"Fresh Faces"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2005.
New York City Opera opened in February, 1944, at
the height of the battles of Anzio and Truk. If skeptics thought it
frivolous to start an opera company in the middle of a world war,
Fiorello LaGuardia straightened them out: the music-loving Mayor
believed that opera was essential to city life, and he wanted lower-
and middle-class New Yorkers to have it at affordable prices, without
pretension. The company was then part of City Center, on West
Fifty-fifth Street, which now concentrates on dance and musical
theatre. The composer-critic Deems Taylor called the City Center Opera
“democracy in action, a democracy realizing the work of the
individual.” Tickets started at eighty-five cents—nine and a half
dollars, in today’s currency—and topped out at $2.20. These days, you
have to pay quite a bit more to get through the doors of what LaGuardia
dubbed “the people’s opera company.” Tickets go up to a hundred and
twenty dollars, which is more than most orchestra seats for “Spamalot.”
Don’t
blame City Opera for falling short of its populist mission. The
politics of Lincoln Center, where the company moved in 1966, killed
that dream. The new complex had two large-scale theatres: the
Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theatre. The second was
designed for New York City Ballet, but another tenant was needed to
fill out the season. If City Opera had not used the space, Martin Sokol
explains in his history of the house, the Met would probably have
started a secondary company, driving it out of business. So City Opera
had little choice but to move in, and, once it did, ticket prices shot
up. Many great things have happened at the State Theatre since—Beverly
Sills’s bel-canto tours de force, Christopher Keene’s explorations of
modernist music drama, recent art-diva turns by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
and Lauren Flanigan—but the house has never found an identity as strong
as the one that LaGuardia and other city leaders forged.
At
the start of this season, City Opera made a gesture toward returning to
its roots. It presented two shows under the slogan “Opera-for-All,”
with every ticket priced at twenty-five dollars. One show featured the
opera-friendly pop star Rufus Wainwright alongside City Opera regulars;
the other offered “Madama Butterfly.” The people came: both shows sold
out. How the company could permanently cut prices across the board
without running a catastrophic deficit is difficult to imagine, but one
thing seems fairly certain: a twenty-five-dollar-a-seat opera house
wouldn’t have to work very hard to sell out.
Since
1996, City Opera has been led by Paul Kellogg, a courtly and canny
administrator. Kellogg recently announced that he will retire at the
end of next season. Now sixty-eight, he says that he lacks the energy
to keep working fifteen-hour days, much of it spent on fund-raising and
marketing. He may also be weary of the city politics in which the
company became embroiled three years ago, after it bid to join an arts
center at Ground Zero. That plan came to nothing, along with most high
hopes for the site. City Opera is still looking to build its own house,
perhaps on Amsterdam Avenue near Juilliard.
The Ground
Zero setback aside, the Kellogg era at City Opera has been stable and
successful—a model balancing act. Productions have followed a sensible
formula, breaking down into approximately five categories: stagings of
Handel and other Baroque operas, wavering between wit and camp; mildly
revisionist productions of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, with
young, gifted, good-looking American singers (Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a
Reims” was a hit this fall); offbeat twentieth-century fare (Strauss’s
“Capriccio,” Paul Dukas’s “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue,” and Richard Rodney
Bennett’s “The Mines of Sulphur”); new opera of the not too demanding
sort (Rachel Portman’s “The Little Prince” arrives in November); and
stylish incursions into operetta and musical theatre (Gilbert and
Sullivan’s “Patience,” this fall).
“Il Viaggio a Reims”
is the last and possibly the giddiest of Rossini’s Italian comedies. It
depicts onstage the very occasion that it was commissioned to honor:
the coronation of Charles X, in 1825, and the gathering of
international notables to celebrate it. (Picture, if you will, a
contemporary opera commissioned for a Presidential inauguration and set
at the Inaugural Ball.) Allen Moyer’s sets evoked a goofy but stylish
imperial spa, and James Robinson supplied fluid direction. The female
leads—Cheryl Evans, Heather Buck, Allyson McHardy, and Maria
Kanyova—were at the heart of the action, working hard to master
Rossini’s florid style and enjoying themselves immensely in the
process. Javier Abreu stood out among the men, with his richly ringing
tenor. George Manahan, City Opera’s music director, led a performance
of self-effacing excellence; the orchestra is a much sharper unit than
it was a decade ago.
City Opera has done well by the
operas of Richard Strauss in the past; in 1999, it presented a riveting
production of “Intermezzo,” with Flanigan tearing into the role of a
famous German musician’s wife. Last year, though, it put on a
maddeningly grim version of Strauss’s “Daphne,” and the new “Capriccio”
was even grimmer. The work is Strauss’s farewell to opera, a sublimely
selfconscious meditation on the nature of the art. It was first heard
in Nazi Germany, in 1942, a fact that the director, Stephen Lawless,
did not let us forget. George Mosley, who sang the role of the Count,
had to imitate Hitler’s oratorical gestures, and a bust of Gluck in one
scene looked like the one that Goebbels sent to Strauss for his
birthday. The sets were at once dour and tacky; we came to terms with
the German past by staring at ugly furniture. Pamela Armstrong didn’t
have the right soprano gleam for the central role of the Countess, but
she lent warmth to a chilly show. Eric Halfvarson, as the director La
Roche, ignored the “context” and revelled in the gruff, wise
personality of his character.
The notion of reviving
“Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” was lovely on paper. This is an opera that the
Met is unlikely to revisit, unless Plácido Domingo embarks upon a new
career as a French soprano. “Ariane,” first heard in 1907, tells the
tale of Bluebeard and his dungeon of wives, but, unlike so many
early-twentieth-century works, including Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle,”
it allows its female protagonist a measure of freedom; Ariane, the
sixth wife, walks free in the end, having tried and failed to liberate
the others. The score takes off from Debussy’s “Pelléas et
Mélisande”—the libretto is by Maurice Maeterlinck, the poet of
“Pelléas”—but it finds an opulent sound-world all its own. It
interested composers as various as Strauss (who conducted it in 1935),
Puccini (the opening notes of “Turandot” can be heard here), and
Dukas’s devoted student Olivier Messiaen (who admired the synesthetic
color-coding of harmonies). Alas, the performance marched along where
it should have glided. Leon Botstein conducted at too unvarying a
tempo, and Renate Behle was miscast as Ariane; she sounded like Isolde
with a power drill.
However the productions turn out,
it’s satisfying to watch the progress of City Opera’s singers, some of
whom are still making their way through the early stages of an opera
career. One is Carla Thelen Hanson, who had taken several years off to
start a family. She came to the house last year as a cover singer, and
got a quick promotion to Tosca: her dark-grained, strongly felt “Vissi
d’arte” sailed right up to the uppermost balcony, where I was sitting.
The role of Bluebeard in Dukas’s opera is actually a small one, but
Ethan Herschenfeld made the most of it, giving a sharp portrait of a
dark, wounded spirit. And Kevin Burdette, playing the self-infatuated
poet Archibald in “Patience,” showed off his plummy, Thomas
Hampson-like voice—was he doing an impersonation, perchance?—and also
his phenomenal agility. He held his own in a giddy song-and-dance
routine with the West End veteran Michael Ball. I’m told that Burdette
is deciding between a career in opera and law. As James Joyce’s wife
once said of her husband, he should stick to the singing.