Perhaps a Carnegie Hall archivist has recorded how often an evening-long work of brand-new chamber music, performed in the big auditorium, has prompted a standing ovation, but I would guess almost never. I was afraid that Kevin Puts’s Emily — No Prisoner Be, for mezzo-soprano and string trio, would get swallowed up in the hall’s expanse. The sight of microphones increased my skepticism, because amplification can only help so much if the music is too small or the space too big. I didn’t need to worry: As soon as the first notes sounded, it became clear that Emily is both intimate and symphonic. And mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the star whose name alone was enough to fill the house on February 19, skipped back and forth across that expressive chasm with ease, accompanied by the string trio Time for Three.
Puts’s cycle of two dozen Emily Dickinson songs, plus a couple of interludes, begins with “They Shut me Up in Prose,” a poem whose first four words evoke rage and resistance against a darkly tyrannical force.
They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me “still” —
Stillness is imprisonment, but confinement is pointless against the immense, liberating force of Dickinson’s poetic mind. She has only to think it, and, “easy as a Star,” she can “look down upon Captivity — And laugh.” It’s a powerful statement of intellectual and artistic freedom, and Puts prepares it with a furious trembling of strings, like the buzzing bees that populate other Dickinson poems. DiDonato enters with a pop-song-worthy hook, and the players double as vocalists, surrounding the tune with a halo of close harmony. But it takes less than a minute for her voice, like the poet’s restless mind, to take flight and spin off into the heavens.
The second song is an introvert’s anthem, “I Was the Slightest in the House,” and Puts sets it as a hushed reflection, almost a diary entry in musical form. DiDonato has one of the opera world’s great murmurs, a soft, warm filament of sound that stays perfectly clear down to the lowest reach of her register and the quietest pianissimo until it simply disappears. When this diva with a big personality, who makes her living lobbing arias to the upper balconies of an overscale opera house, utters the words “ I could not bear to live—aloud— / The Racket shamed me so—” you believe without hesitation that she is a lover of quietude.
Those first two numbers stake out the territory for the rest of the work, which lasts about 75 minutes and lingers on many shades of human experience and musical reference: the Straussian exuberance of “I Dwell in Possibility,” the ravishing depressiveness of “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain,” the Sondheimian wryness of (and millinery references) of “I Tie My Hat – I Crease My Shawl.” That makes Emily sound like a derivative pastiche, though, and it’s not, because Puts’s prosody and melodic gift both keep it fresh.
He has a knack for translating Dickinson’s rhythms into music. Her mixture of plain New England speech and jerky hesitations, of the vernacular and the gnomic, have made her abidingly popular with American composers, who have churned out thousands of settings. But those qualities rarely fit a composer’s style as well as they do Puts’s. His score slips back and forth between hymnlike simplicity and operatic virtuosity. It feels like you could learn to sing along, but you almost certainly can’t.
If Dickinson has a fine collaborator in Puts, the composer has equal affinity with the performers. He wrote the role of Virginia Woolf in his opera The Hours for DiDonato, and the triple concertoContactfor Time for Three. Inevitably, their strengths and quirks seeped into the composer’s head so that the musicians helped shape the score instead of just carrying out its instructions.
The director, Andrew Staples, placed the performers on a stage within a stage, a stylized version of Dickinson’s bedroom in Amherst, Massachusetts with sheer curtains billowing and lighting that traces the bright and darkling recesses of the soul. The production works, mostly because DiDonato and Time for Three all know how to use it, moving without awkwardness, bringing the audience closer to the music instead of creating a distracting barrier. For an encore, DiDonato conscripted the audience into singing the lilting refrain of the final song, “No Prisoner Be,” while the musicians gradually fell silent. This is your music, now, she was saying: Cherish it.
Chelsea Lehnea and Ricardo José Rivera in Anna di Resburgo. Steven Pisano
After the Metropolitan Opera’s season ends in early June, local opera lovers patiently bide their time until late July when Teatro Nuovo again offers a pair of Italian bel canto operas at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater. Following last year’s semi-staged productions of Donizetti’s Poliuto and Ricci’s Crispino e la Comare, Teatro Nuovo this summer offered New Yorkers the modern premiere of Anna di Resburgo by Carolina Uccelli and the first local outing in several decades of I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Vincenzo Bellini’s take on Romeo and Juliet.
