Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (at Meany Theater through April 7; tickets: $55 adults, $20 students) is a couple of hours of lightweight froth, very amusing in the right hands. Luckily for Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, it has those hands in charge. Artistic director Peter Kazaras is a master of detail who can flesh out the slimmest of stories and make it fun to watch as well as hear.
Essentially it’s the story of the old man who thinks he’s wed young woman: She leads him a merry dance until he is delighted to be rid of her, when his long-suffering nephew (who is the girl’s real love) gets her instead.
The Young Artist’s spring performance moved this year from Bellevue’s Meydenbauer to Meany Theater, and has two more performances next weekend. Saturday’s opening night saw bass Michael Uloth in the title role, with tenor Andrew Stenson as his nephew Ernesto, baritone David Krohn as Dr. Malatesta, Ernesto’s friend and Don Pasquale’s doctor, and soprano Amanda Opuszynski as Norina, the girl in the middle.
Fine singing from them all throughout was highlighted by a rare patter song for bass/baritone duet, with Uloth and Krohn aquitting themselves at full speed.
However, the opera story is so slight that it needs plenty of help from the acting and visuals to keep it alive and here the young singers excelled, particularly Uloth and Opuszynski, who have the lion’s share of the funny side of things.
The youthful Uloth portrays a creaky-jointed septuagenarian with a little pot belly and a long skinny face, topped by wisps of grey hair around a long visage adorned with rimless glasses. His mannerisms fit the picture, especially his efforts to sit down and get up again.
The pert and lively Opuszynski, the center of the action, has a blast pretending to be a shy, demure, virginal girl, dressed to match, until the pseudo-knot is tied when she turns into a virago. Krohn, whose character masterminds the plot, deftly keeps things going, feeding the old man pills and water when it all seems to be getting too much for him, while Stenson, the straight man in the story, doesn’t have much to do except be upset at the start until he’s let into the plot, and then ardent towards the end.
Colorful costumes, designed with flair by the UW’s senior lecturer Deborah Trout, come from the 1950s post-war era, when dresses were full skirted and pretty.
Sets are minimal but Don Pasquale’s era show in the projected backdrops of heavy draperies and lots of gilded plasterwork, and Norina’s totally modern art choices come as a shocking departure. Clever touches abound, such as the moving laundry line in Norina’s sparsely furnished original apartment which brings in clothing, not to mention messages attached to a clothes peg.
Brian Garman conducted the orchestra with deft pacing in Donizetti’s charming music, and the whole is an evening’s humorous entertainment.
Performances of Seattle Opera Young Artists Don Pasquale are 7.30 p.m. on March 31 and April 6 and 7, matinée April 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets: $55 adults, $20 students.
“Anglo-Saxon fairy tales end with marriage and living happily ever after. Italian comedy begins there, and the woman outfoxes the man every step of the way.” So says Peter Kazaras, stage director for Seattle Opera Young Artists Program (YAP) production of Donizetti’s comedy Don Pasquale, which opens Saturday for two weekends at the University of Washington’s Meany Theater.
It’s the tale of an old man who plans to take a young wife, in order to teach his nephew and heir Ernesto a lesson. Ernesto is refusing to marry the girl of Don Pasquale’s choice. But Don P’s friend, Dr. Malatesta, foresees much trouble ahead, and organizes a fake marriage with Norina, the girl Ernesto wants to marry. Norina is meek until the fake ceremony is over and then proceeds to lead the old man a wild dance, making his life a misery with a sequence of—to us—extremely funny episodes, until finally everything is put right, the old man is relieved to be rid of his unruly bride and the young lovers are together.
Kazaras has set it in Fellini’s Rome of La Dolce Vita, the 1950s to ’60s, where fashion, and Norina, are forging ahead with post-war abandon, but Don P is stuck somewhere in pre-war style.
Every year the Young Artists Program brings in nine or ten promising young singers on the threshold of operatic careers. The 21-week program gives them coaching in all aspects of being an opera singer, from physical well-being to acting to the business side of things as well as lots of performing. The fall offering travels with minimal sets and costumes all around the state, and unitl now, the spring opera has been fully staged at the Theater at Meydenbauer in Bellevue. This year, with Don Pasquale, it has moved to Meany Theater.
“Meany has wonderful acoustics, but it’s frankly a challenge going into a space three times the size of the previous space,” says Kazaras.
The YAP budget has become more and more limited, and Kazaras and his design team have had to use their formidable imaginations to overcome this. Set designer Donald Eastman’s unerrring eye, Deborah Trout’s costumes, and Chris Reay’s lighting are combining to present something fresh and fun.
Just using projections is not the answer, as they often involve triple the rehearsal time, but they are one of many design choices which can be used to enhance the whole, as they are here. (Think: Norina’s redecorating scheme.)
