Opera Reviews – Stephen Rogers Radcliffe

5 Ways With Music and Drama That Share the Bond of Brevity

Press | Opera Reviews

Monday, May 13, 1991

5 Ways With Music and Drama That Share the Bond of Brevity

By Bernard Holland

Opera is never more torn between its duty to music and its duty to drama than in one-act form. If one buys old theories about the medium — that opera gravitates toward grand themes and outsize passions, that it simplifies human motives and discourages the ambiguities of the day-to-day — then brevity would seem a natural enemy. Weight accumulates with time, and time is in short supply.

New York City offered five specimens of opera as aphorism over the weekend. On Friday evening, the New York Chamber Ensemble played concert versions of “The Robbers” by Ned Rorem, Douglas Moore’s “Gallantry” and “A Full Moon in March” by John Harbison. On Saturday night, the Bronx Opera gave Mr. Moore’s “Devil and Daniel Webster” and the Gilbert and Sullivan “Trial by Jury.”

Like the short story, one-act operas depend on the athletic properties of a few ideas — a scene, a person, an incident — that pull the reader gracefully toward swift conclusions. Few short operas have managed to indulge in time-stopping set pieces without forfeiting momentum. “Cavalleria Rusticana” is one: its arias and interludes stand by themselves but the ferocious dramatic progression never loses a step.

“The Robbers,” written in 1956, is taken from Chaucer’s “Pardoner’s Tale”: “A Full Moon in March” (1977) reworks Yeats’s fantasy of a queen, a commoner, sex and astrology. In both pieces, small, lithe and transparently colored instrumental groups push things along. Deprived of sets and costumes and with only minimal gestures to go by, one felt the instruments as a particularly powerful metaphor for the genre.

Mr. Harbison’s three winds, three strings, percussion and prepared piano had an astringent simplicity and an agitated movement that seemed to carry the four singers almost as passengers. Mr. Rorem’s dozen or so solo instruments achieve a nice irony: buoyant movement and skittering wind phrases played against heavy themes of murder and greed. His language is the more pliant and obliging, colored by that curious and oh-so-French juncture of impressionistic chord extensions and ancient modal gestures.

“Gallantry” from 1957 is a throwaway joke: an opera about a soap opera whose characters are characters themselves. Daytime broadcast drama is re-enacted complete with intervening commercials. The four principals (Julia Parks, Margaret Bishop, Richard Holmes and Scott Berry) flirt with the burlesque but usually avoid it. Moore’s talent for amiable melody prevails.

Saturday night, the Bronx Opera offered an evening of jurisprudence, placing Moore’s setting of the Stephen Vincent Benét play next to English courtroom farce. The two pieces rushed in opposite directions. Driven by its clever texts and its enchanting music, “Trial by Jury” is light, active and brief to a fault. It flies away before we have got a hold of it. So deft are the comic turns that one mourns the opportunities left unmined.

“The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which the famous lawyer pleads for the soul of a friend before a jury of the damned, labors long under its burden of melodrama. A little irony and black humor could have given it life, but in their place is either earnest anguish or earnest good cheer. Moore takes the material so seriously that his usual lyric touch abandons him. Or else it was there but hidden behind a production (directed by Cynthia Edwards) and a performance that had more than its share of ensemble confusions.

Eugene Green — the Judge in the Gilbert and Sullivan and Daniel Webster in Moore’s piece — was decipherable in the first but in both roles oppressively emphatic. Adrian Michael (the Plaintiff then later the Devil) gave clarity, lightness and considerable style in two very different roles. Stephonne Smith sang Jabez Stone with a wide vibrato. Mary Phillips as his wife had some unfortunate adventures with pitch. One of the evening’s briefest performances was perhaps its most elegant: Philip Cutlip as Counsel for the Plaintiff. His client, Theresa Cincione, sang solidly as well.

Michael Spierman conducted the Bronx performances. “Trial by Jury” had a nice lilt; the Moore was a bit disheveled. Working with better musicians and more difficult music, Stephen Rogers Radcliffe presided over Friday night’s triple bill with impressive musical control. The other principal singers on Friday were Nancy Allen and Robert Osborne.

History As Engaging Theater

Press | Opera Reviews

Monday, June 4, 1990

History As Engaging Theater

By Tim Page

THE NEW YORK Chamber Ensemble’s Friday night re-creation of a particularly important concert from the 1927 Baden-Baden Festival was not only good, vital history but an engaging evening of music theater as well.

Some background information: In the summer of 1927, four young composers — Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud and Ernst Toch — were invited to write short operas for performance in a small theater, with a limited number of soloists and a chamber ensemble instead of a full orchestra. On July 17 of that year, the four works received their world premiere performances at a festival of music in the German spa town of Baden-Baden; three of these were greeted enthusiastically, while the Weill work provoked wildly mixed reactions and even, if contemporary reports can be believed, some fisticuffs.

