Sunday, May 23, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
3 Decembers: Chicago Opera Theatre
This was really fun!THE DIVA
The legendary Frederica von Stade, described by The New York Times as "one of America's finest artists and singers," makes her last Chicago appearances before retirement in this opera written especially for her by Jake Heggie, of Dead Man Walking fame.
THE STORY
A glamorous stage actress reveals a shocking secret of their family’s past to her two adult children facing dark challenges of their own. Based on an original play by Terrence McNally with a libretto by Gene Scheer.
THE SCORE
Jake Heggie’s intimate score features just 11 musicians, and will be performed with Heggie himself at the piano. “Jake Heggie has a true gift for soaring and meaningful melody, a great ear for orchestral effects, a talent for picking good source material, and a knack for crafting affecting melodrama (in the best sense of that word) that can move an audience to tears.”—Opera Today
Monday, May 10, 2010
Frederica von Stade
Wow. This was really, really fun and really touching!
From the Tribune review:
Unlike those singers who keep performing well past their sell-by dates, Frederica von Stade is going into retirement in good vocal shape, head held proudly. Her Chicago farewell recital Monday night in a packed Harris Theater was an occasion for the beloved American mezzo-soprano to look back fondly on a remarkable career that has spanned 40 years, through songs that hold personal significance to her.
It was evident from the good-natured rapport the singer enjoyed with her audience and with her fluent pianist, Jake Heggie, what a treasurable artist she remains, even as grandmother-hood beckons. Von Stade could have had no finer musical partner than Heggie, in whose opera "Three Decembers" she is starring this week at Chicago Opera Theater, which presented Monday's event. The composer has long been her close friend, muse and collaborator. It was only fitting that she should include two excerpts from "Paper Wings," a song cycle he wrote for her, based on her own texts.
Heggie isn't the only prominent American composer whose songs she spun into vocal gold. Ned Rorem was represented, as were Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. Lee Hoiby's "The Serpent" and William Bolcom's "Amor" reminded one what a wonderful storyteller she can be.
"Most of my career I have spent playing naughty young boys," the singer observed before plunging into selections that portray both naughty boys (the gavotte from Thomas' "Mignon") and bad girls (Ravel's saucy "Nicolette"). Complementary mugging was thrown in at no additional charge.
Von Stade leavened her mostly lightweight program with more serious songs, including Charlotte's aria from Massenet's "Werther" (interrupted by overeager applause) and Sondheim's bittersweet "Send in the Clowns," sung so that every word mattered. Another Heggie song, "Primary Colors," brought the program to a quiet close before triggering a roaring, standing ovation.
The relatively short program could have stood a few more encores than the three the artist offered. They were Leonard Bernstein's "Greeting," "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No" and "Ah, quel diner," her signature turn as Offenbach's tipsy Perichole. By then cameras were clicking all over the hall, in delirious defiance of house rules.
From the Tribune review:
Unlike those singers who keep performing well past their sell-by dates, Frederica von Stade is going into retirement in good vocal shape, head held proudly. Her Chicago farewell recital Monday night in a packed Harris Theater was an occasion for the beloved American mezzo-soprano to look back fondly on a remarkable career that has spanned 40 years, through songs that hold personal significance to her.
It was evident from the good-natured rapport the singer enjoyed with her audience and with her fluent pianist, Jake Heggie, what a treasurable artist she remains, even as grandmother-hood beckons. Von Stade could have had no finer musical partner than Heggie, in whose opera "Three Decembers" she is starring this week at Chicago Opera Theater, which presented Monday's event. The composer has long been her close friend, muse and collaborator. It was only fitting that she should include two excerpts from "Paper Wings," a song cycle he wrote for her, based on her own texts.
Heggie isn't the only prominent American composer whose songs she spun into vocal gold. Ned Rorem was represented, as were Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. Lee Hoiby's "The Serpent" and William Bolcom's "Amor" reminded one what a wonderful storyteller she can be.
"Most of my career I have spent playing naughty young boys," the singer observed before plunging into selections that portray both naughty boys (the gavotte from Thomas' "Mignon") and bad girls (Ravel's saucy "Nicolette"). Complementary mugging was thrown in at no additional charge.
Von Stade leavened her mostly lightweight program with more serious songs, including Charlotte's aria from Massenet's "Werther" (interrupted by overeager applause) and Sondheim's bittersweet "Send in the Clowns," sung so that every word mattered. Another Heggie song, "Primary Colors," brought the program to a quiet close before triggering a roaring, standing ovation.
