Profile reviews
8“virtuosic skill, vocal wizardry, and commanding stage presence...Scotting's performance alone was well worth turning out for.”
‘Randall Scotting’s Orlando is highly watchable. He delivers a most convincing dramatic and musical performance... his vocal choices are imaginative and always stylish – ‘Fammi combattere’ is terrifically decorated – and he grows in intensity as the evening progresses, delivering an excellent mad scene.’
Past Production Reviews
2The score was begun just before Handel’s 66th birthday — a considerable age in the 18th century (Bach, like Handel, was born in 1685, but died the year before Jephtha was written.) His eyesight failing, the composer must have known he had only a limited time left to put pen to paper. Fate, mourning, and pain infuse the oratorio. It’s opening words, “It must be so,” are sung magnificently by the bass-baritone Dashon Burton as Zebul, “or the Ammonites, our lordly tyrants these eighteen years, will crush the race of Israel.” Much of the resulting sorrow is embedded in the words of Storgé (the mezzo-soprano Ann McMahon Quintero), part-lioness, part Iphis’s broken mother. Already, in Act 1, she has forebodings: “Some dire event hangs oe’r our heads, some woeful song we have to sing in misery extreme. O never, never was my foreboding mind distressed before with such incessant pangs.” (Little did she foresee an improbable angel coming to the rescue.) The fine soprano Ava Pine was the sweet-voiced Iphis; Randall Scotting, as her amorous Hamor, dominated the proceedings whenever he let his magnificent countertenor loose. Their impassioned Act 1 duet resonated throughout the evening, an indelible reminder that the casualty of Jephtha’s catastrophic bargain is the promise of this young couple.
Flight takes place over 24 hours in a busy airport terminal governed by an icy, rule-bound controller, a pair of over-sexed flight attendants, and an eagle-eyed immigration officer. Among the passengers are Bill and Tina, a couple hoping to rekindle their sex life on a sun-drenched holiday, a middle-aged woman eager to rendezvous for the first time with her 22-year-old overseas fiancé, and a diplomatic appointee and his heavily pregnant wife en route to Minsk (appropriately known as Minskman and Minskwoman). Into the mix Dove and De Angelis throw a refugee trapped in the terminal building without papers, a character inspired by Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in a departure lounge at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006 (the same story that inspired Spielberg’s 2004 movie The Terminal). There isn’t a weak link in the cast, with outstanding diction rendering the subtitles almost unnecessary. American countertenor Randall Scotting is marvelous as the Refugee, his plangent, rich-toned instrument possessing just the right degree of otherworldliness to suggest his mysterious origins and the complexities of his unique dilemma. He’s a compelling actor as well, which ensures that his final aria and its dramatic reveal (no spoilers) lands with due pathos. He’s well matched by the fearless coloratura of Canadian soprano Sharleen Joynt who delivers a glittering tour de force as the icy Controller. Meticulous and contained, she stamps out misdemeanors from her all-seeing vantage point with a ruthless and chilling efficiency.