How to choose the right opera for the young participants is a puzzle Kazaras cannot begin to put together until he knows who those singers will be and what their voices are like. It isn’t just a choice of soprano, mezzo, tenor, baritone, as one may have a Mozart or Handel voice, another clearly heading to Puccini or even Wagner eventually, and Kazaras must find an opera which will give the singers experience, suit their voices, and also nurture what are still young instruments, easily damaged by overloading.
Established artists have sung roles many times and know what they need to do to perform consistently throughout an opera. Young artists, says Kazaras, “don’t know yet what they can’t do. They are more willing to try anything. No one says ‘I don’t do this or I can’t do that.’ It’s at this point they find things they thought they couldn’t do and that they can do. It’s my job to make that process more manageable as they go forward.”
Since the inception of the program, the young artists have also found themselves cast in mainstage productions of Seattle Opera, though only in recent years have they been included while they are still in the program. This has made choosing them trickier, as Kazaras, with YAP director Aren Der Hacopian and music director Brian Garman must also think of the mainstage productions coming up where some of those voices will be needed. Young artists often return here for a second year, and it’s those, whose voices and capacities are better known, who are most often picked for the main stage.
“It’s one of the challenges of working with them,” says Kazaras.
Five of this year’s crop sang solo roles in the mainstage production of Carmen. “It didn’t sound like established artists up here and young artists struggling at the bottom” says Kazaras with satisfaction. Tenor Andrew Stenson, in his second year with the program, was the cover for Orpheus in the recent main stage production of Orphée et Eurydice. It so happened that he had to take over the role on March 4 for William Burden and did it well.
Four young artists appear in the upcoming production of Madama Butterfly, which Kazaras is also directing, including Sarah Larsen as Suzuki. Seattle Opera takes on a new venture with Butterfly. Opening night will be simulcast at Key Arena, free to the 8,000 people the arena will hold. Experienced video-director Frank Zamacona will be directing the multi-camera shoot, as he has done before for San Francisco Opera.
Kazaras then will have a short break before coming back for the summer opera, Puccini’s Turandot, when he is returning to his first career, as tenor. While nowadays he spends much more time directing and working with young artists—he is Director of Opera UCLA, and a professor there—he has sung on opera stages worldwide, and for Turandot he will take on the small role of the Emperor Altoum.
“When else am I going to be able to say I’m singing the same role with Seattle Opera as Giovanni Martinelli did in 1967?”
Fist, though comes Don Pasquale, which opens Saturday night. “This isn’t a show,” says Kazaras, “about people coming to see something opulent and old fashioned. This is sleek, witty, and very beautiful.”
Without backdrop, without anything but a suggestion of costume and set, without orchestra and no special lighting, Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program has achieved a riveting production of Massenet’s Werther. After five performances around the state this month, the young singers came to Nordstrom Recital Hall for their final show Saturday night. (Sadly, if missed it, you now have to wait until March for the program’s next outing.)
The production has been abridged so that it only takes two hours with one intermission. It’s been well done, and condenses the story, making it stronger, to my mind. Goethe intended his late-18th-century tale to take a cynical view of an extraordinarily self-centered young man gone overboard with his inappropriate passion.
More than a century later, Massenet took the popular tale and wrote his opera, an overload of physical chastity combined with bursting romantic tension spiraling downwards to disaster. Lugubrious as the story is, Massenet’s music is gorgeous, played here by guest pianist/coach Stephanie Rhodes on stage. Rhodes became the whole orchestra, doing an excellent job and supporting the singers.
Five of the Young Artists took part, with the title role taken by tenor Andrew Stenson returning for his second year with the program. The opera might have been chosen for him and for mezzo soprano Sarah Larsen as his unattainable love, Charlotte. The two have the lion’s share of the singing and carry the action between them.
Stenson, although his voice is quite different, reminds the listener of another young artist here who has gone on to a stellar career, Lawrence Brownlee. Not everyone is suited to French opera, but Stenson’s voice is ideal for this role. It is strong from top to bottom, perfectly pitched, no breaks between registers–in short a beautifully trained lyric tenor voice with gorgeous timbre. He is also able to inhabit the role and even elicit some sympathy, not easy since this is an unforgiving role to act—it’s hard not to get exasperated with Werther as he mopes around and disrupts Charlotte’s family, who all seem to love him nevertheless.
Larsen also has a beautiful voice, her middle and lower registers particularly rich. She too has a difficult role to put across, the chaste, gentle woman doing her duty and concealing a love for this importunate young man, and she acts it well.
Stage director Peter Kazaras has done a stellar job in directing this with so little by way of props to help him and getting get the story across. While both acts are good, the second is completely absorbing from the start and builds to the climax. Massenet milks the emotion for all it is worth in the long-drawn-out death scene, and the two singers command the attention throughout.