The relatively short program could have stood a few more encores than the three the artist offered. They were Leonard Bernstein's "Greeting," "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No" and "Ah, quel diner," her signature turn as Offenbach's tipsy Perichole. By then cameras were clicking all over the hall, in delirious defiance of house rules.
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Streetcar at Writers' Theatre
Wow. Wow. Wow. David Cromer directed, our friends Matt and Stacy as Stanley and Stella. Too, too good.
From Chris Jones's Tribune review:
You enter the theater through the door to the bathroom, where Blanche DuBois soaks and Stanley Kowalski wipes off his sweat. Inside, Stella and Stanley's meanly appointed railroad apartment overwhelms the theater, like a giant, faded streetcar derailed in a sultry swamp.
Yet nothing ever stops moving in David Cromer's restless conception of desire, Tennessee Williams-style. Fans hum. Light bulbs swing. Memories float. Cats howl. Beds creak. Punches are thrown. Fiery jazz stabs the air.
Such is the astonishingly level of intimacy here. Such is the attention to the most precise little details. Such is the feast for the senses on offer in Glencoe.
Cromer, the breakout Chicago director who has been handed three Broadway shows inside two seasons, is inarguably now the definitive current interpreter of mid-century American poetic drama. And since the likes of William Inge and Williams floated up from a heartland that could no longer contain them, there's something apt in Cromer himself replicating their journey from Chicago.
And although New York now may have Cromer trapped inside a Broadway proscenium moving celebrities around, this astonishingly talented director still best springs to life with young, raw actors in a Chicago-style space like Writers' Theatre, where you can reach out and touch Stella's vitals and Stanley's vittles.
Thanks to the all-embracing conception of designer Collette Pollard, some of the seats in this configuration are little more than inches away from the bed where those things that happen between man and women in the night make everything else all right. Assuming you're not, like poor Blanche, the third wheel.
Cromer's version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” makes some unconventional choices. Cromer stages the shadows that dance in Blanche's head — her unfortunate affair with a fellow who turned out to be a “degenerate,” the lost young man who was her melancholy love. And yet Natasha Lowe's uptight Blanche has little in the way of faded Southern gentility; she's more of a full-on talky, prissy neurotic, messing up her long-suffering sister's messy but otherwise viable marriage. When they pack her off, you don't feel so much sympathy as relief for all concerned. That, for some, will be a problem.
Yet Cromer is clearly trying both to treat the play (which features gorgeous sound from Josh Schmidt, Cromer's collaborator on “The Adding Machine”) as an overtly poetic conception (you will have never seen the nightmarish flores sequence better integrated into the whole) and also reveal its oft-hidden inner truths. You might not feel for Blanche, but you surely sense the danger of her situation and make a mental note never to be dependent yourself on the kindness of strangers.
Matt Hawkins' Stanley and Stacy Stoltz's Stella are a couple of needy kids who at least have each other's bodies. Stoltz, who is doing the best work of her career here, doesn't come off as slumming it, but as a woman who got lucky and knows it. Hawkins might not have the primal qualities traditionally associated with Stanley — he's loud and brash yet with barking tenor top-notes — but he's intermittently cocky and needy. Actually, he's a more sympathetic figure here than his nemesis, whom Cromer likes to put in a cold blue light. And that makes for a very interesting ride.
Individual scenes unspool beautifully, including a typically understated but emotionally devastating turn from Danny McCarthy in the role of Mitch. Time and again, scenes are refocused, ripped apart, put back together.
Take, for example, the crucial progression after the fight, when violent Stanley has smacked his wife and she has left him to hide out in the apartment upstairs.
You see Stanley pull himself together. Then you see Stella's foot and leg slowly descending from above, like a redemptive angel. The actors (who are married in real life) head to the bed to make young love, leaving Blanche stewing with Mitch on the porch, incredulous that her abused sister has returned home.
Lowe, her voice blocked and uptight, shows us a woman who doesn't know how to be anything but indignant. But although she is the one to whom Williams gave the lines, and thus the traditional focus of a production, Cromer ensures that you can hardly hear what she's saying for the creaks and cries of passion coming from Stanley and Stella's bed, as a man pulls his woman down and she finds life in her fall.
From Chris Jones's Tribune review:
You enter the theater through the door to the bathroom, where Blanche DuBois soaks and Stanley Kowalski wipes off his sweat. Inside, Stella and Stanley's meanly appointed railroad apartment overwhelms the theater, like a giant, faded streetcar derailed in a sultry swamp.
Yet nothing ever stops moving in David Cromer's restless conception of desire, Tennessee Williams-style. Fans hum. Light bulbs swing. Memories float. Cats howl. Beds creak. Punches are thrown. Fiery jazz stabs the air.
