That’s a choice line from Steve Smith’s story for the Times, “Darkly Spiritual Challenge to Injustice,” about Tippett’s most famous work and it’s themes of justice and social change.  The piece will be performed in concert on Friday (2/3) by the Collegiate Chorale at Carnegie Hall.

Perhaps it’s that bravery, that hold-your-chin-up attitude, which allows Koestenbaum the courage to delve so deeply into the shame, guilt and suffering of others.

“Humiliation” is the latest book by Koestenbaum who will appear on Thursday at the University of Albany in an afternoon seminar and evening reading, sponsored by the New York State Writers’ Institute.  As the title suggests, his new book explores the humiliating moments of a wide range of historical figures, up to and including the sex scandals of American politicians.  He also throws in plenty of moments from his own life.

Degradation may seem like a surprising departure for the author whose six previous books of nonfiction include highly personal, almost loving biographies of Andy Warhol and Jackie Kennedy Onassis (“Jackie Under My Skin”) two of the great, glittering icons of the 20th century.

Yet in a recent discussion Koestenbaum points to the pivotal importance of a shaky self-image in the lives of the first lady and the pop artist.  He also suggests that it’s the most troubled part of their lives that made them appealing topics to him.

“Jackie was a queen and a mistress of ceremonies and very imperial in manner.  But then there was the bad press she received for defection (to marry Aristotle Onassis) and the footage that weirdly records the bloodied suit,” says Koestenbaum. “And Andy Warhol was spat upon as a child and always an outsider.  His sense of having a bad body, bad skin, bad hair gave him a profound sense of being untouchable. That was the M.O. of his mature career.”

Okay, everybody hurts.  But is Koestenbaum, who’s a distinguished professor of English at the City University of New York, just an intellectual version of a tabloid reporter, spinning out books of scandal for the high brow set?

Actually, Koestenbaum elevates the discussion by regularly making statements like “Humiliation is the kiln through which the human soul passes and receives a burnishing and consolidation.”

Using the psychological term abrecation – the release of a previously repressed emotion through reliving the experience that caused it – he goes on to explain humiliation’s deeper significance.

“By repeating a traumatic episode, you release it’s toxicity, you convert it.  It’s repeating the acts of shame to get cheerful,” he explains. “Writing the book had an abreactive effect for me, and before that so did teaching a course called ‘Humiliation.’ We were all in a good mood and didn’t talk about personal things.  But it was a personal subject and we realized that one could be very cheerful discussing humiliation if you had a supportive group.”

Being an author isn’t easy on the psyche though.  Whatever healing may have come to Koestenbaum through the writing about humiliation was at least somewhat jeopardized by the publishing process, fraught with editing, interviews and especially reviews.

“Publishing itself is so weird and elating and depressing, such a mixed bag,” he says.

Besides his non-fiction books, Koestenbaum has also written five books of poetry and a novel.  He made his first mark on the cultural map in 1993 with “The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire.” A brash and daring treatise on the passionate connection between gay men and opera, it includes chapters on “opera queens,” record collecting, and the cult of soprano Maria Callas.

Humiliation, it seems, is a thread that’s laced throughout classical music, especially the worship of opera divas, and the gorgeous prolonged deaths, night after night, of Violetta, Mimi and all the other tragic female characters.

Koestenbuam says that he just didn’t use the h-word in writing “The Queens Throat,” thinking it too extreme at the time.

“There’s a deeply felt connection between the shame of a flawed public performance and the mercilessly rigorous and perfectionist standards in classical music interpretation,” he says.

Perhaps the only realm where there are higher, even more unattainable standards is that of masculinity.

“Many gay men’s narrative is about failing in masculinity. But everyone does. It’s impossible to ever succeed at masculinity,” states the 53-year old author.  “As a gay man, I have a complex, very particular understanding of the melodrama of masculinity.  As someone my age, it’s taken for granted there’s shame in the package. That’s why a straight man could not have written this book.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Sunday afternoon’s program featured something far better than a risky premiere.  Instead, it was Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, which was written in 2009 and received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music.  That award doesn’t always mean enduring quality but Higdon’s concerto has got the stuff.

