Ravel, L’Enfant et les sortilèges / Puccini, Gianni Schicchi

By Bernard Jacobson

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews

Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, soloists, members of the Auburn Symphony, cond. Brian Garman, dir. Peter Kazaras; Meydenbauer Center, Bellevue, WA, 6.4.2008 (BJ)

Cast for L’Enfant et les sortilèges – Picture © Rozarii Lynch

I should have had more faith. The prospect of Ravel’s masterpiece of enchanted childhood set, not in a room and garden, but in a subway station was the reverse of alluring. How could it possibly achieve the ravishing effect of the transformation from room to garden, which I shall never forget from the first time I ever saw the piece staged, fully half a century ago, by the Oxford University Opera Society?

Well, Peter Kazaras, artistic director of Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program, has worked magic before–in last season’s Falstaff, most notably – and he worked it again in this wonderful production. Eschewing the more obvious enchantments of Colette’s libretto, to focus instead on the surreal qualities of the story, he made L’Enfant more universal than ever, liberating it, as it were, from the outward trappings of one particular French-bourgeois context. The customary nursery-age infant was replaced by a rebellious teenager, and the putative animals by humans with mildly animal characteristics. It was the kind of directorial intervention that I usually find counter-productive. But Kazaras, it’s no exaggeration to say, is a genius of a director, and when he does it, it works.

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Pauline Viardot and Friends

By Harvey Steiman

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews.

Melody Moore, soprano; Fredericka von Stade, mezzo soprano; Vladimir Chernov, baritone; Peter Grunberg, piano; Marilyn Horne, host and narrator; a salon presented by San Francisco Performances at Herbst Hall, San Francisco, 22.3.2008 (HS)

Though discerning vocal recitalists occasionally slip one or two of her songs into their programs, it’s safe to say that Pauline Viardot and her music were new to most of the audience for “Pauline Viardot and Friends.” After the 2 1/2-hour “salon,” which made as much of the 19th century singer and composer’s relationships with famous figures of her day as it did of her beautifully crafted music, they may well have fallen in love with her.

The Romantic Russian writer Ivan Turgenev certainly tumbled for her, and spent much of his life as the “trois” in a sort of ménage-a-trois that included her much older husband. As described in the script, written by Georgia Smith, this was perfectly understandable. Pauline was quite a gal. She was fluent in four languages by the time she was 4, she dazzled Liszt with her piano virtuosity at 10 (he taught her for a while), became a singer at 16 and the toast of Europe by 22.

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Hartke, Crumb, Golijov

By Harvey Steiman

Reprinted with permission from Seen and Heard – Music Web’s Live Opera, Concert and Recital Reviews

Hartke, Crumb, Golijov: Members of eighth blackbird; Orquestra Los Pelegrinos; Dawn Upshaw, soprano. Presented by Cal Performances, Zellberbach Hall, Berkeley, California, 1.3.2008 (HS)

American soprano Dawn Upshaw’s fierce intelligence and supple voice bring extra layers of depth and excitement to contemporary music. That was in abundant evidence Saturday night as she energized Ayre, a song cycle by the Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, into exuberant existence. With help from the eclectic Orquestra Los Pelegrinos, the 40-minute performance capped off a program of highly listenable, ear-bending contemporary music that included a new piece by Stephen Hartke and George Crumb’s still-haunting 27-year-old evocation of whale song.

Ayre, which premiered in 2004, somehow melds the folk music of Jews, Christians and Arabs of late 15th-century southern Spain into contemporary orchestrations without losing their sense of authenticity. If anything, Golijov’s touch adds extra depth to their power, using electronics to bend the sound without breaking it.

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