A vocally arresting Luisa Miller at San Francisco Opera

Directed by Francesca Zambello, San Francisco Opera's current production of Luisa Miller premiered in the 2000/01 season. It's revival fifteen years later seems a trifling amount of time for an opera that sits at the perimeter of repertory choices but it presents great confidence in the dramatic merit of Verdi's middle period romantic tragedy which premiered in 1849 at the Teatro San Carlo. On virtually every level it's a refreshingly stylistic and visually absorbing production, vocally arresting and musically strident.

Director Francesca Zambello's Luisa Miller 

In Verdi's adaptation of Friedrich von Schiller's 1784 play (Intrigue and Love), dramatic segueing requires astute handling. Verdi gives enough potent vocal expressivity to his characters in building belief to overcome otherwise often improbable coincidences of characters being in the right place at the most unlikely time. Zambello obliges, successfully giving the drama an energetic flow and interspersing it with dance-like gestures and captivating silhouetted vignettes for dynamic effect.

A sensitive cohesion exists between Zambello's directorship and set designer Michael Yeargan's elegant minimalism featuring a sweeping alpine forested diorama that identifies its Tyrolean setting and which opens for various entrance effects. A cantilevered beam which cuts through it, and on which slides a large canvas portraying scene-specific associations, is curiously successful in its use.

Dunya Ramicova's costume designs delineate the classes with such striking thematic vivacity that their beauty can be excused for their sanitised division of the classes. The peasant villagers celebrate in a spectrum of pastels, the ruling class parade in shimmering crimson and soldiers are distinguished in emerald. Gary Marder's lighting design adds appropriate emotional colour and dramatic scale and is used to great effect for casting intriguing projected shadows. Visually, the eyes are delightfully, sometimes deceitfully, dazzled.

Leah Crocetto as Luisa and Michael Fabiano as Rodolfo

How the village girl Luisa Miller and Rodolfo meet is unknown but Luisa is initially unaware that Rodolfo is the son of Count Walter. When their relationship is revealed, their love is trodden by atrocious self-interest as the classes become embroiled in the affair. Luisa is a well-loved popular member of her community but her effervescent contentment is torn away. In her distress, her psychological state is challenged by both a self-sacrificing act to save her father and her own self-preservation, even if that means contemplation of suicide.

As Luisa, Leah Crocetto nails the shifting emotional corners of character with her luscious and powerful soprano. Opening brightly with "Lo vidi e 'l primo palpito", Crocetto impresses with shining cyclical top notes. A clean and mighty coloratura is on display in Act II's "Tu puniscimi, O Signore" and an urgent, surging lower range in "A brani, a brani, o perfido". Vocally, from Act III's "La tomba è un letto sparso di fiori" through to the subsequent finale, Crocetto is unfaltering in her delivery and receptiveness to her circumstances.

American tenor Michael Fabiano's role debut as Rodolfo is steeped in thrilling and masterly vocal technique and accompanied by acting of the most operatically convincing. In Act II's "Quando le sere al placido", Fabiano's passionately warm and fluid style and elegant open top is intoxicating as he recalls happier times with Luisa. And nothing is ever lost in his exhilarating iron-strength recitatives.

But neither Fabiano nor Crocetto are helped by Act III's more dubious events. Rodolfo enters the Miller home, calls Luisa a whore (believing she has deceived him and plans to marry the Count's henchman Wurm), slips poison in a cup, drinks it unbeknownst to Luisa and then gives it to her. A villainous, violent side emerges in Rodolfo which goes unnoticed by Luisa, as does the fact that having just happily saved herself from suicide, she appears content in the throws of a poisonous death. Clearer direction and a little more attention to the acting in the slow-crawling last moments could have elevated the finale immensely.

Vitaliy Bilyy as Miller and Leah Crocetto as Luisa

As Luisa's father, Baritone Vitaliy Bilyy is excellent, imbuing Miller with demonstrative fatherly love and understanding, protective in the face of danger and sympathetic in Luisa's pain. Bilyy deftly shapes his expansive sound and liquid warmth of tone while thrusting his vocal line with wholehearted meaning.