If the revival of a rare full-length opera from the mid-19th Century by a woman composer didn’t reveal a hidden masterpiece, Anna did provide a fascinating glimpse into what might have been had Uccelli continued her opera career. And Capuleti provided clues as to why this work by one of Italy’s greatest composers has never been taken up by the Met.
Several days before its Rose Theater date, Anna received its first performance since 1835 at Teatro Nuovo’s other home, New Jersey’s Montclair State University. Will Crutchfield, the group’s founder who for two decades led Opera at Caramoor where he began his exploration of neglected works of the first half of the nineteenth century, had carefully prepared a new performing edition of the second opera composed by the prodigious Uccelli. Following the publication of a group of songs when she was still a teenager, Saul, Uccelli’s first opera, premiered in Florence when she was just twenty years old. It attracted the notice of Gioachino Rossini whose support helped smooth the way for Anna’s only production in Naples five years later.
Uccelli, then a widow with a young daughter, had the bad luck to produce her opera just a month after the hugely successful first performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor which, like Anna, takes place amid warring clans in Scotland and ends with a tomb scene. After its second show, Anna, like similarly named Donizetti operas like Emilia di Liverpool, Maria di Rohan, Gianni di Parigi and Gemma di Vergy, disappeared until Crutchfield unearthed it. Uccelli wrote no more operas but enjoyed a modest career giving concerts throughout Europe with her accomplished pianist-daughter until her death in 1858 at age 48.
Gaetano Rossi’s tangled Anna libretto revolves around sons in conflict over the sins of their fathers. Anna’s husband Edemondo has been in hiding accused of the murder of his father Roggero by the late Duncalmo. Meanwhile, Duncalmo’s son Norcesto remains consumed with bringing Edemondo to justice. Anna and her son have been disguised as peasants at Olfredo’s farm until Norcesto notices Anna’s son’s resemblance to his father and reveals the pair’s true identities.
Their exposure draws Edemondo out of hiding, and he is swiftly condemned to be executed for patricide until a conscience-stricken Norcesto reveals that it was actually his own father who murdered Roggero. Thus, Anna, which appeared headed for disaster, gets an unexpected happy ending.
The opera’s first act demonstrated that Uccelli was a competent composer of no great individuality. But its second and final act reveals a much more compelling creator who seized on the story’s impending disaster and provided music of startling immediacy. After an arresting opening chorus, Uccellini gives Anna a striking, soaring solo describing her grief as she contemplates her son’s perilous future. After a vivid double-aria for Edemondo, Anna and Norcesto confront one another in a magnificent, lengthy duet of accusation and recrimination that is the score’s remarkable high point. If the opera ends with a predictably bland chorus of rejoicing, Uccelli has indelibly shown us the great potential she had.
Teatro Nuovo brought back for Anna the three singers who had formed the central triangle of last summer’s Poliuto. Once again, striking soprano Chelsea Lehnea embraced her character’s crises with a forceful flamboyance. She boldly added many searing high notes that communicated Anna’s increasing desperation. While her big top register easily filled the theater, the middle of her cool voice wasn’t forceful enough, and she was very reluctant to dig into her chest voice until that riveting duet with Ricardo José Rivera’s Norcesto.
The Puerto Rican baritone who had stood out as Severo in Poliuto once again brought a richly stirring voice and commanding presence to the brutal, then remorseful Norcesto. He chose, though too often, to sing above forte, but he enlivened the performance whenever he was present. As Edemondo, tenor Santiago Ballerini also loved to aim his resonant high notes to the back balcony, but he showed more care than Rivera for softer dynamics in Uccelini’s grateful music.
Another tenor, Lucas Levy excelled as the benevolent Olfredo and got the work’s most unique number: his aria describing Edemondo’s trial for murder is written in a fast-moving patter style usually reserved for comic moments. Elisse Albian’s glittering soprano briefly pleased as his daughter Etelia, who joined her father in relating much of the opera’s complicated exposition.
Teatro Nuovo eschews having a conventional conductor, so its splendid period-instrument orchestra is led by a pair of performing musicians. In Anna’s case, Lucy Tucker Yates played the fortepiano as Maestro al Cembalo while primo violino Elisa Citterio led the band as Capo d’Orchestra. They paced the music with crispness and verve making a strong case for Uccellini’s often richly imagined orchestral writing.
