Five College opera ends long drought
(by Christina L. Barber; Daily Hampshire Gazette, Sat./Sun May 5-6, 2001)

Northampton--Pluto, a pimp?  Proserpina, a prostitute?  Charon the Boatman, a big guy sporting dyed blond hair and carrying a cell phone with a direct line to the devil?

Such was the scene at Smith College this week, as Five College students donned Goth garb and cavorted around "hell" in a sold-out performance of the opera "L'Orfeo."

The show, a one-night only event, was a joint production of the University of  Massachusetts Opera Workshop and the Five College Early Music Program.  It marked the first fully staged opera by UMass students in nearly 25 years, as well as the first-ever collaborative opera production by the Five Colleges.

"It's one of the masterpieces of Western music," said Elizabeth Parker, the producer of "L'Orfeo" and director of the UMass Opera Workshop.   "This was a chance to do it with nice, young voices and a full orchestra."

The production starred UMass graduate students Mark Ison and Joanna Abbott and featured standout performances by Megan Browning and Nina Moe of  Smith College, Jeffrey Wang of Amherst College and Charles Mays Jr. of UMass.

"The idea of five schools working together to produce an opera is unprecedented," said Ison, who played Orfeo.  "Very few people will ever have that kind of opportunity.  Even in larger music schools, you'd be hard-pressed to find that level of talent and expertise.  And in that sense, it was extraordinary."

Like Ison, all 20 or so cast members were confident and well-prepared.   They'd been rehearsing twice a week since January and didn't exhibit a trace of nervousness.

"We picked the cream of the crop that auditioned," Parker said.   "They're intelligent, fun, committed people, and they have a ball on stage."

"L'Orfeo," composed by Claudio Monteverdi in 1607, is widely considered the first great opera.  Based on Greek mythology, it tells the story of Orfeo's ill-fated quest to retrieve his young bride, Euridice, from the depths of the underworld after she dies from a poisonous snakebite.

Wednesday nights' performance, which packed the 650-seat Sweeney Concert Hall at Smith (the college donated use of the hall) was an accessible and thoroughly modern adaptation of Monteverdi's tale.

The Italian score was "Englished," as the program put it, by director Drew Minter.  He also set the opera in the Pioneer Valley--Orfeo and Euridice's wedding takes place on a hillside overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir--and in New York City, which symbolized hell.  It was there the black-clad students had so much fun playing pimps, prostitutes, thugs, and bouncers.

"It is a mistake to assume that historically informed performances ought to be dry and dull," said Robert Eisenstein, the director of the Five College Early Music Program, whose 22-member orchestra provided the musical accompaniment.

Indeed, this "L'Orfeo," was neither dry or dull, with drinking scenes, racy costumes, sexual innuendos and New Age rituals such as a post-wedding "smudging" ceremony.

The set was minimal but high-tech--scenes from the region of New York City were photomontaged on two big pillars which rotated between acts--and the first stanza of Minter's libretto even referred to the World Wide Web: "In print, online, who could not hope to meet you?"

"Some people will think it's cutting edge, and some people will think it's over the edge," Minter said, "I make no apologies for it at all."

While purists in the hall may have balked at Minter's decision to translate and update "L'Orfeo," most of the operagoers seemed delighted.   As one was overheard to say, "Oh, the kids must've had fun with this!"

Minter, an internationally known countertenor who teaches at Smith, said translating any opera into English is potentially controversial, but was a necessity in this case.

"It's a shortcut, and we needed shortcuts because ("L'Orfeo") is a very complex piece and we had really limited rehearsal time," he said.  "To do it in Italian would have been very hard for the students."

As for updating Monteverdi's opera, Minter noted that he is hardly the first to modernize an old piece; Henry Purcell's 1692 "Fairy Queen" was itself an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," he said.

"If I had my choice, I would always do period productions," Minter said.  "But I think a really great work leaves itself open to a lot of interpretation."  Rewriting, he said, is not only fun, but "a grand tradition of theater."

If Minter had one regret, it was that limited funding precluded the Five College students from performing "L'Orfeo" for more than one night--just as it had prevented them from mounting a major opera production during the past 23 years.

"It's a little bit sad that they only get one crack at it," he said.  "It would be nice if they could show it more often, because they did a lot of work."

Still, Minter said, the semester-long project was an unprecedented experience for all students involved.

"It was really a chance for them to learn, and I think they learned a lot," he said.  "Some of the kids have really grown and improved, and that's exciting and gratifying."

Parker also bemoaned the limited engagement, but she said if there was every any question about local support for opera, this sold-out "L'Orfeo" answered it.

"This valley is hungry for opera," Parker said.   "There's a tremendous audience here."

Rescuing Dowland
(by Jonathan Saville; San Diego Weekly Reader, April 26, 2001)
Anthony Rooley's Consort of Musicke makes a case for Dowland's being an exceedingly boring composer

The songs of the English Renaissance composer John Dowland constitute one of the great treasures in the history of music.  Not many music lovers are convinced of this, however, even those with a predilection for what is generally referred to as "early music"

Why not?  First of all, these are brief works, whose consumate artistry is demonstrated only on a small scale.  Second, their usual mode of performance features a solo voice (almost always a high voice) accompanined by a single lute.  Even when the singer has a beautiful voice, a good technique, and a sense for how to deliver a song effectively, the limitations of the performing forces and the sameness of sound tend to weary the listener after awhile.  Take, as a salient example, countertenor Steven Rickards delectable CD offering a selected anthology of Dowland's lute-songs.  Rickards is a superb singer, his collaborator, Dorothy Linell is a fine lutenist; and the selection includes many of the composer's most striking songs.   Still, after the disc's generous 74 minutes and 8 seconds of countertenor and lute, one feels an urgent claustrophobic longing to listen to Die Meistersinger or the Verdi Requiem.

