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Tag: Ryan McKinny

  • Il Trittico: Puccini’s Masterful Triptych – Houston Press

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    Giacomo Puccini’s penultimate opera, Il trittico (“The triptych”) premiered at the prestigious New York City’s Metropolitan Opera after the successful opening at that company of his Girl of the Golden West (1910). In between came the Franz Lehár-light somewhat operetta, La Rondine (1917) for Monte Carlo. It wasn’t a success, except for its lilting score that was filled with waltzes and champagne fizz. Revived sporadically, this bonbon is the least performed of all his mature works. But Trittico (1918) is something different in his impressive canon – Bohème, Butterfly, Tosca, and the posthumous Turandot – three one-acts, each about an hour long, yet each so different in tone and style. But there is no mistaking who wrote all three. The master’s voice, orchestration, and sublime love duets are all over it.

    The work plays with the theme of death, as the opera was composed during the Great War and its sacrificial slaughter of so many young men. It can also be parsed as a riff on Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy with its three parts that depict Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

    Il tabarro (“The cloak”) showcases Puccini in verismo mode, that dark foreboding Italianate style of melodrama which fascinated the audiences of the day. Telling of everyday life, hardscrabble and gritty, instead of stories about ancient kings and queens. This was raw for its time and for decades was the prominent money maker at the opera houses. On its way out as opera’s reigning style, Puccini revived it in this work about Michele, a poor, hardworking boatman on the Seine (bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), Giorgetta, his young nubile wife (soprano Corinne Winters, making a spectacular HGO debut), and Luigi (tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz), a virile stevedore, her lover. The previous death of their daughter has ripped apart their marriage, leaving Michele and Giorgetta adrift in their relationship, to be replaced by a wandering eye, depression, jealousy, and ultimately murder.

    Subsidiary characters sing of their ceaseless work on the river, drinking themselves into a stupor to forget, or nostalgic dreams of what might be but never will. Mezzo Jamie Barton, as “rummage lady” Frugola, has a fragrant reminiscence of having a little cottage with her husband Talpa, the wondrous bass Andrea Silvestrelli. The short aria, an aching lullaby, looks forward to Ping, Pang, and Pong, the counselors in Turandot (1924), one of whom dreams of returning to his little house of bamboo in Honan.

    McKinny is a brooding force, stalwart and thick. He realizes he has lost his wife, but pines for her still. Remembering happier times past, he softly remembers how it used to be with Giorgetta, then grows despondent and impatient, then violent. His deep baritone conveys every conflict within him. Full of passion, Chacón-Cruz has ardent tenor down pat. His trumpet voice rings out like Richard Tucker of old. He fills the Brown Theater with Puccini’s radiant but treacherous high notes, hitting every one square on. He is a superb Puccini tenor. Winters is a revelation. What an addition to the roster. Her career has been mostly centered in Europe where she has sung Mimi, Jenufa, Nedda, Iphigénie, Káťa Kabanová, among other leading roles. She’s a glamorous presence on stage with a voice that’s clean and sure and full of drama. She’s a keeper.

    Suor Angelica is Puccini on a high plane indeed. He said it was his favorite among all his works, and you can hear his delight in writing this transcendent piece about a rich girl who is banished by her prominent family to a nunnery after the birth of her illegitimate son. For seven years she has waited to hear any word from them, tending to her medicinal plants, praying to Mary devotedly, and keeping her secret buried within. When her cold, imperious princess aunt arrives, she demands Angelica sign over her inheritance. And, by the way, your son died years ago. Devastated by this horrid news, she mourns her lost son who never saw her. She must go to him. In a final act of desperation – or maybe abiding faith – she concocts a draft of poison from her plants and, covering the statue of Mary in the room, commits suicide.

    Winters is radiant in the role, scaling all of Puccini’s spiritual passion with ease and lithe dexterity. Nothing is too much for her. She soars in anguish at never seeing her little boy and is resolute in her decision to end her life. Every passage is sung with utter conviction and beauty of phrase. Is she the next Callas?

    Barton is a magnificent harpy, cold and frozen as Lake Cocytus in the Inferno. In her black peplum outfit, with glittery pin and up-swept hairdo, she has the look of a bored Park Avenue matron. She nonchalantly smokes a cigarette as she delivers her news. She could be the evil stepmother in a gothic horror, dripping attitude and bereft of any familial feeling. She’s chilling…and delicious.

