February 10, 2016 – Kenneth Best – UConn Communications

When the award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth performs in J. Louis von der Mehden Recital Hall on Feb. 10 at 8 p.m., it will be as unique an experience for the group as for the audience.

Roomful of Teeth is both a Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning group of classically-trained musicians who perform unconventional music. They will perform with UConn students in the Concert Choir, Wind Ensemble, and Symphony, completing a Sackler Artist-in-Residency that began last fall when the group met with music and art students on the Storrs campus.

“This is probably more involved than we’ve ever been at a single institution,” says Brad Wells, founder and artistic director of Roomful of Teeth, who is also director of the choral program at Williams College in Massachusetts. “Usually we work with composers or singers [on a campus]. To have this kind of rich, multifaceted, and multipart residency is very rare and exciting.”

In addition to meeting with students in Department of Music classes taught by Jamie Spillane ’87 MM, director of choral studies; Kenneth Fuchs, professor of music composition; and Jeffrey Renshaw, coordinator for conducting and ensembles; and with Harvey Felder, director of the Symphony Orchestra, the vocalists also met last fall with a painting class taught by Kathryn Myers, professor of painting, whose Aqua Media class this semester is creating paintings inspired by the music of Roomful of Teeth.

The student art will be on display in the Arena Gallery in the Art and Art History Department building behind von der Mehden on Feb. 10. The performance will also include a work written by a student in Fuchs’s music composition class.

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Staging a centuries-old Germany fairy tale about the journey of a brother and sister through the woods to a house made of candy inhabited by a fearsome witch, requires as much imagination from the performers on stage as it does from a 21st-century audience.

The UConn Opera Theater production of “Hansel & Gretel” on Saturday, Jan. 30 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. at Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts is a modern interpretation of the Brothers Grimm story that in recent years has been used as the basis for films such as the 2013 horror tale “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” and M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 film “The Visit.”

“The Harry Potter films showed a generation that witches can look like they stepped out of a Renaissance fair, off a rugby field, or from behind an office desk,” says Michelle Hendrick, stage producer for the opera. “The pointy-hat, broom-riding, cackling crone is a Halloween costume and not the witch of this story. We wanted to make choices that were true to our place and time.”

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By Jeremy Eichler GLOBE STAFF | NOVEMBER 24, 2015
When Joseph Silverstein first auditioned for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s violin section, someone had to call the librarian for help. More music was needed in order to find something for Mr. Silverstein to sight-read. While he was only 30 at the time, he had already played everything in the audition file. He got the job.

About a year later, when he was sitting as last-chair violinist, the formidable music director Charles Munch summoned Mr. Silverstein to a private meeting. “ ‘You must play with the orchestra,’ [Munch] said in his gruff way,” Mr. Silverstein recounted in an oral history project about his life.

“Yes, I agreed. I did play with the orchestra.”

“No, no. You must be a soloist.”

A Chinese concertmaster, BSO music director Seiji Ozawa, and Mr. Silverstein in Beijing in 1979.

Mr. Silverstein accepted the conductor’s invitation. It would be the first of many.

Renowned for his warm honeyed tone, his impeccably urbane style of playing, and his sophisticated sense of musical culture, Mr. Silverstein served as the BSO concertmaster for 22 years, as its assistant conductor from 1971 to 1984, and generally as one of the very brightest stars in the city’s musical firmament. The conductor Andre Previn succinctly summarized a verdict shared by many when he told The New Yorker magazine: “Joseph Silverstein is the greatest concertmaster in the world. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact.”

Mr. Silverstein, who was also the music director of the Utah Symphony from 1983 to 1998 and a committed teacher, died of a heart attack Saturday night in Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. He was 83.

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The expression “too soon” is usually applied to tasteless topical jokes, but it serves equally well for operatic productions. On Tuesday night, just three years after its premiere at the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Opera revived designerJun Kaneko’s colorful, broad version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute.”

Speaking only for myself, I enjoyed the production well enough the first time around, in 2012. I wasn’t counting the days until it returned.

Unfortunately, Tuesday’s performance didn’t do much to burnish any fondly held memories. Kaneko’s designs — with their bright, Magic-Marker projections and patchwork quasi-Japanese sets and costumes — retain their power to charm and delight the eye, and there was a handful of first-rate vocal performances (including a dramatic last-minute substitution) to enhance the evening’s musical appeal.

But this wasn’t a performance that underscored either the comic zest or the spiritual aspirations that infuse “The Magic Flute” at its finest. Instead, we got corny, threadbare jokes, stage direction by Harry Silverstein that couldn’t quite decide how seriously to take anything that was happening, and — most infuriatingly of all — musical leadership from conductor Lawrence Foster that was both sluggish and technically uncertain.

The result was one of those productions that can put true “Magic Flute” aficionados on the defensive, assuring anyone who will listen that this product of Mozart’s final year is better than it seemed.

Yes, the plot is convoluted and forgetful, with manic shifts in tone and a great big moral flip-flop at the center — but with attentive rigor it can be made into something dramatically coherent having to do with love, honor and courage. And no, the score isn’t ponderous or dreary — it’s rich-hued and profound.

Just like the last time around, this “Flute” is done in an English translation by General DirectorDavid Gockley. I’m not sure why English is an improvement on the original German, given that the supertitles are operating throughout, but the aria translations at least do their job without making a fuss. The spoken dialogue, though, is cringe-inducing, a mixture of plodding literalism and wheezy attempts at mild outrageousness, and having every gag telegraphed by the titles only kills any possible trace of freshness.

Amid this discouraging setting, a listener felt thankful for an injection of high drama — particularly the unplanned casting switch for the high-profile role of the Queen of the Night. Soprano Albina Shagimuratova had handled this famously demandingly role memorably well in her 2012 company debut, but she called in sick just hours before curtain, leaving her cover, Kathryn Bowden, to take over.

An unenviable assignment, perhaps — but Bowden dispatched it superbly. She showed nerves for just a moment at the beginning of her Act 1 aria, figuring out the acoustics of the house and bringing her voice up to the necessary level; after that, it was clear sailing throughout.

Bowden came through even more powerfully in the Act 2 aria, “Der hölle Rache” (to give the piece its familiar German title), with its pinpoint coloratura and grueling high F’s. Some sopranos squeak those passages, but Bowden sang them out fully and precisely; the tumultuous applause that greeted her bore no trace of indulgence.

 

 

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