One of today’s most widely performed composers, Higdon writes in the current style that might be dubbed post-ugly.  The concerto, like most of her music, is lively, fluent and engaging, but also extraordinarily demanding on the players, both soloist and orchestra alike.

It was written for and recorded by star virtuoso Hilary Hahn, a former student of Higdon’s at the Curtis Institute.  Sunday’s soloist was another Curtis student, 21-year old Benjamin Beilman.  He’s the first performer to take up the work after Hahn and this was his debut in the piece. He delivered with distinction and flair.

The first movement’s cadenza is a genuine tour de force, with a pilling up of themes and showy devices.  Higdon, who spoke before the piece, said she wondered if it was actually playable but Beilman tackled it with ease and confidence

After a stretch of romantic relaxation in the central movement, based on the form of the chaconne, comes the finale, which Higdon likened to a violin in a race at the Olympics.  The hurdles on the track were the colorful explosions from the orchestra.  The Glens Falls players shined in the numerous brief solos.

Beilman’s encore, from Prokofiev’s Sonata, revealed one of his gifts that was largely missing from the hyperactive concerto, a warm radiant tone.

After intermission, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral” sounded like a different orchestra had taken the stage. The woodwinds were sour and out of tune at the launch of the first movement and the babbling brook of the second had a meager flow rate.  But Peltz added momentum with each movement and the playing got better for it.

Despite the struggles, or perhaps because of them, it was an engaging performance over all.  In other words, there was always something to listen for, good or bad, rather than just sitting through another accurate but rote account of the familiar classic.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

IN OTHER HIGDON NEWS:

The long awaited opera (Higdon’s first) for the San Francisco Symphony will no longer be in San Francisco.  The Sante Fe Opera has stepped up to take on the commission.  After a long search for the right subject, and then a protracted negotiation for rights, the source material is in place:  ”Cold Mountain,” the best-selling novel by Charles Frazier.  The Opera Company of Philadelphia is a partner in the commission and production and the premiere is slated for 2015.

Here are more details from the Sante Fe Opera’s press release:

COLD MOUNTAIN – Jennifer Higdon, composer; Gene Scheer, librettist

2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.  Cold Mountain is Charles Frazier’s powerful account of one soldier, W. P. Inman, who deserts the Confederate army as the war is coming to an end and makes his way back to his home on Cold Mountain.  The novel won the 1997 National Book Award and was made into a film in 2003. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

The Civil War has a special resonance for New Mexicans.  The New Mexico Territory was the site of one of the final and westernmost battles of the Civil War, fought at nearby Glorieta Pass in 1862.  Historians have called it a major event in the history of the Civil War.  The village of Pecos is the site of an annual reenactment of the skirmish.

Cold Mountain composer Jennifer Higdon is one of the most in-demand composers today.   She was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto and a Grammy the same year for her Percussion Concerto. blue cathedral, written in 2000, on the death of her brother, has become one of the most performed modern orchestral  works.  Her compositions have been performed by leading orchestras throughout the country and she has received commissions from numerous instrumental ensembles.

The versatile American librettist and composer Gene Scheer is the librettist.  Among his many projects are several with composer Jake Heggie, the latest being Moby Dick for the Dallas Opera which was premiered in 2010.  He collaborated with Tobias Picker on two operas, An American Tragedy, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, andTherese Raquin for the Dallas Opera.  He has written songs for singers including Renée Fleming, Sylvia McNair and Stephanie Blythe, and a song cycle, Voices from World War II for Nathan Gunn.

Nathan Gunn, who will sing the role of W.P. Inman, is one of the country’s leading operatic baritones.  He has performed in virtually every major opera house in the world and is admired as an interpreter of new works including operas by Tobias Picker, Daron Hagen, Andre Previn and Peter Eötvös.  He collaborated with Gene Scheer on the opera An American Tragedy, and the song cycle Voices from World War II.  Gunn is also a distinguished concert performer and recitalist.  He appeared in the 1998 production of Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict and the following year in Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos in Santa Fe.  He is currently Professor of Voice at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

This year’s entry is “Die Liebe der Danae.” Richard Strauss’ second to last opera, it was completed in 1940 but only premiered in 1952, three years after the composer’s death.  The piece’s New York staged debut opened on Friday night and was seen on Sunday afternoon at the Fisher Center.