    In a neat note of irony, director James Robinson sets the opera in a post-World War II children’s hospital. The nuns are dressed in Marian blue, and a large blue curtain will be drawn across the hallway corridor. The palette is very Renaissance. The hospital’s public hall, full of bandaged children, forces Angelica to constantly remember her son and her sin. Her last vision, while dying, is a little boy who stares at her from outside the corridor as he puts his hand on the glass door. Is it an act of benediction? A hallucination of Angelica’s? Whatever it could be, it befits Puccini’s ethereal and dramatic score.

    Gianni Schicchi is Puccini’s slice of paradise; a laugh-out-loud comedy that pays fitting homage to Verdi’s final masterpiece Falstaff. The greedy Donati clan gathers around the death bed of patriarch Buoso. They are gleeful, waiting to reap his inheritance. To make sure his death throes are final, Zita smothers him.

    But, wait, where’s the will? They tear the place apart to find it, only to discover that he’s left his entire fortune to the local monastery. What will they do? Now they’re crying real tears. Zita’s nephew Rinuccio, in love with Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta, suggests Gianni, a country newcomer to Florence, will know how to fix the situation. Zita will have none of this, nor allow her nephew to marry beneath him. But Schicchi is called for and when he arrives, after many complications from the relatives, suggests a fool-proof plan.

    He will impersonate Buoso and dictate a new will to the notary. He realizes he’ll end up in Hades for this transgression, but what the hell if Zita agrees to the marriage so that everyone gets a piece of the rich pie. In a sly bit of chicanery, Schicchi does indeed bequeath property to the obsequious family, but reserves the richest prize for himself. The young lovers are united, greed is OKed, and Schicchi runs them all out of his opulent new house.

    Puccini races through the plot, piling comic bits about like a master silent film comedian. The music is buoyant and contains the showstopping number, Lauretta’s plea to her father to allow her to marry, “O mio babbino caro.” Winters sings this with a daughter’s guile and a lover’s heart. It’s meltingly good. McKinny makes the most of Gianni with his cigar and beat-up fedora. He’s a wise wise-ass for sure, booming his clever plot while knowing full well the dastardly intentions of the family. His Schicchi is a wonderful characterization, good hearted and suffused with devil-may-care.

    Barton has a field day as battleaxe Zita, sashaying about like a Fellini cartoon, and Chacón-Cruz rises to the sonic rafters as lover Rinuccio. Even supernumerary Alessando DiBagno gets into the act as a most convincing dead guy as he’s contorted by the family as they search the bed for that will. All do their finest in the tradition of a ‘60s Italian rom-com.

    In all, a total night at the opera, lovingly conducted by maestro Patrick Summers who has wanted to conduct this work for ages. It’s one of his favorite operas, and by his masterful leading of the orchestra through Puccini’s mighty paces he shows his utter devotion and admiration. Three glorious operas, gloriously delivered.

    Il trittico continues at 2 p.m. Sunday, November 2; 8 p.m. Saturday, November 8; 7 p.m. Wednesday, November 12; and 7 p.m. Friday November 14 at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For more information, call 713- 228-3737 or visit houstongrandopera.org. $25-$370.50.

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    D. L. Groover

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  • HGO’s Don Giovanni Offers Sex, Deceit and a Final Reckoning All Wrapped Up in Mozart’s Music

    HGO’s Don Giovanni Offers Sex, Deceit and a Final Reckoning All Wrapped Up in Mozart’s Music

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    “I feel I’ve seen this set before,” one longtime Houston Grand Opera subscriber said at intermission on Opening Night of Don Giovanni. She had. HGO has retained the same whirling box of a building used in its 2019 production of Mozart’s classic anti-hero opera.

    Same set, same projections – some clever, some tedious, some befuddling – and Houston favorite bass-baritone Ryan McKinny’s there too, although this time as the servant Leporello instead of the Don himself.

    Of course, the most important returnee was Mozart’s music and from the first notes as directed by the UK’s acclaimed Dame Jane Glover it was impossible not to be swept up in it and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto filled with passion, tragedy and take-a-breath comic moments.

    The orchestra was in fine form Friday night as were all the three female leads with clear carrying tones that reached all the way to the back seats of the Wortham Center. All three were rewarded with heavy applause post-performance.

