(response to The Barber of Seville, performed by the Atlanta Opera Company, and a radio broadcast from Houston Grand Opera of John Michael LaChiusa's Send and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. )
Rossini's music, even during a second-act thunderstorm, stays airy, light, and dry. The characters are all endearing. "Figaro" (played by Hugh Russell) sang with bravado as he boasted how his imagination bubbles with ideas like a volcano, and how money sets it to bubbling. The Count Almaviva (Bradley Williams) is his less-bright buddy whose rank and wallet save the day a couple of times. There's a great battle of wits and wills going on between Rosina and her guardian Bartolo and Rosina and Figaro. She seems so modern, so like a bored thrill-seeking teen girl of today -- except for some extraordinary high and light notes. Even bad guy Bartolo is endearing -- having as much fun catching his ward and her male admirers in their schemes as they have circumventing him. All of them do the tongue-twisting patter that earns scads of applause.
This production also stayed light and airy. The first image is a back-lit blue scrim, and the silhouette of a musician. Then we see bicyclists, more musicians, and eventually three free-standing town homes that look flat -- before windows open and we see as many as three characters in a room behind the window -- the effect being the same as when Wile E. Coyote disappears behind a thin tree trunk. Interiors were portions of walls dropped in from above, colorfully papered.
Rossini did some post-modern reflexive bits, such as the pastiche of other opera styles during a music lesson scene, and when Bartolo mocks the girl's aria, and later, when Figaro impatiently tries to get the lovers to stop their duet to escape. Wonderful moment is Act One finale, in which the main characters are mortified, "like statues," singing one syllable per measure, and Figaro sings supple lines around them, playing with the convention of their facing the audience in place.
These must all be familiar to opera fans, but they're new to me. I'd expected something cute and stylized, not vital and warm and self-knowing.
John Michael LaChiusa's one-woman, one-act opera Send, performed on the radio by Audra McDonald, had some of those same qualities. His music utilized sampling technology to allow McDonald to sing words against thoughts -- overlapping her own voice in duets. The situation is simple: the 30-something woman has sent her phone number to the man who replied to her personals ad on line -- and she's been waiting hours for him to call. While she repeats "five minutes more," she daydreams about the possible ways this on-line relationship might develop, the way people do -- and castigates herself for being so dependent on this dream of romance.
LaChiusa and Rossini share in common their attention to keeping a steady pulse going throughout the evening, though relieved sometimes by silence, or very lightly textured accompaniment.
Poulenc's piece is something else. He draws us uncomfortably into a clutching woman's desperate world, as we listen to her curses, cajoling, self-abasement, flirtation, and delusional chatter on the phone to her ex-lover. Intense, hard to take for the length of the act. I saw a production of this with a memorable set: Instead of the woman's apartment, we saw a red sports car, crashed into a telephone pole on some country road, and she crawls out of the wreck to talk on her cell phone. But there's more: the swell of the hill and the odd object hanging down from above the phone pole resolve into the dashboard of a car and its rear-view mirror. In that mirror, we see the road behind her, and images flashing of her memories, of "his" eyes, of her reflection. . .
Throughout the Rossini, I was thinking how much more real and delightful this two-hundred -year - old piece is than most Broadway musicals I've seen.
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