Besides declaring its greatness, the notes from conductor Botstein and stage director Kevin Newbury point to the opera’s appropriateness for our times.  It’s about the worship and necessity of money, the primacy of status, and the fickleness of love.  Yet the fact that the source material is Greek myth says we’re hardly the first generation to be obsessed with such matters.

In past years, Bard’s productions have been so lavish with stagecraft as to balance out the middling quality of the work at hand. But “Danae” received a modest, if occasionally clever treatment, at least by past standards.  A spray of long tinsel is lowered to form a golden (moneyed) halo, but like an ATM card it gets used a few too many times.  After intermission, Danae and Midas are living out of a beat-up blue compact car.  Otherwise, the sets are rather static projections of Manhattan buildings or a desert horizon.

The most arresting scene visually and musically was the opening.  As the orchestra plays a tight rhythmic counterpoint reminiscent of Kurt Weill, a couple dozen Wall Streets in navy suits and power ties are scurrying about, singing of unpaid bills.  Later they opened their briefcases to the heavens, like open mouthed fledglings waiting to be fed.

The second scene is an attractive pairing of sopranos Megan Miller as Danae and Sarah Jane McMahon as Xanthe that brought to mind “Der Rosenkavalier.”  Miller’s best moments come late in the opera when the textures thin and the pace relaxes.

Almost all of the vocal writing is darned tough, with long, not terribly gracious lines set high in the register. Combine this with the constantly unfolding themes and cadences in the orchestra and the effect is unrelenting.  Given their tasks, Miller and the other leads, tenor Roger Honeywell as Midas and bass Carsten Wittmoser as Jupiter, did more than admirable work.  But the playing of the American Symphony Orchestra under Botstein was more workmanlike than usual.

R. Strauss’ “Die Liebe der Danae”
3 p.m. Sunday, July 31, 2011
Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

________________________________________________________________________

It’s hard to imagine that the Bard Music Festival will ever get around to a season titled “Noel Coward and His World.”  So it’s probably enough that the college’s SummerScape series has mounted such a loving revival of the composer’s operetta “Bitter Sweet.”   The show opened on Thursday night, was seen at the Friday matinee and runs through August 14 in the intimate smaller theater of the Fisher Center.

While his name evokes the early to mid-20th century, the dandy Coward lived until 1973 and was once a powerhouse composer, writer, performer and producer.  These days, in the realm of classical music and opera at least, his work is a rarity.  So again, “Bitter Sweet” was a welcome arrival.

But just to be clear, this is no forgotten masterpiece either. It’s probably debatable whether the category of operetta or musical comedy is a better fit.  The numbers, often overflowing with clever inner rhymes, aren’t quiet as droll as most Gilbert and Sullivan nor as studied as some of Stephen Sondheim.

Though the music never exactly soars, there are plenty of good tunes including a one-time hit, “I’ll See You Again.”  The small orchestra, conducted by James Bagwell, is sweetened up with lots of saxophones.

The story is a touching reflection on youthful love seen through the eyes of a matron, played with wistful grace by Sian Phillips.  She’s surrounded by a cast that’s surprisingly large and pleasingly youthful and energetic.

Two of the leads certainly had an operatic confidence and power.  Mezzo Sarah Miller’s performance as Sarah/Sari only grew richer as the show progressed.  Tenor William Ferguson twice started songs without accompaniment yet was in fine tune when the orchestra joined in many bars later.

As a German chanteuse, soprano Amanda Quittieri had several fine production numbers though her finale was a garbled mix of languages.  The best showmanship came from the male quartet of droll waiters. They climaxed in the suggestive and frolicsome “Green Carnation,” Coward’s only slightly veiled reference to Oscar Wilde.

The plot jumps about between decades and across national borders.  Adrian W. Jones’ single set was elegant and efficient but it was the lavish costumes by Gregory Gale that best evoked each time and place.  A constant presence on stage was the grand piano and more than a few performers displayed fluent keyboard skills.

Noel Coward’s “Bitter Sweet”
3 p.m. Friday, August 5, 2011
Fisher Center, Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Photos by Cory Weaver courtesy Bard College

Throwing in one afternoon recital was going to be a nice added touch.  But renditions of some standards and maybe a few arias would have sufficed, right?  If she wanted to touch on her youthful fondness for Karen Carpenter, too, well then all the better.

