The Music Academy of the West’s 2021 Summer Festival, which has been a robust success, achieved under trying circumstances, will conclude with a sensational streamed event from the Vocal Institute: “Mirrorflores — Cinematic Opera,” premiering online at 5 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 14, and available for viewing for 30 days following the premiere.
The Music Academy describes what is essentially an anthology of pre-Mozart operas in the following words:
“Operatic arias and scenes ranging from baroque to bel canto will come to life on the beautiful Miraflores campus of the Music Academy of the West as a film, being presented online. Mirrorflores is a purposeful play on words to reflect past and present as [Vocal Institute creative director] James Darrah redefines how opera can be delivered through the cinematic lens.”
“I feel this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, for an entire generation of passionate artists to demonstrate power in new leadership, vocalize and take action on the boldest of ideas, solutions, and visions for the form that haven’t already been explored,” Darrah told “Opera Wire.”
“I want to have an active part in that kind of growth for the form with others–push opera further into real cinematic content … ,” Darrah said.
The program will consist of arias and scenes by the following composers:
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) — “Des bien que Venus nous dispense” from Dardenus (1739), performed by Grace Skinner, mezzo-soprano, Jordan Costa, tenor, Bin Yu Sanford piano.
George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) — “Dover, giustizia” from Ariodante (1735), with Lorenzo Zapata, bass-baritone, and Ga-Young Park, piano.
Henry Purcell (1659-95) — from The Fairy Queen ((1692), “See, I obey,” ”Turn thine eyes,” “My torch indeed,” and “They shall be as happy,” performed by Anush Avetisyan, soprano, Olivia Johnson, mezzo-soprano, Byron J. Mayes, baritone, and Alexander Soloway, piano.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) — from L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), “Pur ti miro” by Kaileigh Riess, soprano, Alma Neuhaus, mezzo-soprano, and Alexander Soloway piano.
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87) —from Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), “Quel silence effrayant! … Dieux! Qui me poursuivez” and “Quel language accablant … Unis des la plus tendre enfance,” by Josh Berg, tenor, Korin Thomas-Smith, baritone, and Ga-Young Park, piano.
Five more from Handel — from Serse/Xerxes (1738), “Ingannata Romilda,” “L’amerete?” “Se bramate d’amar,” with Kaileigh Riess, soprano, Alice Chung, mezzo-soprano, Bin Yu Sanford piano; from Ariodante (1735), “Tu prepararti a morire” by Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano and Juan Lázaro, piano; from L’Allegro, il Pensieroso, ed il Moderato (1740), “As steals the morn upon the night” with Katherine Lerner Lee, soprano, Shawn Roth, tenor, and Juan Lázaro, piano.
Before discussing the program as an emotional voyage through a very different time — for, while Proust did his time-traveling with the aid of his tastebuds, I do mine with my ears — I will put my nit-picking soul to rest by pointing out that The Fairy Queen is classed a “semi-opera,” and L’Allegro, il Pensieroso, ed il Moderato is not an opera at all, but, as his librettist described it, a “Pastoral Ode,” a setting of two great poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” by John Milton (1608-74) and a mediocre one, “Il Moderato,” by the said librettist, Charles Jennens (1700-73).
That is to say, it is not even an oratorio — which is, as Lord Kenneth Clark said, “a kind of sacred opera” — but a choral “ode,” without characters or narrative structure.
Handel was a superb musical dramatist. In his youth, he wrote lots of operas, in the Italian style of Lully, in Italian, but when he moved to England and tried to write operas with characters from the Bible, the clergy intervened — he was forbidden to “stage” a Biblical story, with costumes and sets, so he invented the oratorio.
As it happens, the lyrics to the exquisite “As steals the morn upon the night,” were not penned by “the divine Milton,” but by the emphatically terrestrial — one might even say flat-footed — Charles Jennens.
In Richard Strauss‘ opera Capriccio (1942), the elegant, highborn guests debate which is more important, words or music; as the Handel aria shows, music wins every time. Indeed, a mediocre text is more likely to liberate the composer from the burden of setting great literature; he can follow his own bliss, instead of the poet’s.
It is a secret truism of Hollywood that a bad book is easier to turn into a good movie, than a good book — still less, a great one. Something of the sort pertains in the world of vocal music.
Nevertheless, the English composers do better than most at setting their great writers to music. It was always hit or miss. Purcell was a friend and drinking companion of the great poet, John Dryden, who wrote the libretto for King Arthur, and The Faerie Queene began as a famous epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Yet, when he composed his operatic masterpiece Dido and Aeneas, he relied for his libretto on an Irish hack named Nahum Tate. It worked out pretty well, of course.
This concert/opera is a wonderful way to experience these operas, not as a sampler but as an anthology. The only one of them I have seen performed live was the Monteverdi.
My view was a privileged one, from the wings. I was a member of the stage crew, in charge of dropping and raising the curtains. In other words, I had something else to do besides just sit there, in the audience, listening.
At about the same time, I was also crew on a production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (somebody in the University of Washington Music Department was obviously into 17th century opera). Several factors contributed to the complexity of my response to the Monteverdi.
For one, although I have since come to regard Monteverdi as one of the three or four greatest composers who ever lived, I was then scarcely aware of him. For another, I was just beginning an affair with an alto in the cast.
But the main distraction, I guess, was that both the Purcell and the Monteverdi were produced in the auditorium of the high school where I had been but recently a student; I had been on that very stage, painting sets for the senior play (Carlo Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters), when a girl who had been working in the school office, where the school’s only radio was located, banged open the hall door and screamed across the dark auditorium that President Kennedy had been shot. (Nowadays, of course, such an event would have set all the cellphones ringing.)
These operas are all long, except the Purcell, and few of us have the patience to sit through one of them in its entirety. We have other things we plan to do the same evening, before or after the performance. The original audiences also did other things — eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, flirting — with the difference being, they did them during the performance.
While the plot creaked on, they would stuff themselves, get drunk, deal cards, roll dice, and carry on loud, increasingly boisterous conversations, until one of their favorite singers stepped forward for a solo, or the orchestra took up a familiar, beloved tune; where upon most, if not all, noise would cease while the piece lasted.
The earliest of these operas was written in 1643, the latest in 1774, and they happen to be the greatest works on the program. They also represent the two most important operatic composers before Mozart.
Monteverdi more or less invented the opera, and displayed a dramatic genius that has seldom, if ever, been equaled since; Gluck, with Orfeo ed Eurydice (1762) reoriented the opera in a radically different direction. (“His idea,” says Wikipedia, “was to make the drama of the work more important than the star singers who performed it, and to do away with dry recitative (recitativo secco, accompanied only by continuo) that broke up the action.)”
Most of the singers I have known have put Handel high on the list of composers they like to sing, and that may be part of why he is so heavily represented.
Tickets for this rich and varied concert are $10. You may get digital tickets at www.musicacademy.org/whats-on/vocal-institute-special-event-mirrorflores-part-i-online-2021/book/49203.
For other information, consult the Music Academy’s home page, https://www.musicacademy.org/.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.