Still, Weill’s “Mahagonny Songspiel,” to a text by Bertholt Brecht, was the only one of the four to enter the standard repertory and the central “Alabama Song” may be numbered among the composer’s best-known creations. I have little patience for Brecht’s shrill, debased representation of humanity but the music in this half-hour is wonderful — lean, tuneful, citric and altogether original. No wonder it caused a fuss.

Hindemith’s “Hin and Zuruck” — “There and Back” — owes a clear debt to the cinema. It might be described as an operatic palindrome that reaches a certain point in its action and is then run backwards. A husband enters to wish his wife a happy birthday, finds an incriminating love note, shoots her, then jumps out a window. The sequence of events is then reversed: the husband falls back through the window, the wife is restored to life, they quarrel about the love note, he wishes her a happy birthday and departs. Hindemith’s score mirrors this chain of events: It is vigorous, virtuosic, richly contrapuntal and — no slight intended — sounds just as good backwards as forwards.

In general, the music of Darius Milhaud has not worn the years very well (the same may be said of the other composers in the aggregate of French composers known as “Les Six,” but Milhaud, with the most inflated reputation, had the farthest to fall). He now is remembered almost exclusively for his little jazz-age masterpiece, “La Creation du Monde,” but the sweet pocket opera (nine minutes) he wrote for Baden-Baden, “The Abduction of Europe,” deserves an occasional performance. It is exquisitely made, often very funny (including a chorus of mooing cows), imbued throughout with a sort of pastoral elegance that leads to a vaporous and beautiful finale.

Unfortunately, the final opera, Ernst Toch’s “The Princess and the Pea,” is trite throughout, a succession of melodic, harmonic and theatrical predictabilities. Doubly unfortunately, it was by far the longest opera on the program — some 45 minutes. Still, for the sake of history, it had to be included: The New York Chamber Ensemble gave it a lively reading, and Margaret Bishop made a delightfully pouty princess.

Indeed, there was little to fault in the evening’s performances. The ensemble playing was synchronous and energetic, and Stephen Rogers Radcliffe’s leadership was never less than authoritative. The singers — Mark Bleeke, Richard Holmes, Michael Brown, Robert Osborne, Nancy Ortez and Katherine Johnson — were equally fine; I particularly admired the Lotte Lenya-like mix of sweet and sour that Johnson brought to the Weill work. / II

Music: Verein Revisited, With Jan DeGaetani

Press | Symphonic Reviews

Music: Verein Revisited, With Jan DeGaetani

Monday, September 14, 1987

By Michael Kimmelman

In 1918, Schoenberg founded the Verein für Musikalisch Privataufführungen, a society devoted to the presentation of contemporary music from Mahler and Strauss onward. Admission to the society’s concerts was by subscription only; critics were not invited, and rehearsal time was ample. Berg, Webern and other composers active after the First World War belonged to the society, which became one of Austria’s most distinguished cultural institutions until its demise in 1923.

The society employed pianists and then chamber ensembles for its concerts, so among the central occupations of members became the transcription of orchestral scores for smaller forces. Dozens of works were rearranged, sometimes by the composers themselves.

Saturday evening’s engaging program at Alice Tully Hall by the New York Chamber Ensemble was the first in a series of concerts entitled “Music of the Verein Revisited.” The performing ensemble, which incorporated the Fine Arts Quartet, the New York Woodwind Quintet and a handful of others, played works by Debussy, Schoenberg and Mahler. Stephen Rogers Radcliffe conducted, and the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani was soloist.

Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” transcribed by Hanns Eisler, opened the program. Performed by 11 players, including the pianist Ursula Oppens, the work sounded less plush and colorful than usual, with the winds gaining even more prominence and the strings receding into the background. Still, the benefits of hearing a piece such as this stripped to the bone became apparent: textures were clear and there was no blanket of sound covering up the musical machinery.

Miss DeGaetani next rendered three sets of songs: Schoenberg’s “Vier Lieder” (Op. 22), arranged by Felix Greissle; Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder,” arranged by the composer; and Mahler’s “Rückert Lieder,” transcribed by Philip West. Again, the music was on a scale that drew the listener to it and allowed small details to gain prominence. It also suited the temperament of the evening’s soloist, who did not have to battle large numbers of instrumentalists to make herself heard.

Throughout, Miss DeGaetani offered performances of exactitude, purity and elegance. Words meant something to Ms. DeGaetani; tones were struck clearly and precisely. She created an atmosphere of rapt concentration, and she sang in beautifully constructed, carefully measured phrases. In particular, the final lines of Mahler’s “Ich Bin der Welt Abhanden Gekommen” were spun out in silken tones.

Mr. Radcliffe served ably as partner without drawing from his players quite the same level of refinement. His best work of the evening came during an unusually spirited and thoughtful version of Schoenberg’s “Kammersymphonie” (Op. 9), which closed the program.

Future performances in the four-concert Verein series by the New York Chamber Ensemble are scheduled for Jan. 15, Feb. 6 and April 8 at Alice Tully Hall.