As it turns out, Friday’s hour-long program was a daring revelation of Voigt’s deepest self. Sure, she sang plenty — complete or truncated renditions of 18 different selections, with pianist Kevin Stites. But it was what she said that touched the audience in deep and unexpected ways.

Working loosely from a script prepared by playwright Terrence McNally, Voigt traced her life story.  Born to a Baptist family in Illinois, her earliest musical experiences were in church choirs.  During her early teens, the family relocated to California. She joked that the sound of the town’s name — Placentia — still leaves a rather unclean taste in her mouth.  While there, she took to musical theater and we heard snatches of selections from “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Music Man.”

Tracing her ascent into the highest rank of opera singers soon led Voigt to utter the f-word:  F-A-T.  She once tipped the scales at 333 pounds.  She reminded us of the international incident caused when she lost a role at Covent Garden because she couldn’t fit in a little black dress (size one). Though she mostly steered clear of settling scores, Voigt did declare, “concepts are the first refuse for directors who don’t trust the music.”  After recounting a failed marriage, the over eating and gastric bypass surgery, it didn’t come as a surprise to hear Voigt also reveal her alcoholism.

And oh, how she sang.  While her mighty voice seems rather contained in the role of Annie, songs like “Edelweiss,” “Moon River” and “Show Me” felt not just comfortable but open hearted.  Classics were also on the bill with leider of Brahms and Strauss as well as “Nessun Dorma,” the first aria she ever wanted to sing — before she learned it was the exclusive terrain of tenors.  Knocking down barriers seems to be Voigt’s greatest role these days.

“Voigt Lessons”
with soprano Deborah Voigt
Friday, July 29, 2011
Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown NY

Previously on MyBigGayEars:  Deborah Voigt Gets Her Gun On

________________________________________________________________

The storm had already hit and the argument was in full progress when the lights go up on “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck,” the new opera by composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tony Kushner.  The one-act premiered in a double bill on July 21 at the Glimmerglass Festival and was seen on Friday evening.

It’s a recreation of a tumultuous moment late in the life of Eugene O’Neill, and the playwright is at loggerheads with his third wife Carlotta.  The music is pounding and furious while the insults, pointed and smart, zing. The pace eventually slackens, thank heavens, but the entire 40-minute opera has a power and immediacy that’s rare to new works.

Tesori conducted the Glimmerglass Orchestra, which often evoked the era of the jazz big band.  Bits of popular song come over the P.A. system, as if from the onstage phonograph.  Kushner’s fascinating libretto makes frequent use of biographical lines from O’Neill’s own works.

Bass-baritone David Pittsinger, as O’Neill, sang with a sturdy force while moving with an old man’s gate.  Soprano Patricia Schuman released plenty of fury but her part seemed to be in low register and she was often covered by the loud orchestra.  Some drama critics of the day show up as a trio, to both torment and croon.

The evening opened with “Later The Same Evening,” by composer John Musto and librettist Mark Campbell, in its professional company debut.   A comparatively lackluster 75 minutes, the opera dips into the imagined inner musings and chance interactions of 11 characters from five paintings of Edward Hopper.

Musto’s music is clean-lined and his settings of English combined with the singer’s fine diction revealed every word. The orchestration was lean to the point of being dry.  Taken together, it did evoke the pensive, depressive nature of Hopper’s human still lifes.

In an economical if obvious bit of staging, reproductions of the paintings are seen on the back wall, as if hung in a gallery.  The body positions and costumes of the singers mimic their painted counterparts.  Leon Major was the director.

Erhard Rom’s silver-walled set gets filled with dry ice after intermission for “Blizzard.”  Company director Francesca Zambello staged that with typically unfussy and economic ease.

All told, the new Zambello era at Glimmerglass has had about as many successes as failures.  But the company is reaching higher and once again making Cooperstown a destination for inquisitive arts goers of all stripes.

“Later The Same Evening” (Musto/Campbell)
“A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck” (Tesori/Kushner)
Friday, July 29, 2011
Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown NY

Previously on MyBigGayEars:
Tony Kushner’s first opera explores Eugene O’Neill

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

All production photos by Julieta Cervantes courtesy Glimmerglass.