    Making her HGO debut, Erika Baikoff as Zerlina was a more than pleasant surprise in a role that sometimes takes a back seat to Dona Elvira and Donna Anna. She fully embodied the peasant girl on her wedding day allowing herself to be lured away by Don Giovanni, who promises her a better future than what she could have with her new husband Masetto. She, in turn, accuses Masetto (baritone Norman Garrett) of being jealous without cause (not true), while she continues to flirt with this exciting noble, but finally comes to see the Don for what he is.

    Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, a two-time Grammy winner, was utterly convincing as Donna Elvira the noble woman who’d given herself to Don Giovanni and was almost immediately abandoned by him as he continued his incessant pursuit of other women. Both dignified and sad, she somehow against all her better judgment finds herself drawn to him, allowing herself to hope for a reconciliation. By the end, though, the pity she has for him is perhaps the most damning aspect of their relationship.

    There he is, the grand seducer and one of the women he’s wronged has nothing but pity (and a remnant of love) for him.

    And then there was soprano Andriana Chuchman as Donna Anna. As the opera starts, he has seduced her in her father’s — the Commendatore’s — home. In this version, enraptured, she wants Don Giovanni to stay but he’s having none of that. As he struggles to leave (faithful servant Leporello waiting below), she starts screaming which brings out her father.

    The Commendatore and Don Giovanni fight and the Don fatally stabs her father. Donna Anna knows only that her father is dead — she doesn’t know who did it —  and makes her longtime fiancé Don Octtavio (tenor Kang Wang) to aid in the search for her father’s killer.

    Of the three female characters, Chuchman was the one with the most chemistry with bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni’s Don Giovanni. The scene where she allows him to lead her into his bedroom with the Don while suspecting/knowing what kind of man he is, captures in a few moments both his appeal and the underlying evil in it. This is a man who leaves destruction in his wake, with no aim in sight except his own gratification.

    Even Donna Elvira’s maid, who above all should know the damage Don Giovanni has done with the way he treated her mistress, appears flattered by his attentions.

    McKinny as Leporello has the crowd pleaser role , the servant who despises the actions of his master, but documents his seductions in a little book and enables him to continue his deceits, at one point switching clothes with him.

    A highpoint, of course, is when McKinny as Leporello sings “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” – “My dear lady, this is the catalogue”) to Donna Elvira tallying up the number of conquests Don Giovanni has made in several European countries.

    As Houston audiences have seen in other productions (Parsifal, Salome, Rigoletto), McKinney is a good actor on stage, and coupled with the ability to project his voice well, earned some of the biggest applause at curtain time.

    In the Don Ottavio role, Wang’s voice seemed a little underpowered in the first act, but he hit his stride in the second. Throughout he found himself in an impossible situation wanting to move on to marriage with Donna Anna while she puts him off saying she has to first find her father’s killer. And who remains still caught up in the attractions of the Don.

    As Don Ottavio, Wang frequently cuts a pathetic figure, almost overdone in the Act II when he walks around the stage cradling  Donna Anna’s dress in his arms and buries his face in it.

    Pisaroni who previously appeared in The Phoenix, Faust and The Marriage of Figaro at HGO, took on a role he has played many times as Don Giovanni. He certainly struck a romantic figure when called for, and an occasionally threatening one to his adversaries and servant.

    Thanks to the lighting and set design, when the set was dark (which was often) Pisaroni stood out as the only singer costumed in blue in contrast to other characters who tended to be in black or beige. Still, even he could not overcome the graphics that whirled about him in nausea-inducing fashion as he sang one aria.  What started out as clever projections of the names of all the women Don Giovanni had slept with, devolved into sometimes meaningless distractions exuding false energies — as if the story being told wasn’t enough.

    Bass Patrick Guetti had an impressive outing in his HGO debut as the Commendatore. At the end in spectral form, his voice rang out through the theatre in commanding fashion.

    At that end the anguished look of desperation on Don Giovanni’s face was far more telling than him being consigned to the flames as many productions historically have done. Even the Commendatore retreats from view. The man who loved parties and surrounded by women was suddenly left alone to pay for his sins.

    Performances continue through May 3 at 7:30 p.m. Fridays, Saturday and Wednesday and 2 p.m. Sunday at the Wortham Center, 501 Texas. Sung in Italian with projected English translation. For more information, call 713-228-6737 or visit hgo.org. $25-$210.

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    Margaret Downing

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