The remaining cast give solid performances. Daniel Sumegi's broad-ranged guttural bass gives aloof authority to Count Walter. The dark and threatening bass of Andrea Silvestrelli bonded magnificently with the lurking and plotting of the evil-eye Wurm. And as Federica enters on a life-size black stallion statue (to a few chuckles), in order to secure the man she has loved since childhood (Rodolfo), Ekaterina Semenchuk brought the sophistication and demeanour of privileged upbringing with stylishly dusky mezzo-soprano aplomb.

The fine-voiced San Francisco Opera Chorus are unified and energetic but I couldn't help but wish that their large numbers were reduced to a smaller ensemble in the opening act and employed more fittingly across the stage in the Act I finale.

Whilst Luisa Miller might not garner the sympathetic reactions and intimate immediacy achieved in Verdi's 4-year later La traviata, it has much dramatic and contemporary relevance, and music that nonetheless matches it. With Nicola Luisotti conducting, Luisa's story is told in its most heartrending way and he shows complete understanding of both the potential of Verdi's score and the attention to his onstage artists. The undulations and depth of sound was golden and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra responded with magnificence.

The next time I meet Luisa again will be here in my hometown when Opera Australia's new production opens early next year. She deserves the attention she's gaining.

Production photographs: Cory Weaver

Sondheim's Company at Fortyfivedownstairs: link to my review at Aussietheatre

http://aussietheatre.com.au/reviews/review-company

Maria Mercedes beguiles in Master Class at Fortyfivedownstairs

Who could possibly have delivered Terrence McNally's Master Class other than Maria Mercedes herself? Based on a series of master classes held at New York's Julliard School in 1971 given by the legendary Maria Callas (it's almost superfluous stating that she remains one of opera's most celebrated singers), Mercedes completely owns her space.

Maria Mercedes as Maria Callas

It was Maria Mercedes being Maria Mercedes, commanding her performance in the same way Callas boasts that it could only be Callas when on the stage in all her glory. It's a high intensity experience that keeps its audience alert and the body tense. 

Master Class superbly blends an informative class, a beguiling introspective portrayal of La Divina and searing vocal performances shared by her attending students Georgia Wilkinson as Sophie De Palma, Blake Bowden as Tony Candolino and Teresa Duddy as Sharon Graham. The audience is there to learn, to take notice and, quite possibly, to take down notes. The depth of realism and immediacy is astounding. That the portrayal of Callas is warped to heighten her bite becomes irrelevant. 

Darting from worldly instructive tidbits to self-idolatry smugness, Callas ends up in almost pitiable territory. "If you don't have a look, get one", Callas tells her students. What she calls a sense of humour feels more like an assault on her prey. Callas is in perpetual combat with her own demons and the talented and spirited young students she can shred in an instant. Her students don't take it altogether lightly. 

Callas won't be challenged despite her contradictions but her credo can be boiled down to first listening, then feeling and finally singing. It's the singing part that each successive, bemused student struggles to demonstrate due the relentless interruptions. 

Maria Mercedes as Maria Callas

"Next victim!", Callas jokes, but the consequences of her tongue are knowingly laid bare as each aspiring student is pulverised by her unforgiving style. When they do sing, you can't help but relish the talent before you. Callas excuses herself for being harsh. You might not like her methods but, here in front of you, Maria Mercedes coerces and moves these singers to their best performance, at times not without tears. 

Mercedes is authoritative as she traps her audience into Callas' disturbed psyche. It's wordy, and quick and you might pause listening to her self-indulgent, self-idolatry spiel but watching Mercedes is transformative. With each student's learned aria comes a flashback on her soul and Mercedes mirrors them nothing short of breathtaking.

Still, behind this woman whose hair is pulled back tightly in a bun, each hair drawn to seemingly manipulate her every concocted expression, a team consisting of director Daniel Lammin, producer Cameron Lukey and designers  Brendan Jellie (lighting), Owen Phillips (costumes) and James Hogan (sound) create the striking pedestal for Callas to look down from. 

Cameron Thomas, as Manny Weinstock the piano accompanist, obliges her with smiling good-naturedness and technical excellence. 

I first saw Master Class in London in 2012 starring Tyne Daly at the sizeable Vaudeville Theatre. Daly was natural, formidable. But here at Fortyfivedownstairs, the generations-worn New York warehouse-style space lent a powerful intimacy and unequivocal connection between Mercedes' ownership of the role and her audience. 

Don't be afraid to take pen and paper.  