Such is the astonishingly level of intimacy here. Such is the attention to the most precise little details. Such is the feast for the senses on offer in Glencoe.
Cromer, the breakout Chicago director who has been handed three Broadway shows inside two seasons, is inarguably now the definitive current interpreter of mid-century American poetic drama. And since the likes of William Inge and Williams floated up from a heartland that could no longer contain them, there's something apt in Cromer himself replicating their journey from Chicago.
And although New York now may have Cromer trapped inside a Broadway proscenium moving celebrities around, this astonishingly talented director still best springs to life with young, raw actors in a Chicago-style space like Writers' Theatre, where you can reach out and touch Stella's vitals and Stanley's vittles.
Thanks to the all-embracing conception of designer Collette Pollard, some of the seats in this configuration are little more than inches away from the bed where those things that happen between man and women in the night make everything else all right. Assuming you're not, like poor Blanche, the third wheel.
Cromer's version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” makes some unconventional choices. Cromer stages the shadows that dance in Blanche's head — her unfortunate affair with a fellow who turned out to be a “degenerate,” the lost young man who was her melancholy love. And yet Natasha Lowe's uptight Blanche has little in the way of faded Southern gentility; she's more of a full-on talky, prissy neurotic, messing up her long-suffering sister's messy but otherwise viable marriage. When they pack her off, you don't feel so much sympathy as relief for all concerned. That, for some, will be a problem.
Yet Cromer is clearly trying both to treat the play (which features gorgeous sound from Josh Schmidt, Cromer's collaborator on “The Adding Machine”) as an overtly poetic conception (you will have never seen the nightmarish flores sequence better integrated into the whole) and also reveal its oft-hidden inner truths. You might not feel for Blanche, but you surely sense the danger of her situation and make a mental note never to be dependent yourself on the kindness of strangers.
Matt Hawkins' Stanley and Stacy Stoltz's Stella are a couple of needy kids who at least have each other's bodies. Stoltz, who is doing the best work of her career here, doesn't come off as slumming it, but as a woman who got lucky and knows it. Hawkins might not have the primal qualities traditionally associated with Stanley — he's loud and brash yet with barking tenor top-notes — but he's intermittently cocky and needy. Actually, he's a more sympathetic figure here than his nemesis, whom Cromer likes to put in a cold blue light. And that makes for a very interesting ride.
Individual scenes unspool beautifully, including a typically understated but emotionally devastating turn from Danny McCarthy in the role of Mitch. Time and again, scenes are refocused, ripped apart, put back together.
Take, for example, the crucial progression after the fight, when violent Stanley has smacked his wife and she has left him to hide out in the apartment upstairs.
You see Stanley pull himself together. Then you see Stella's foot and leg slowly descending from above, like a redemptive angel. The actors (who are married in real life) head to the bed to make young love, leaving Blanche stewing with Mitch on the porch, incredulous that her abused sister has returned home.
Lowe, her voice blocked and uptight, shows us a woman who doesn't know how to be anything but indignant. But although she is the one to whom Williams gave the lines, and thus the traditional focus of a production, Cromer ensures that you can hardly hear what she's saying for the creaks and cries of passion coming from Stanley and Stella's bed, as a man pulls his woman down and she finds life in her fall.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Alumni Weekend
It was alumni weekend. I didn't carry the SSD banner this year, but got to work the alumni medal awards breakfast with Gary Becker and Warren Winiarski!
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Ryerson Lecture, Shulamit Ran: Music for a Time and Place
The Ryerson leccture is the U of C's annual lecture by a faculty member to the University community. Ran presented a great talk, but it was too bad she couldn't play the music from an upcoming composition.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Francesco Cavalli’s Giasone at Chicago Opera Theatre
From the Chicago Tribune review:A first-rate cast of promising young singers and the city's period instrument group Baroque Band, under Scottish early music specialist Christian Curnyn, pumped new life into a baroque opera that could have proved a well-intentioned snooze. Nearly three hours in the theater flew by as if on winged feet. Everything about "Giasone" is good enough to make you wonder why the composer's stage works remained unperformed and under-appreciated until the Cavalli revival of the late 1960s and early '70s.
...
The libretto uses the legend of Jason winning the Golden Fleece as pretext for mixing a satirical cocktail of sex, lies, intrigue, low comedy and attempted murder. This Jason is not only a fearless hero but also a serial seducer who must juggle two royal paramours, Medea and Isifile, each of whom has borne him twins. Complication is heaped on complication until the pathetic playboy gets his comeuppance and everything is happily resolved at the last moment.
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