Not all singers of these songs are as good as Rickards (and that is the third reason that Dowland is not as popular as he deserves to be).  In the nature of things; the majority of Dowland singers are English; and--also, unfortunately, in the the nature of things--there is a persistent conviction among English singers that "early music" must be performed with extreme restrainte, avoiding overt emotionalism or explicit tone-painting, and with an invariable sweetness of tone that never dares cross the vocal boundary separating the croon from the operatic.  I know, not all English singers are like this.  But enough of them are to alert the listener in advance that an English singer performing Dowland is unlikely to sound much like Callas or Pavarotti.   thus, the only integral recording of Dowland's vocal music, by Anthony Rooley's Consort of Musicke, makes a virtually irrefutable case for Dowland's being an exceedingly boring composer.

Nevertheless, the Dowland performance at St. James by the Sea, by the early-music group calling itself My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, rapidly obliterated the memories of Rooly and his prissy, dreary gang.  This group of singers and instrumentalists (which, to save newsprint, I will refer to as MLCC) had the courage to treat Dowland as a vital, passionate composer, and to present his music as an exciting living experience, rather than as an antiquarian's foray into a remote and thoroughly dead past.  And they did so not by anachronistic modernization, but by going back to the authentic Dowland and the authentic English Renaissance.

For one thing, they took Dowland at his word that his soungs could be performed in a larg variety of ways.  According to the composer's own specifications, any of his songs (with a few exceptions) is viable as a solo with lute accompaniment; as a solo with lute plus a bass viol; as a solo with the accompaniment of a consort of viols, with or without lute; as an unaacompanied four-voice part song, in the manner of a madrigal; or as a part song, with a varying number of voices, accompanied by lute or viols.  In addition, Dowland himself arranged many of his soungs for purely instrumental performance, either by lute or by viol consort.  In short, while the music may be substantially the same, many different performances of it are legitimate, and any suggestion of monotony is due not to the composer but to the performers' lack of imagination.

An idea of how MLCC inventively exploited the range of possibilities can be suggested by their treatment of one of Dowland's most charming songs, "Now, O now, I needs must part."  This work, with its witty text and irresisitibly catchy tune, has three strophes, each ending with a fourline refrain.  The whole thing can be sung as a solo with lute.  But in MLCC's performance, the first strophe and all the refrains were sung as an accompanied part song (by soprano Marcia Young, countertenor Drew Minter, tenor Philip Anderson, and baritone Gregory Purnhagen); the second strophe was taken as a solo by the baritone, who sang not the soprano tune but the bass line (which turned out to be a terrific tune in itself); and in the third strophe, the soprano and countertenor performed the music as a duet.  Through, the accompaniment was provided by the group's three lutenists (Grant Herreid, Pat O'Brien, and Andy Rutherford) and their bass viol player (Rosamund Morley).  In each performance mode, all the notes were there, all the counterpoint, all the harmony, with different elements being emphasized according to whether a particular line was sung or played instrumentally.   One heard a single work, yet with immense variety within it.

Nor was that all.  "Now, O now, I needs must part" ended the first half of the concert at St. James (to tumultuous applause by the electirified audience).  The second half began quietly with the instruments alone--and what were they playing but an instrumental version of the same song, with virtuosic lute variations ("divisions" as they were called in Dowland's day)!  Then, at the very end of the concert, when the audience kept calling the performers back to the stage, the four singers offered as an encore, a cappella, the first strophe of the now familiar song, with its regretful and wittily appropriate words: "Now, O now, I needs must part."   The mixture of seriousness and playfulness in this gesture, like the text of the song itself, was just what one would have expected in the age of Elizabth I.

It might be asked, however, whether in Elizabethan times vocalists would have sung with such passion and such full voice as what we heard the MLCC singers do.   Countertenor Drew Minter, the best known of the group's members, is famous for his roles in Baroque opera, in which his dramatic intensity in projecting a character's emotional state makes him a vivid presence.  He was no different in his singing of Dowland: in each of his solos, the listener was made aware not only of the melody but of a person uttering the melody, a person in whome the feelings the words and tune expressed (usually, in Dowland, the pains of love) rose not from a graceful conceit of language or a well-shaped musical line but from the core of that person's being.

Minter's is surely a suitable style for Handel, who composed more than a century later, but is it right for Dowland?  The proof of the pudding is in the eating--how gripping the songs become when Minter gives his all to them!  But the historical context of Dowland's music also has something to tell us about how he should be performed.  Consider Elizabethan poetry, architecture, public celebrations, word exploration, meetings of parliament, and attitudes towards the Queen--none of these were marked by polite restraint.  It was an age of big characters, loud talk, and bold deeds.

There was also (in case you haven't already thought of it) the Elizabethan-Jacobean theater.  Dowland's four books of songs (of which MLCC performeed 18 of the 21 songs in Book One) were published between 1597 and 1612.  The public that valued Dowland during that period would also no doubt have been in the audience for Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.  I am not suggesting that "Now, O now, I needs must part"--or even Dowland's great "In darkness let me dwell"--is of the magnitude of King Lear.  But they belonged to the same culture, were heirs to the same literary traditions, and grew out of the same national temperament.  If Drew Minter, in lamenting the inequities of Love, makes the same gestures and has the same melodramatic throb in his voice as Duke Orsino's declaiming, "If music be the food of love, play on," he cannot be much off the mark.

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