Production photographs by Clare Hawley

Melbourne Opera's Maria Stuarda Herald Sun Review

http://m.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/arts/opera-review-maria-stuarda-melbourne-opera/story-fni0fcgk-1227512999636

Victorian Opera's well-intended but undistinguished Remembrance

In Victorian Opera's Remembrance concert, of the many text frames and black and white photographic slide projections utilised to reflect on adventure, courage, mate-ship and tragedy, one of the final projected slides inform of the approximately 300,000 men and women who left our fledgling nation to embark on the long journey to a war fought on many fronts. The tremendous death toll of around 60,000 and injured numbering 120,000 in the Great War of 1914-18 is an anguishing statistic.

Victorian Opera developing artists,
Orchestra Victoria and Community Chorus

In this salute to one of the defining yet dark transitions in Australian history during this centennial year of the Gallipoli landing, Victorian Opera deserves much praise for its wide-reaching collaborative efforts, its community involvement and outreach to the people of Victoria. For its one-only performance in Melbourne, Hamer Hall's colossal scale, however, sadly overwhelmed the concert and far too many seats were empty.

Writer, director and two-time Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Rodney Hall's threads of interesting wartime personal records and a war correspondent's reports sew a six-part chronological progression from Enlistment, Embarkation, Training, Gallipoli, Trenches (The Western Front) and Homecoming. The format was realised musically with a potpourri of popular songs of the day arranged by Victorian Opera Artistic Director Richard Mills amongst his own descriptive orchestral composition, music distinctly seesawing between turbulence and reflection which balanced the jaunty tunes.

David Hobson as the war correspondent

But Hall's intended free-flowing adaptation with a continuum of movement (as the program notes described) looked flimsy. The notional behaviours of dancing, waving, rifle training and wounded soldiers, for example, did more to unscrew the tribute's impact and the work's many parts struggled to reach memorable dramatic heights.

As the war correspondent, the dexterity of David Hobson's trusting, suave and sunny tenor was not tested to its poignant and expressive limits. It was in the narration of trench stories where the more searing aspects rested.

In various roles that included soldiers and nurses, eight of Victorian Opera's outstanding young artists (supported through its collaboration with University of Melbourne's Conservation of Music), met the vocal writing with ease but projection and sound balancing persisted. Nathan Lay, Matthew Tng, Carlos E. Bárcenas and Michael Petruccelli impressed in their solos while the females, Kate Amos, Elizabeth Lewis, Emma Muir-Smith and Cristina Russo, worked best in ensemble but it wasn't a night given to presenting the best capabilities of these developing young artists.

A well-rehearsed community choir of more than 100 members added heightened atmospheric appeal in key moments but lacked vital swagger in the old tunes of yesteryear.  Orchestra Victoria provided solidly driven and comforting support and the percussion and brass sections led with flair.

Remembrance will be performed in Bendigo, Wodonga, Warragul and Shepparton and certainly the smaller venues will lend greater impact to Mills and Hall's collaboration. Unlike the point in history Remembrance pays tribute to, it will unlikely, however, be recorded as a defining moment in the company's young identity-building 10-year history.


Production photos by Charlie Kinross

Women in War: A sensitive and optimistic new work at Arts Centre Melbourne

In this centennial year of remembrance of the ANZAC spirit, an especially sensitive new work from a much to praise cross-cultural international collaboration reflects on the suffering of women in war. What it does further is demonstrate Australia's potential to tap its own multi-cultural heart to produce theatre that reflects our broader connections to the world.

From composer Tassos Ioannides and librettist Deborah Parsons, Women in War traces the lives of three women from three different cultures - Clarice (Caitlin Spears) a young Australian volunteer nurse, Yeliz (Berna Anil), a Turkish widow searching for her only son on the battlefield and Polyxeni (Irini Tzanetoulakou), a Greek war widow who runs a simple cafe. Their lives are spun into a tragic story of love, loss, bravery, adaptation and reconciliation.

The cast of Women in War 

Set during the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 on the Gallipoli Peninsula and the Greek island of Lemnos their individual paths converge to reach a climax in which a collective vow is made, while instructing the audience, to never fight again. In a chorus of strength the message resonates, throwing back at us the human conundrum of praying for peace while fighting wars to achieve it.