Of the other roles, bass Michael Uloth has only a cameo role but it’s enough to make one want to hear more of him. He has the lead in the YAP’s spring production of Don Pasquale. Baritone David Krohn, another returnee, has the role of Charlotte’s long-suffering husband Albert. He sounded better last year as Don Giovanni and this opera may just not suit him particularly. Soprano Amanda Opuszynski, as Charlotte’s little sister, gave an excellent portrayal of a young teen, good in every detail, though she sounded better as one of the gypsies in the mainstage production of Carmen earlier this fall than she did here.
Nordstrom Recital Hall is not kind to high tones at volume, where the sound often becomes hard and shrill. There is little reverberation to soften anything. Violins always suffer here, and it seems likely that the quality of Opuszynski’s voice, the highest, was undermined by these acoustics. Larsen also, in her highest register, had the same problem.
The singers, who spend twenty-one weeks in the Young Artists Program, get training in every aspect of being an opera singer, from everything to do with performance to life skills and budgeting. They are halfway through this course, and you will be able to see their progress at the production of Donizetti’s comic Don Pasquale, the end of March and in early April at Meany Hall.
There’s seemingly no end to the ways you can stage Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Different times and milieu see different things in the Don: he can be a Sinatra-esque rake, an iconoclast anti-hero, a compulsive seducer, an irredeemable rapist. Mozart’s music allows a certain latitude–it can illustrate a scene, or take up an ironic distance.
In the Seattle Opera Young Artists production of Don Giovanni (through April 9, at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center), he’s a 1950s Eurotrash party boy with more than a hint of the talented Mr. Ripley. Krohn sings the part well, with bravado, but his Giovanni is not at the core motivated by the love of seduction. Then, the Don is a charming rogue, teasing and cajoling. Here, he reminds you a little of a Ted-Bundy-in-training, someone who’s trying to work himself up to something more. His servant Leporello is always complaining and recalcitrant, but in Erik Anstine’s hands, you sense a foreshadowing of worse to come, if the Don crosses a line that can’t be uncrossed.
Director Peter Kazaras, perhaps making financial necessity the mother of invention, supplements a set of extraordinary costumes from Candace Frank with a little scaffolding stage left and right (from set designer Donald Eastman), and projects video and stills against the back wall. The projections at best add an immediate ambiance, and at worst distract from the live action. Intense washes of color, from lighting designer Connie Yun, serve to elevate scenes from the banality of place as the characters access heights of emotion.
He’s also added a little girl (she’s not from the “Prague version” of the score the Young Artists are using) whose purpose and identity is left vague. She’s not simply a framing device, though, since she interacts with the Don and other characters. She might be the Don’s little girl, she might be his prey. (She might be a thousand things.)
I’m of two minds about her presence. You might say she activates the moral field, without defining it: Is the Don, despite all, a caring father? Is he a sexual predator? Not knowing, you can’t feel comfortable settling on a reading of the Don, one where it’s all in fun, or one where he’s a simple sociopath. (The drawback is that her identity is never disclosed because she doesn’t exist; for the plot, she’s extraneous.)
The people who do exist for the purposes of the plot are served well enough by the Young Artists cast here. Marcy Stonikas is an imposing Donna Anna, with more than enough voice to fill Meydenbauer’s auditorium–it even seems slightly preposterous that when the Don accosts her in her room in the middle of the night, her scream brings no one. You would like to hear more dynamic nuance, but this should come throughout the run.
Her Don Ottavio (Andrew Stenson, last night) is a doormat, caught up in a pattern of appeasement. As Stonikas plays it, she only tolerates Ottavio’s presence as a means to avenge herself on Giovanni. She doesn’t bother even to humor Ottavio’s awkward attempts at romance.
Amanda Opuszunski’s Donna Elvira is a spitfire–you believe her woman-scorned side more than her relapses as the Don woos her back. She’s joined by a lively, flirtatious Zerlina (Jacqueline Bezek, a guest artist) who’s not so much innocently swept off her feet by the Don as willing to kick the tires of this wealthy admirer. She’s well-matched by her gruff beau Masetto (Adrian Rosas), who also channels the Voice of Doom as the Commendatore.
A perk in this production is Zerlina threatening Leporello with a cleaver after he’s caught impersonating the Don (while the Don works his wiles in Leporello’s outfit). Once again, there’s no firm ground to stand on–it’s not precisely a wink-and-a-nod as Zerlina terrorizes Leporello. Though Mozart’s music, conducted with brio by Brian Garman, is not particularly threatening at this point, its formal disconnect from an enraged woman stalking around waving a cleaver creates a sense that anything can happen.
The most striking thing about this production, you may find, is not the Don himself, but how his behavior deranges everyone he comes into contact with.