Kushner has a penchant for taking on big projects and important themes, starting with his most famous work, “Angels in America,” a six-hour, two-part play about AIDS that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. For further evidence of his ambition, as well as a somewhat outrageous sense of humor, consider the title of his most recent major play: “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures.”

Yet for all Kushner’s big involvements, he recently took time to come up with just the right new three-syllable word to replace another word that he decided was a little too mundane. It was while in the midst of final rehearsals in Cooperstown, where the Glimmerglass Festival is producing the world premiere of “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck.” The new one-act opera by composer Jeanine Tesori, to an original libretto by Kushner, debuts tonight (7/21) and runs for five more performances through Aug. 22.

“When writing in verse forms, there are various strictures that you have to obey and a somewhat mathematical precision in searching for a word that will fit,” explains Kushner. “Writing lyrics, instead of writing language that’s supposed to approximate how people speak spontaneously, forces you in a slightly different relationship to language. It knocks the dust off the machinery a little bit.”

Creating “Blizzard” is certainly not Kushner’s first time immersed in music. His parents were professional musicians, and he has already collaborated extensively with composer Tesori. Their through-composed musical “Caroline, or Change” played on Broadway for 136 performances in 2004 and received six Tony Award nominations. The team also has an outstanding commission from the Metropolitan Opera.

“I can’t write or read music, but I love it, and go the opera all the time, though I’m sort of up and down about musical theatre,” says Kushner. “I love the chance at having this intimate connection to singing and to music.”

Asked if there’s a difference between writing for an opera versus a musical, Kushner turns to the diverging nature of the genres and their practitioners.

”I’m not entirely sure of the difference between a musical or opera, but when you go into an opera company with people trained to sing operatically, the expectation is different,” he says. ” ‘Caroline, or Change’ was commissioned for the San Francisco Opera with Bobby McFerrin, but he decided he didn’t want to write an opera. Director George Wolfe was happy about that, because he wanted to work with musical theater performers, not opera singers. There are certain things that musical theatre people know how to do that opera people don’t and vice versa.”

Similar to slotting in words to fit a musical line, Kushner and Tesori were given a very specific task when commissioned last year by Glimmerglass and Francesca Zambello, the company head who is staging the new work. Zambello already had in mind to produce “Later The Same Evening,” by John Musto and Mark Campell, a one-act that deals with the life of painter Edward Hopper. As a companion piece, Zambello requested another one-act about the life of an American artist. Kushner immediately thought of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

“I’m an O’Neill fanatic and have been working on a screenplay about his life for the past 13 years,” says Kushner. “If you’re a playwright, you go to O’Neill as the source. There’s really not much in the way of serious American theatre before he came along. He proved it could exist. He’s the father of us all, the first to stake a claim nationally and internationally for American dramatic literature.”

“A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck” depicts a rather infamous incident that occurred late in O’Neill’s life. It’s February 1951 and O’Neill, 63, gets into a heated argument with his wife, Carlotta. Although in failing health, he walks out of their cabin into a snowstorm and is rescued an hour later.

“The fight that he and Carlotta had almost ended their marriage, but in a sense he never recovered from it,” explains Kushner. “After an hour in the snow, he went into the hospital and stayed fairly seriously infirmed for the rest of his life.”

“Their relationship is a tortured love story. Most great ones are,” adds Kushner.

Besides the husband and wife roles, the opera includes three singers who portray famous drama critics of the era. They’re evoked through some insults the wife hurls at her husband, the sensitive artist. Dealing with tough reviews is a sore spot Kushner can identify with.

“The relationship between critics and playwrights is infinitely tormented,” says Kushner. “If you know of any artist who has no ax to grind, I’d love to meet them and find their secret.”

Kushner says the new opera is one of the shortest things he’s ever written. Just 20 pages of text, it spills out over some 40 minutes of music. Though the work is completed and ready to debut, Kushner’s enterprise starts to show through again during the final rehearsals in Cooperstown.

“When I was watching it, I had a vision of expanding it,” he says. “I’m very pleased with it and think I’ll try to give it further life. I’d like to write more, add one or two other sections, maybe make it a complete evening.”

