Midsummer Voices

 

We caught a bit of opera and razzmatazz down at the Trailhead on a Saturday afternoon on the invitation of some friends who have been following the Mixed Precipitation Opera Company for several years. The drama was familiar—Romeo and Juliet. The performance took place on the grass behind the building, with young women and men on mountain bikes speeding up and down the hill in the distance. And the zany acting style, which I enjoy only to a degree, was counter-balanced by the inclusion of arias from Bellini's 1830 opera The Capulets and the Montagues. Shakespeare was nowhere to be seen, or heard, which I also consider a plus, and it made sense, considering Bellini based his opera not of the Bard's rendering but on a far older Italian novella.

The troupe seemed to be a little short on props. At one point in their update of the original tale, the two lovers drive away on a motorcycle. They didn't have one, however, so we watch Romeo and Juliet tear across the field in front of the stage in the back of a pick-up truck holding a cardboard image of a motorcycle on a stick.

At another point a duel takes place between two rivals making use of Venetian blinds!

It was all great fun, and the singing was very fine. So were the contributions from the pit band, which consisted of a cello, a violin, and an electric piano. The director wisely dispensed with anything resembling a recitative, replacing those passages with spoken dialog or a song by Fleetwood Mac, the Pixies, or the Fugees. A line dance here and there also livened the show.

Some viewers might have taken the casting of women in both the title roles as a gender-bending update. I did. Looking it up later I learned that Bellini wrote it that way. 

It was a brilliant but blistering afternoon, and many in the audience were more than happy to have their program mounted on a stick.

Our enthusiasm for opera revitalized, a few days later we attended a Metropolitan Opera "encore" performance of Il Travatore at a nearby multiplex. The production was lavish, the singers top-flight, as one might expect, considering the source. In fact, we saw this very performance a few years ago when it was originally released in theaters.

The plot is an odd one, and I'd forgotten the last few wrinkles. Though there were only ten people in the audience, I was reminded how noisy elderly viewers can be, chatting in a normal tone of voice as if they were sitting at home in their living room. But all things considered, it was a fine evening.

 A few days later we headed downtown after supper to listen in on an evening of art songs presented as part of the Source Song Festival that takes place every year in early August. We used to attend regularly during the fest's early years, when concerts were held near the river at Antonello Hall. Parking was easy to find, the concerts were free, they started early, and we could grab a bite to eat a block away before the show at Zen Box Izakaya's happy hour.  When the festival expanded and moved uptown to Westminster Church we lost touch.

The organization is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. The performance we attended featured rising opera star Tamara Wilson and renowned baritone Anthony Dean Griffey, and it was a great pleasure to be there. We even enjoyed the drive downtown, which took us through a traffic jam near Target Stadium along with thousands of people who were there to hear a concert by Pink. (Who?)

Once we got past the parking ramps near the stadium the traffic thinned out considerably, and we enjoyed watching people hurrying on foot down Hennepin Avenue to one of the theaters carrying a touring Broadway show.

Once we got past Nicollet Mall, the traffic disappeared.

Yes, our own little event was well-attended. Eighty people? A hundred and twenty? It was so low-key that no one was scanning tickets. (In fact, I think several of the organizers smiled at me warmly because I was the first person they'd seen that night whom they didn't know.) Conversation from row to row and from aisle to aisle before the performance was widespread; we might have been the only couple there who knew NO ONE else in the audience.

To my untrained ear, Tamara Wilson's voice was, above all else, strong, but I think I'd rather hear her doing the title role of Aida (which she sang at the Met recently) than the cute song cycle based on a book of childish magic spells with which she opened the evening. The warmth of Griffey's handling of two brief Ned Rorem songs came as a welcome contrast, and he also breathed more than a touch of sincerity and life into a few selections from Copland's somewhat hackneyed Old American Songs.

But Tamara really hit her stride after intermission. Her voice was perfect for Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder, sung in German with all due intensity and weight.

It was a fine evening from start to finished, and we even enjoyed wandering the church library at intermission looking at black-and-white photos of the many distinguished women and men who have been guest speakers at the Westminster Town Hall Forum over the years.

But something essential was missing, and I was pleased when Hilary noticed in the program that another concert was scheduled for the following night, during which the young artists who had participated in the week-long series of workshops that the festival is mostly "about" would display the fruits of their efforts on stage. This would be an even more interesting show, so I thought, with ten performers instead of two, and new compositions from start to finish.

And so it proved to be.

The following evening the traffic downtown was thinner. The voices on stage were more varied and no less pleasing. And the compositions were, if anything, more delightful, though they weren't all new. Each performer had chosen a famous song, and then had gone to work with their collaborating composer, spinning a new creation in light of that chosen classic. That's why songs by Wolf and Debussy, Schumann and Schönberg, Rachmaninoff and Grieg, showed up on the program alongside the compositions of the largely unknown women and men who had been the festival "fellows" during the week.

The words were largely incidental. The explanations for the words that the composers offered before each performance were sometimes revealing, sometimes insightful, occasionally misguided. They exposed each young composer's brilliance, youth, character, and  naiveté. The melodies and the singers, all of them sopranos, carried us along. No intermission. A giddy sense of excitement filled the room, as if we were witnesses to an event at which the participants had began to discover for themselves or reaffirm how good they really were.