italian tenor Gianluca Sciarpelletti portrayed Macduff, the Thane of Fife, first as a flinty, fecund warrior and later as a man broken by Macbeth’s merciless slaughter of his family. Discovering the corpse of the slain Duncan in Act One, Macduff’s shock, horror, and grief resounded in Sciarpelletti’s singing in the sextet and finale. Lamenting both the deaths of his children and his own feelings of helplessness and failure in his moving scene in Act Four, this Macduff declaimed the recitative ‘O figli, o figli miei!’ with wrenching emotion.