Spending a full summer in Cooperstown just didn’t seem possible. The internationally acclaimed operatic star Deborah Voigt was too in demand to make that kind of long-term commitment.

It was only last spring when Francesca Zambello, the recently appointed general and artistic director of the Glimmerglass Festival, approached the soprano about being the company’s artist in residence during summer 2011.  The two were friends as well as colleagues but Voigt thought that Zambello was asking a lot.

“Then she said, well what if I did a whole musical for you?” recalls Voigt. “That was a whole other matter.  Oh yeah.”

On Saturday night Voigt debuts in her first professional musical comedy role, Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun.”  The production, directed by Zambello, also stars baritone Rod Gilfry and runs for 14 performances through August 21.

It’s the culmination of an extraordinary year for Voigt.  In the spring, she starred as Brunnhilde in “Die Walkure,” the latest chapter in the Metropolitan Opera’s new high-tech “Ring” cycle.   And during December and January, also at the Met, she played another cowgirl role, Minnie in Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West.”

Riding the wild west theme on to Glimmerglass was no accident, it turns out.

“When ‘Cesca and I were discussing what musicals would be appropriate for me vocally and in terms of my advanced years, ‘Annie’ was a title that came up.  It made sense to make it a year of cowboys and Indians and guns, along with some spear chucking arias thrown in the midst,” says Voigt, referring to the weapon of choice for Brunnhilde, the maiden warrior of Norse myth.

Taking on big new roles and following through on ambitious plans is part and parcel of being an opera star, but Voigt’s duties at Glimmerglass are truly new ground.  During a phone conversation two weeks before opening night, some stress and fatigue were obvious.

“I’m having a lot of fun and working really hard,” she said. “It’s a different language for me and I feel like I’m having to catch up. Having spoken dialogue and portraying the character — I’ve not done that since high school.  I’m a little bit overwhelmed in a way that feels different from Wagnerian-ly.”

Voigt, 50, was raised in Wheeling, Illinois and became active in music through the Baptist church.  When she was a teen her family relocated to Orange County California where she performed in some high school musicals.  It was in college at California State University, Fullerton, that she first sang with Gilfry, an operatic star who’s been doing more musicals of late.

Voigt admits that some folks in the operatic world may question her choice to devote so much time and energy to a musical, just as some Glimmerglass fans have complained of the company’s new embrace of the more populist repertoire (next summer two out of four productions will be musicals).

“I don’t know how the experience will affect my future. After the summer, though, my middle voice is going to be in great shape.  The role is all middle voice,” she says.

Voigt referred regularly to working with a teacher to help her prepare performances — not just of “Annie,” but for every appearance on her busy calendar.

“We’ve sung through it to find a way that’s healthy for me and not the belting style of Ethel Merman (who created the role of Annie Oakly in 1946).  That was great for her but would not be terrific for this opera singer,” she says.

In early June Voigt sang in Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” with the New York Philharmonic and when we spoke she was in the midst of rehearsing an evening of Strass and Wagner arias for a July 9 performance with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival.  Still to come at Glimmerglass is “Voigt Lessons,” a unique quasi-recital event on Friday, July 29.  With a mix of classical repertoire and popular standards, it’s being developed by Voigt and Zambello in collaboration with playwright Terrance McNally.

“I’m an opera singer, that’s the trap I fell into many many years ago. It was a random path and if my teacher had been a different teacher it might have been a different kind of singer,” says Voigt. “I’m grateful to have such a fabulous career yet it’s an enormous responsibility. It’s constant study and learning and keeping you instrument where it needs to be despite age, health or emotional status.”

In the new production of “Carmen,” which opened at the Glimmerglass Festival on Saturday, the action grows more tight and focused throughout the night until Carmen and Don Jose are alone in a ring.  In a daring moment of surrender, Carmen stops her tormenting ways and prostrates herself before her angry and jilted lover.  She seems to think better of it, but it’s too late. The knife plunges.

The lights are at their brightest in that climax.  The evening began in a washed out haze with only fleeting bits of color against a jumbled set of sepia and gray tones. In a program note, director Ann Bogart says that she took inspiration from bull fighting and the grittiness of the Orson Welles film “Touch of Evil.”  She makes the evening a long but inexorable progression.

