Category: Reviews

Voices of Ascension at St. James’ Church, Madison Avenue, on Thursday, February 4.

“Signature pieces” are crowd-pleasers, almost by definition: if it’s not the kind of thing that absolutely everyone loves, you probably won’t be performing it often enough for it to become a signature. I don’t begrudge Voices of Ascension putting together a program of such favorites—this is the choir’s twentieth anniversary, after all—but it did result in striking homogeneity. People love the Romantic period, and that’s what the program comprised: some early, some late, some French, such Russian, some Protestant, some Orthodox, but all Romantic, lushly expressive, sweetly melodic, chromatics yielding ultimately to tonality.

I don’t mean that as criticism, exactly—I love Mendelssohn and Bruckner and Rachmaninoff as much as anyone—but I would have enjoyed some Bach and Palestrina, too, or maybe Pärt or Britten or Chen. Under Dennis Keene’s baton, the choir has recorded works from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, so I’m puzzled why they limited themselves to just over a century of repertory here.

The first half of the program breezed through ten short works by assorted composers, and after an intermission, the choir performed Fauré’s heavenly Requiem—a cornerstore of Western choral literature for a reason. And even if I wearied a bit of all the pretty, pretty Romanticism, I never tired of the choir’s warmth. The voices blended together exquisitely, filling the sanctuary with glorious sound.

The Gotham Chamber Opera at the Hayden Planetarium on Wednesday, January 10.

Il mondo della luna—both the opera in general and this production in particular—is like one of Shakespeare’s fluffier comedies, the ones with identical twins and widespread cross-dressing and absurd misunderstandings. They’re interchangeable nonsense, as far as I’m concerned, so if you sit down to watch As You Like the Two Gentlemen of Errors expecting something dignified and august, the utter lunacy is disconcerting, even off-putting. But if you just go with it, embrace the mayhem, it’s endearing—not a masterpiece of Western civilization but sharper than you might expect. Plus, there’s something somehow comforting in the realization that people—even properly bewigged historical people—have always gotten a kick out of so-called low-brow pleasures we’re supposed to feel all high-brow guilty about.

Composer Franz Joseph Haydn came around about a century and half after Shakespeare, and Il mondo della luna doesn’t feature identical cross-dressing twins separated at birth (which is sad because who doesn’t love that plot device?), but the silly story of a con man who tricks a wealthy, overprotective father into believing he and his daughters have traveled to the moon is the kind of thing the Bard would have loved: broad farce with an improbable but adorable happy ending. As for the music, Haydn will always pale to his contemporary Mozart (as unfair a standard as there ever was), but at his best, he produced some of the greatest music of the Classical period, and for this production, the Gotham Chamber Opera have shamelessly trimmed more than three hours down to an hour and half of his best.

The Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, January 16.

One thing I’ve come to love about opera is that the female characters generally are players in the action, to a far greater extent than many contemporary works in different media. I suspect the desire to show off the female voice superseded the inclination to shuffle all the women to the background as passive wives and mothers and girlfriends. True, the storylines opera provides those female characters are often ludicrous, even offensive, but at least they are storylines. I’ll take them.

Consider Carmen, Bizet’s masterpiece, first performed in 1875. The gypsy antihero not only drives the action; she’s the titular character—something of a sociopath and a parodic warning against the dangers of unbridled female sexuality but nonetheless an infinitely stronger, more compelling character than José, her pathetic boy toy, or Micaëla, the virgin to her whore. One can’t help but relish Carmen’s vivacity even as one recoils from her cruelty, which is, after all, returned in equal measure by many of those around her.

It’s a great role—iconic for a reason—and in the Met’s new production, Elina Garanca brings Carmen to fresh life. She’s impetuous but self-possessed, seductive but guarded, tenacious but fatalistic, and director Richard Eyre showcases her beautifully in his wonderfully dramatic, gritty-edged new production. Sweeping away caricature, Garanca and Eyre have created a fierce, raw Carmen to remember.

The Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, December 8.

I believe Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) is commonly considered the most accessible of Mozart’s operas. Because it’s technically not opera but singspiel, its between-aria dialogue is not sung but spoken. Ingmar Bergman adapted it for screen, and the Metropolitan Opera has been putting it on every December for the past few years in a bid to make it a tradition in holiday family entertainment. But for me, the utter insanity (and misogyny) of Flute sets it well below another beloved Mozart opera, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), which, to my ears and eyes, is far more accessible and charming and beautiful than Flute can ever be. True, Figaro is all about sex and infidelity, so it’s not a great candidate for holiday family entertainment, but for an adult audience, Figaro is dazzling.