For Capuleti, Crutchfield took over at the cembalo, while Jacob Lehmann, who last year had skillfully guided Poliuto, returned to his violin as Bellini’s Capo.Many in the audience have missed Capuleti: though Crutchfield conducted it at Caramoor in 2012, its most recent local outing was in 2001 when the much-missed New York City Opera staged it with Mary Dunleavy and Sarah Connolly as the star-crossed lovers.
Bellini’s 1830 opera had to wait until the postwar bel canto revival was in full swing before it had its 20th-century revival. In 1957, Italian Radio presented it with Fiorenza Cossotto as Romeo, and the next year, the American Opera Society brought it to New York for the first time in more than a century with Giulietta Simionato, who would perform it again with AOS six years later opposite Mary Costa as Giulietta. AOS’s successor in presenting rare bel canto works, Eve Queler’s Opera Orchestra of New York, brought together three starry diva-pairings: Ashley Putnam and Tatiana Troyanos; Mariella Devia and Jennifer Larmore; then finally, Annick Massis and Vesselina Kasarova.
Alina Tamborini and Stephanie Doche in I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Steven Pisano
In the past several decades Elina Garanca and Joyce Didonato have donned Romeo’s tights around the world, and the former recorded the opera with Anna Netrebko. But the Met has resisted mounting the opera though the company has recently embraced bel canto operas with more urgency than it had while James Levine (who reportedly had little patience for that repertoire) held sway.
Though Capuleti premiered just a year before Bellini’s masterpiece Norma, it feels like an early work, less complex and less potent. While the music for Romeo and Giulietta shows the composer at his most inspired, the remainder of the work comes across as perfunctory. The libretto by Felice Romani draws not from Romeo and Juliet but from Shakespeare’s source, so Bellini’s opera lacks expected, iconic moments such as the lovers’s first meeting, their balcony encounter and secret marriage, all of which Charles Gounod in his Roméo et Juliette, for example, captured so beautifully.
Even the opera’s title seems miscalculated as the contentious Capulets and Montagues are scarcely featured. Paris has already been killed before the action begins, and Capulet and Friar Laurence are cardboard characters, while no Montagues beyond Romeo appear at all. Tebaldo, the tenor role, gets an ordinary cavatina-cabaletta that fails to make much of an impression. Despite Robert Kleinertz’s earnest, sometimes strenuous efforts for Teatro Nuovo, his Tebaldo remained a cipher.
Bellini’s Romeo is written for a mezzo-soprano, a trouser role that permitted the composer to conjure elaborate female duets that rival those prominently featured in Norma. The challenging roles of the lovers demand a charismatic pair at the top of their game. The opera has most often been revived as a vehicle for superstar soprano-mezzo pairings. Lacking singers of that caliber Teatro Nuovo offered instead promising young artists who tackled Bellini’s writing with care and devotion but lacked the outsized panache that can really bring Capuleti to life.
Alina Tamborini as Giulietta brought a large penetrating soprano with a quick vibrato that, like Lehnea’s, opened up brilliantly on top. However, she lacked warmth in the middle which made her haunting “Oh! quante volte,” the opera’s most famous aria, less moving. Her daring ornaments sometimes went overboard but still brought excitement to an occasionally bland evening. She did partner beautifully with her ardent Romeo, Stephanie Doche, in their all-important duets.
A restrained Doche began uneasily but gained confidence in her interactions with Tamborini. In the second act, she firmly negotiated Romeo’s wide-ranging music from arresting chest tones to brightly ringing high notes. Her quietly devastating rendition of Romeo’s grief-stricken aria over the “dead” Giulietta demonstrated the rightness of Bellini’s music which in the past was often omitted by star mezzos who preferred an older variant from an opera by Nicola Vaccai.
Both operas this summer were directed with apt economy by Marco Nisticò in front of effective projections by Adam Thompson that evoked productions of the time of the work’s composition. Nisticò, who as a bass-baritone frequently performed with Crutchfield at Caramoor, might have done more with his eager chorus, but his solo singers performed with intensity and focus.
The novelty of Uccelli’s Anna attracted a bigger, more enthusiastic audience than the better-known Bellini work, but both were greeted gratefully by an audience lately starved for bel canto by the Met, a company now more dedicated to presenting contemporary works—a repertoire shift that’s proven only partially successful.
