The opera had an old Hollywood movie feel to it, in the best way. The leads are given big star gestures, bolstered by a large ensemble of character actors, all of whom were vivid and deep in their roles.
The cast is led by tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro, in an emotionally expressive performance as Giorgio (whose father was an early proponent of Mussolini), and soprano Rachel Blaustein, making a stellar NYCO debut as Micól (who senses the doom and the likelihood of being the last in the long Finzi-Contini line)
Soprano Meredith Bloomfield...relates the tale of the Dutchman to her sailor’s-wife cohorts, giving a wide-eyed fascination to her performance, and declares that she means to be the instrument of the poor man’s salvation.
Played by Wagnerian dramatic soprano Meredith Bloomfield, her first aria, the ballad “Johohoe! Traft ihr das Schiff im Meer an” (“There is a ship that sails the seas”) is delivered with meticulous authority, exquisitely negotiating its many vocal leaps and dramatic pauses.
Witnessing the LOTNY production makes one wonder why Owen Wingrave is not performed more often: it has a small cast of eight with juicy roles for all of the characters, evenly divided between men and women’s roles, not true of either of the composer’s operas, Peter Grimes or Billy Budd.
The part of Mrs. Coyle, Owen’s lone steady supporter, was vividly filled by the versatile Canadian-American-Irish soprano Amelia Watkins, whose vibrant (but never unruly) tones didn’t preclude near-perfect diction; she did handsome credit to the memory of its creator, the shamefully never-damed Heather Harper, who’d died just three weeks earlier. There was even a supernumerary bonus in the strong presence of Broadway legend Penny Fuller as the Wingrave housekeeper. Deftly holding the show together from a challenging stage-right, stage-level “pit,” conductor Richard Cordova (using Britten protégé David Matthews’s chamber orchestration of 2007) led his fifteen expert players in a nuanced, balanced reading that seemed, too, to relish this often angular score’s every jagged edge. If my admiration never turned to love, well, I’m not blaming anyone but Britten.