The performances also have a cinematic intimacy, especially that of twenty-four year old Ginger Costa-Jackson who’s making her debut as Carmen. In fact, it’s her first time to have the lead role in an opera.  Her voice was dark, rich and attractive. Bringing to mind a tousle-haired Jennifer Lopez, she displays a youthful and unceasing passion and an understated skill of seduction. Costa-Jackson seldom played overtly to the house, but stayed tightly bound in the role, intently focused on Carmen’s shifting priorities and ploys.

The show horse of the night was tenor Adam Diegel as Don Jose.  His voice grew more powerful and compelling with each scene.  As for his acting, Carmen seemed to truly piss him off. More than once he flung her away from him, as if trying to fight a magnetic bond.

The secondary leads were fine to serviceable.  Anya Matanovic sang beautifully as Micaela. Keith Miller hit his marks in the famous toreador number but later had a frog in his throat.

A pair of Spanish dancers enlivens several scenes, especially with a terrific shadow dance in the second act.  Just after the opening, there’s a creepy mix of soldiers and children marching in formation.

As expected, Bogart’s production mostly avoids the obvious and traditional. Carmen never handles a rose. Instead, a basket of oranges sit stage center for much of act one. They’re tossed about in a vaguely erotic way.

The set is often jumbled and junky, in that familiar, supposedly non-traditional manner.  How many seasons now have we seen the theatre’s back wall?  But it takes more than clutter and shadows to rob the drama from “Carmen.”

MEDEA
Glimmerglass Festival
Opening night, July 8, 2011

The dramatic soul that enlivens Glimmerglass’ new production of Cherubini’s “Medea” doesn’t appear on stage but comes from the pit.  Starting with the lengthy overture, it’s an evening for the orchestra thanks to the 28 year-old Italian conductor Daniel Rustioni.

With his vigorous style and unceasing energy, Rustioni displays a strong vision of the score and musters an unusually hearty and sustained sound from the Glimmerglass orchestra.  One still wishes that the string section was 20 or 30 percent larger, but the thought didn’t come to mind during Friday’s opening night.

Though a central component to any successful opera staging, a conductor can’t overcome limitations and failings on the stage and there are many with this “Medea.”

Soprano Alexandra Deshorties got all the notes in the hugely demanding title role but failed to deliver the kind of coherent and unflinching grit that the character requires to be convincing let alone compelling.  She was not aided by some bizarre choices from director Michael Barker-Cavan.

This is not, however, an opera transplanted to some strange new time and place.  The single set is vaguely Greek, distinctly temple.  A ceremonial scene makes elegant use of incense and water.  Medea’s appropriately chilly first entrance is one of her best moments.  In the second act, her body is contorted into one awkward yoga position after another.  Toward the end, as she sings on and on about her children, she hardly looks at them or touches them.

During one of many climactic arguments with Jason, the two are shoved off to the side of the stage and grip opposite sides of a black wall.  The old fashioned stand and sing method would have been better.

Joe Vanek designed the set as well as the costumes and they’re a hodgepodge of styles. Medea gets caught up in a pea green dress with a stiff and distracting train. At one point the male chorus looks like some Ken and G. I. Joe dolls decided share play clothes.

Deshorties gets upstaged by singers more comfortable — and showy — in their roles.  Wendy Bryn Harmer is a knock out as Glauce, Jason Collins unflagging but not particularly moving as Jason. David Pittsinger is sturdy as a rock in the priestly role of King Creon.  As the wretched plot winds on, some of the most moving moments come from the servant Neris, played with affecting beauty by Sarah Larsen, a member of the company’s Young Artist program.

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Photos by Julieta Cervantes courtesy Glimmerglass Festival.

GAY EARS ADDENDUM:

During the intermission of Medea I spoke to a colleague about the handsome and dynamic conductor Daniel Rustioni.  I said that he’s got that Joshua Bell-type hair with a great bounce.  The person I was conversing with had been at the company’s opening night dinner the prior week and said that when he saw the guy across the way  at the party he asked, “Who’s boy toy is that?”  He got the reply, “He’s one of this year’s conductors!”

Rustioni is starting to get an internet buzz and recently appeared in Italian Vanity Fair.

