Posts Tagged ‘Larry Hancock’

Tenor Kirk Dougherty and soprano Sylvia Lee cuddle in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

Who was the first novelist to enjoy truly international fame? If you guessed Charles Dickens, you would be wrong. His success was preceded by the author who is little read today, Sir Walter Scott. The Scottish author is certainly remembered in the world of opera, with his story The Bride of Lammermoor, a far-fetched tale of mayhem, madness, and bloodshed that is nevertheless based on a true story, told by Scott’s mother, Anne Rutherford, about an ill-fated romance set within a larger feud between the Dalrymples and the Rutherfords.

He told the story.

However, it’s not the plot that draws us into Gaetano Donizetti‘s 1835 Lucia di Lammermoor, a gory little tale of tribal vengeance in the highlands, but the glorious music, from beginning to end. How sad for my readers, then, that I’ve taken so long to write about this wonder of a production at Opera San José – since it closes tomorrow, with a Sunday, September 5, matinee at 3 p.m.! My excuse: I only saw the opera myself Friday night.

Soprano Sylvia Lee‘s perfect coloratura performance in the title role is a big reason for the excitement. Lucia has become her signature role, performed in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, and her native South Korea before she began her residency at Opera San José this season. General Director Larry Hancock, in a talk before the performance, compared her to late, legendary Lily Pons, who was also associated with the role.

He set it to music.

Charlise Tiee, writing in San Francisco Classical Voice, “Her acting was completely engrossing, her sweetness which is crushed into derangement, was utterly convincing. … Her voice is resonant from top to bottom and without a hard edge or a hint of shrillness. She attacked the coloratura passages with clarity and ease, yet was expressive. Her voice alone is well worth the trip to the South Bay and what a pleasure it is to see such an impeccable performance of an iconic role.”

“The show breathes with wonderful musicality, simple and direct acting, and plenty of vocal fireworks that underline the ‘bel’ in bel canto.”

Elijah Ho, writing in the San Jose Mercury was also enthusiastic: “To put it bluntly, it was a thing well-conceived and brilliantly executed. … Get in your car, or take the bus or the train. There is magnificent vocalism and so much more.”

By the time she had sung her final notes as Lucia on Saturday evening, it was apparent soprano Sylvia Lee had left us with something special.

A matchless Lucia

The singing actor, a winner of the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, conveyed meaning seamlessly throughout the evening. We marveled at how she handled the delicate cantilena of “Regnava nel silenzio”, the way she took the delicate roulades in “Quando, rapito in estasi” with ease and elegance. When she was in her element, there was incredible evenness of tone. Pitches, no matter the distance, were hit squarely in the middle, and her legato flowed the Mozart-prescribed way: “like oil.”

Lucia’s mental collapse, culminating in the much-anticipated mad scene, was both subtle and gradual. Lee’s facial expressions, beginning with wide, crazy eyes, evolved from “Il pallor funesto” to “Soffriva nel pianto.” By the end, I couldn’t help but be disturbed by the contrast between her blood-soaked white dress, the forlorn, exhausted expressions of her face and the emanating beauty of her coloratura in response to the flute.

The opera is set in the 17th century, but Larry Hancock, thinking of the enormous plumed hats of the era and the silly breeches with their “nests of ribbons” (I loved that phrase), vowed “not on my stage.” He preferred a more medieval look to the opera, and recast Lucia in the 15th century. This required him to adjust political woes that beset the characters, suggested in the single line in the original: “William is dead; we will see Mary mount the throne” – referring to the joint rule of Mary, daughter of James II, and her husband William of Orange. Never happened, of course – Mary died first. Hancock rewrote the line, setting the action after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, when Henry Tudor (i.e., Henry VII) defeated Richard III. Since England and Scotland were not united until 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne, Mary’s sister, I couldn’t understand why the Scots would much concerned with either death.

No matter, the 15th-century costumes were sumptuous, recalling the rough land where the elegant French Mary Stuart‘s life would be tormented by feudal clashes and turf battles less than a century later.

Baritone Matthew Hanscom puts the pressure on Lee and Dougherty in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

Opening night at the opera. (Photo: Elena Danielson)

Before I made the trek to Opera San Jose yesterday, a friend tipped me off that a line from Dante Alighieri opens one of the scenes in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s Marriage of Figaro (read about the production here). This perfectly cut diamond of an opera has sometimes been compared to the Italian poet’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy; both oscillate between the highest and the lowest that the human species has to offer – from the supercelestial to the depraved. But did Mozart crib a line from Dante? Where?

Did he crib from Dante?

Larry Hancock, the learned and amiable general director of the San Jose Opera, was equally mystified when I asked him at the Q&A session following his pre-show presentation. He told me to keep my ears open.

Well, an easy thing to do at an opera from one angle – but in the San Jose Opera’s excellent production, it was also easy to lose track of scholarship in the beauty of the music and the magic of this very well-matched cast of singers. There wasn’t a weak link in the long chain. So I forgot all about Dante.

By Act II, I was swept up in the Countess’s great self-pity aria (there’s always one in a Mozart opera), Susannah’s banter, and the smitten Cherubino as he began to sing the song he wrote for his Countess, Voi che sapete che cosa è amor. The supertitles rolled on the screen – “Ladies, you who know the intellect of love…,” or words to that effect. The text suddenly seemed very un-Mozartlike, and a frisson ran through me. I raised my pointed finger to the overhead screen in slow recognition, and it froze there in mid-air, till my discomfited companion jerked my hand down again.

Scandalous priest

I had been expecting a line from The Divine Comedy. Instead, of course, this is one of the most famous passages of La Vita Nuova, the work in which Dante describes his love for Beatrice Portinari, and his anguish at her death – as well a meditation on love as a transcendent force in our lives and as a poetic theme. “Ladies who have the intelligence of love,/I wish to speak to you about my lady…” (Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, i’ vo’ con voi de la mia donna dire…)

Not dead on, but close enough, and certainly an Italian audience would recognize the homage even faster than I did.

I found Larry in a hallway during the intermission. How did this Viennese composer come to utter the words of Dante? He probably didn’t, he said. He suggested I look instead to the famous librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a dissolute priest banished from Venice who eventually took to the pen for his living. And aren’t we grateful he did? He was the most celebrated librettist of his time – and he certainly would have known his Dante well, even if he didn’t take the poet’s sterner admonitions to heart.

He got it right.

I highly recommend this Marriage of Figaro, which continues through November 29, so you can pay a visit over the Thanksgiving over the weekend.

It was my first time attending an opera in about a decade. What inspired me to accept an invitation several weeks ago, during a time of very intense deadlines? It was the first opera I had ever attended way back in 1978 London, at the English National Opera, so it strikes a deep chord in me. More importantly, however, I recalled that René Girard said, “The Marriage of Figaro is, for me, the most mystical of all music.” No doubt he was moved by its recurring themes of escalating vengeance, sublime forgiveness, and finally, peace and reconciliation.

Little did I know I would be attending it the day after his funeral, and two days after a massacre in France. Elijah Ho noted in the San Jose Mercury:

On Opera San Jose’s Saturday night opening performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, French police stormed the Boulevard Beaumarchais of the 11th arrondissement in Paris, where but a few feet away, the Bataclan theater had become the site of unspeakable horrors. The boulevard, which leads directly to the Place de la Bastille, is named for the playwright on whose revolutionary work Mozart’s opera is based, one which prefigured the most famous storming in history. … In November 1963, Leonard Bernstein famously remarked after the assassination of President Kennedy: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”