In its 21 scenes without interval, director Alkinos Tsilimidos compacts the storytelling with sure-footedness and strong delivery. Ioannides' music combines some beautifully sympathetic pieces inspired by each cultural identity, plunging to operatic depths and swept by pulses of musical theatre. Woven with crackling radio broadcasts, sounds of battle, the oft-referenced World War I song, "After the War is Over" and accompanied by Parsons' libretto, which breathes with poetry and realism, an enveloping sense of place is created.

An all-female team of designers build this sense of place via a little Greek cafe and a clear, starry sky providing an inviting start. Set designer Shaun Gurton maintains broad spatial depth incorporating a few unfussy, unmatched cafe tables and chairs to the left and a second-level raised platform to the rear giving ample scope for Tsilimidos' direction. Ioanna Tsami's costumes seamlessly evoke the period and Katerina Maragoudaki's sudden and subtle shifts of lighting heighten the drama.

Tomas Dalton and Caitlin Spears

Women in War, however, suffers from a pastiche of intermittent, interruptive and highly gestured cinematic music verging on the epic, which at times feels discordantly spliced onto its events. Extraneous scenes divert focus from its central characters at times and a sense of congestion dominates despite the ease with which the stories are told.

What stands out in Women in War are the fervently and evenly balanced voices of a cast who sharpen their characters with life and women who etch their grief in your memory. Women driven by love are portrayed with ease from three well-cast female leads. In them, with all their differences, they conjure an inner strength seemingly unknown to themselves without feeling contrived.

As Clarice, Caitlin Spears's bell-bright voice captures both her innocence and common sense with radiant belief, arriving on Lemnos to do her bit for king and country and more than just a bit to see her fiancée Ernest who is serving with the ANZACs on the island.

Berna Anil's passionate expressivity and powerful voice shows the hope and desperation that Yeliz has in the search for her son as she cuts her hair, takes a uniform and enters the battlefield.

Irini Tzanetoulakou's Polyxeni is grounded with salt-of-the-earth directness and a haunting voice which lives in the dark, hiding her loss away as much as she can while running a cafe making pennies from the business of war and supporting her adolescent daughter.

Tomas Dalton depicts the compassionate Ernest as a gentleman of war with a marvellously polished performance and an attractive voice of honeycomb-like texturing and warmth of tone. Together with Spears, the young pair show striking form as a duo.

Jason Wasley gives everything he has to the animalistic Orderly but draws the short straw with a character that attempts to add tension and issue without success. The remaining cast give strong form to help propel the drama and together in chorus they impress with dynamic harmonic blending.

Women in War crept into the Arts Centre Melbourne calendar with little fanfare and might very well disappear into obscurity after the ANZAC centennial year is over. Nonetheless, it leaves a grand sense of optimism for broader cultural forays in Australian contemporary opera.

Blessed in bel canto heaven at Victorian Opera's I Puritani

With an evening blessed in bel canto heaven, Melbourne audiences had just one chance to hear Victorian Opera's concert performance of Vincenzo Bellini's I Puritani, a grand opera which premiered in Paris in 1835 not long before the young composer's death.

Expectedly, the Hamer Hall stage was devoid of sets and costumes but the emotive vision and robust musical landscape painted by the shining artists and the musicians of Orchestra Victoria was clearly palpable. I Puritani's original 1640s setting during the English Civll War was felt with as much presence as its story clearly has in a modern context, a story of loyalty and love crossing political allegiances and its ensuing conflict.

Jessica Pratt (centre) with soloists, chorus and musicians of Orchestra Victoria

With neither surtitled introduction nor announcements (local audiences seemed to be trusted having mobile phones switched off), a matter-of-fact briskness heralded a subdued entry into what would become a momentous escalation of musical and dramatic force.

Conducting, Victorian Opera Artistic Director Richard Mills came to the stage and commanded every corner of the orchestra with gusto. The tempi were thoughtful and timing was crisp. Intermittent, erratic brass excepting, Orchestra Victoria responded marvellously, especially with the fine, vibrating warmth of the string playing. Highly percussive passages were safely handled, giving the well-prepared, confident-voiced Victorian Opera Chorus room to breath. Rear-stage but cleverly not highly prominent, the chorus acted as an effusive force on the horizon.

Early in Act I a tentativeness existed in orchestra and chorus blending but ended thrillingly on the summit of excellence with Elvira's aria then quartet with chorus, "Oh, vieni al tempio, fedele Arturo". After interval, in Act II a refined cohesiveness remained. Act III pulsated with tension, energy and splendiferous vocal signatures.