Read the reports:

New York Times (6/5/11)

Towleroad (6/5/11)

Towleroad (6/6/11)

Towleroad (6/7/11)

And Nico Muhly, saying he’ll just dip his toe in the controversy, nevertheless manages to churn out some 1,800 words on the topic. I don’t even have time to read 1,800 words…

By the way, the composer of “Beached” is Harvey Brough.

“That just drives me crazy,” says Craig Rutenberg. “It sounds like something you did when you were French and you worked with the Germans during the war.”

However you define his profession, Rutenberg is at the top of the field.  He’ll be appearing Saturday night at Tannery Pond with soprano Christine Brewer.  She’s one of today’s most prominent singers, including Thomas Hampson, Dawn Upshaw, Ben Heppner and Frederica von Stade, who turn to Rutenberg as their partner in recital.

“I’m an accompanist.  I’m a decent pianist and I accompany a singer,” says Rutenberg. “My job is to lay down the most beautiful carpet of sound and help the singer make a good performance of a song.  That for me is accompanying.”

Rutenberg makes his duties seem rather simple, but his career encompasses far more than what he does during a concert.  Often going hand in hand with being an accompanist is being a vocal coach — the person who guides singers in learning and preparing repertoire, especially opera.

Rutenberg is a master coach as well.  As head of the music staff at the Metropolitan Opera, he supervises a staff of 52 full and part-time musicians, including language coaches, assistant conductors, vocal coaches, ballet pianists and prompters.

“The best part of working at the Met is that I’m around some pretty wonderful musicians and conductors all day,” says Rutenberg. “And the worst part is sometimes I’m not.”

The job description for an accompanist/coach is lengthy:  “You need to know a lot of repertoire, know language — French and German or German and Italian — know how to play like an orchestra,” say Rutenberg. “You have to be able to travel with someone and be pretty laid back.  Frequently there’s going to be a stronger personality than you in charge of what’s going on. And then you have to always remember you’re not married to this person and you don’t have to go home with them at night.  That’s the good part.”

Rutenberg is well beyond the point of needing a gig so badly that he has to play for whatever singer will hire him. As he puts it, “I don’t play for anyone I’m not crazy about.”

With Thomas Hampson

He’s been accompanying Christine Brewer for about 10 years now.  Though he was businesslike and succinct during our interview, it was clear he practically swooned when he first heard her voice.

“When she came to do the Met auditions around ’90 or ’91, I was just sideways by the beauty and honest of her singing,” he recalls. “I remember blurting out that she’s the only person who should be in this competition.”

Brewer is known for her abilities to handle demanding roles in operas of Wagner and Strauss.  Yet Saturday’s all-American program will be a departure. It features more intimate works of Menotti, Ives and Harold Arlen, plus the final aria, “All My Life,” from “The Mother of Us All,” Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera about Susan B. Anthony.

The concert will also be a departure for Rutenberg, who will perform a few short solo piano pieces, five of Thomson’s musical portraits.

A trademark of Thomson’s, the short pieces were written by the composer while the subject, usually a friend or colleague, would sit as if modeling for a painter. Among Saturday’s selections is “Bugles and Birds: A Portrait of Pablo Picasso.”

“The personality always comes through and in the most frightening way sometimes,” explains Rutenberg, who refers to Thomson as his friend and mentor.

“Virgil was incredibly kind and generous and one of the great blessing in a great life,” he recalls. “When I was an undergrad at Georgetown I would visit him in New York once a month for a weekend.  I would learn to cook, and play the piano and earn a little extra by copying music.”

Thomson lived for decades at the famed Chelsea Hotel, where he died in 1989.

“I slept on the couch many many times.  The kitchen was a glorified closet with a gas stove,” recalls Rutenberg. “Just about anyone who was anyone in the artistic or musical or literary world would come by.”

Stepping further out of his familiar role as accompanist, Rutenberg is in the midst of a three-year project to record Thomson’s complete solo piano works, which include about 90 portraits.  He explains, “I’m probably the only person on the planet who’s alive who knew a good portion of these people.”

Originally appeared in the Times Union.

Previously on MyBigGayEars:

Thomas Hampson in recital at Tanglewood