NEW YORK — It was a delicious challenge that came as a total surprise.
As choreographer Annie-B Parson tells it, she was walking down a Brooklyn street when her phone rang. It was the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, wondering if she’d be interested in choreographing for the Met.
Parson, based in Brooklyn, founder of the Big Dance Theater and also known for choreographing David Byrne’s joyous “American Utopia” on Broadway, had never done an opera and acknowledges she knew little about the art form.
But of course she was interested. It was the Met’s buzzy, commissioned production of “The Hours,” about the interior lives of three women connected — across generations and an ocean — by Virginia Woolf and her writings (one of them Woolf herself). Parson would be the only woman on the creative team.
And so one of her first decisions when she came on board was that all dancers should be female, or female-identifying.
“We auditioned probably 150 people,” she said in an interview, for a dance cast of 13. “And as the only female creative team member in a piece about an extremely radical feminist voice, it was very important to me to bring that feminism to the stage.”
“That’s a personal statement on my part,” she added. “None of the men can do that … Nobody knows what it’s like to be anything unless they’re it, right?”
The opera, by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel (later adapted into the film starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar) about three women connected specifically by Woolf’s 1925 novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”
It stars a powerhouse trio of Renée Fleming as Clarissa Vaughan; Kelli O’Hara as Laura Brown; and Joyce DiDonato, as Woolf herself. Directed by Phelim McDermott, it runs through Dec. 15, including a Dec. 10 matinee simulcast to movie theaters worldwide.
Gelb says he reached out to Parson because he’d been impressed by her work in “American Utopia,” and thought she’d be a great fit with McDermott: “Part of my job as general manager is to be a creative matchmaker.”
He said in an interview that he feels Parson’s contribution has been to amplify and richen the story of “The Hours” for everyone in the vast, 3,800-seat theater, “as far back as the last row of the Family Circle.” (And on a recent evening, it looked like every one of those seats were taken.)
The opera unfolds over one day in three different places and eras. Woolf is attempting to write, and feeling suffocated in a country home outside London in 1923; Brown is an unhappy housewife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles; and Clarissa Vaughn is an editor arranging a party — organizing flowers and food – for her dear, ailing friend Richard, a novelist who has AIDS, in late 20th-century New York.
Parson says she was acutely aware of the challenge of illustrating the interior lives of the women, but did not set out to psychoanalyze them in movement. “I feel like if I had tried to do that, it wouldn’t have worked,” she says. She wanted to get there, but in a different way.
So, in a process she modestly describes as more “mundane,” the choreographer focused on actions, not thoughts.
“I don’t want to describe someone’s unconscious,” she says. “So for Virginia Woolf, I looked at, what does she DO? She writes, she reads. I worked on those actions. What does Clarissa do? She buys flowers. What does Laura do? She bakes. She takes pills.”
Another example: When Clarissa’s ailing friend Richard’s apartment rolls onto the stage, Parson’s dancers are hanging off the platform in what looks like a chilling metaphor for illness. Parson agrees, but says her aim was actually, “there’s this platform and it’s moving, and how can I animate it?”
The choreographer spoke from Lyon, France, where she is now working on her second opera. She said that even though “The Hours” was her first, it wasn’t as difficult as it sounds to adjust her craft.
“I have worked so much with musicians, great musicians,” she says, like Byrne and many others. “So thinking about how a show rolls out and how to choreograph to music so it’s supportive and at the same time has its own life … it didn’t seem that different.”
It was, however a dream to have so much time to rehearse, and to have the opera’s resources behind her. She was thrilled, for example, that when she rehearsed by herself, she had a pianist. “I mean, I’ve never had that experience before,” she said with a laugh. “I’m always listening on my iPhone to music when I’m working on my own. Everything about making dance at the Met is heightened and supported. I can’t tell you how much fun it was.”
An added bonus for Parson, who hadn’t read Woolf since working on a play of hers more than a decade ago, was getting to read her again, especially her diaries and “A Room of One’s Own” — and especially now, in 2022.
“Her writing is so profound,” Parson said. “And the world’s changed a lot in terms of gender and feminism. So she reads really, really well right now. It was really exciting. I actually want to cry right now, I’m so moved by thinking about her.”