Showing a natural-like rapport with his soloists, each taking the stage as their roles required to lend clarity to the story's flow, Mills unobtrusively conducted with both the direction of a guardian and the trust of a friend.

Bellini demanded of his librettist Carlo Peponi, "The opera must draw tears, terrify people, make them die through singing". The Italian sung libretto was as easy to make sense of in its surtitled English translation as it was interpreted by the singers. Pleasingly, rolled 'r's were gloriously enunciated. Bellini's vision felt very much realised and breathtakingly interpreted.

I was impressed the first time I saw Australian soprano Jessica Pratt perform in Naples in 2013. Pratt has quietly established herself firmly in sought-after European houses and having the opportunity to hear her again in Melbourne (her only Australian performance this year) is a coup for audiences after her debut in the role of Violetta in Victorian Opera's La Traviata last year.

In a lipstick pink gown, amongst a line-up of black-tie suited soloists, Pratt exuded an immediate, captivating  purity as Elvira, betrothed to Sir Riccardo Forth but eventually given permission to marry her love, the royalist Lord Arturo Albert. Calm and radiant, Pratt's experience and comfort in the role was apparent, securing her character with dramatic completeness. As radiant in voice as her stage beauty, Pratt not only navigated her rich vocal range and fluid, elegant coloratura without apparent effort for all the energy required, but showed an understanding as to where her voice belonged in ensemble.

Pratt returned in Act II in an emerald green cloak draped over a midnight-blue gown to reflect the darker, delusional Elvira who loses her mind after Arturo disappears mysteriously with a female captive prisoner. Driving the poignancy of her character without resorting to melodrama, Pratt responded in brilliant form in  "Qui la voce" then "Vien, diletto" with heartfelt pathos.

Celso Andres Albelo Hernandez as Arturo and Jessica Pratt as Elvira

Looking delighted to perform in front of a Melbourne audience Columbian Celso Andres Albelo Hernandez powered with passion and determination as Lord Arturo Talbot. Exhibiting a thrusting, dynamic Italianate tenor, Albelo drove his voice with courageous control like a racing car driver taking risks that paid off. Albelo's middle range was thick and lusciously layered and his phrasing was intelligent. An inclination to overextend finishes brought a little imbalance but in ensemble there was complete awareness of the power of his instrument. In Act III's "Corre a valle, corre a monte, l'esiliato pellegrin" in which Arturo continues a song he hears that he used to sing with Elivira, every note was awoken with meaning. A reunion with Elvira followed in a thrilling duet with Pratt in "Vieni fra questa braccia". Together, the singing was vibrant, unforced and the on-stage harmony was real.

As Elvira's uncle Sir Giorgio Valton, bass-baritone Paul Whelan's experience in the role showed, portraying a compassionate and trusted mediating force with exemplary diction and a fireside-warmth of tone. Only in ensemble did a hint of eagerness occasionally sneak into vocal starts.

Currently a developing artist at Victorian Opera, as Elvira's betrothed Sir Riccardo Forth, Nathan Lay stepped into a demanding role to notch up another level of success with a memorable performance. Layered with don't-mess-with-me grit, Lay's seamless phrasing and suave, velvety baritone showed ease and control. Only in the voice's upper range did signs of strain appear but Lay remained steadfast in the spirit of character. Often accompanied with Whelan's Giorgio, the pair never appeared upstaged by the star amorous couple. One of the evening's overall highlights came with their extended Act II duet, a vocal rendition blending age-old comfort and surety.

In smaller roles, the night was enriched with accomplished vocal performances from baritone Jeremy Kleeman as a resonant, warm-voiced Lord Gualtiero Valton, tenor Carlos E Bárcenas adding impressive high head notes as a clear, confident-voiced Sir Bruno Robertson and Tania Ferris' lusciously leaden-dark mezzo-soprano for Enrichetta di Francia, the mysterious prisoner and widow of the King Charles I.

When the performance was over and adulations were done, it occurred to me that Victorian Opera had conveyed the power of Bellini's last opera without the trimmings of costumes and sets. Rather than feel cheated, I felt marvellously privileged. It also occurred to me, without mobile phone or audience disturbance, what a behaved and satisfied lot the Melbourne audience was.


Performance photographs by Charlie Kinross