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.”
It has been a gratifying week for our string bass instructor, Gregg August. JD Allen’s record, on which he received a 4.5 star rating in DownBeat Magazine, and he received two Grammy nominations for his work with Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. Congrats Gregg!
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.
Baritone Ryan Burns ’12 MM likens the preparation for his performance with the Jessica Lang Dance Co. presentation of “The Wanderer” at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Nov. 19 to having the lead role in an opera.
“It’s not something you can put together in a couple of weeks,” Burns says of singing Franz Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” (The Lovely Maid of the Mill), a song cycle of 20 songs sung over an hour. “It’s been a unique challenge to prepare this body of music in such a way that you can maintain all that good technique and language and stay focused. It’s been a challenge, but a really great one.”
A doctoral candidate in music who has performed with the Connecticut Lyric Opera and the Opera Theater of Connecticut, Burns was selected by the contemporary ballet choreographer for the unique joining of dance and classical music that has been described as “a true work of art” by the Boston Globe and “a work of high craftsmanship” by The New York Times.
The innovative Jessica Lang Dance has become one of the most talked about new companies in the dance world. “The Wanderer” is a romantic contemporary tale of jealousy and obsessive desire, performed by nine dancers with sweeping choreography and imaginative set design. “Die schöne Müllerin” is based on poems written around 1820 by Wilhelm Müller and is one of the composer’s most important song cycles written in 1823 in the tradition of setting Romantic German poems to classical music.
Burns says combining the two artistic fields is “a really unique way to take something that’s almost 200 years old now and make it fresh and new. What’s unique about this particular pairing is taking two mediums that you wouldn’t necessarily think to put together. It’s a way to connect different audiences that maybe have never heard Schubert’s music or seen contemporary dance. I’ve approached it as if it were an opera, because it has so many of the same elements.”
Burns grew up in a home surrounded by music, singing, playing trumpet, and performing in musicals. As an undergraduate at St. Anselm College, he majored in criminal justice, played football, and once performed the National Anthem while in pads and uniform before a game. After completing his degree, Burns worked in the development office of his alma mater while taking voice lessons and started performing.
“The opera bug bit me,” he says. “I knew I wanted to go back to music and would have regretted it had I not done it.”
He decided to pursue a master’s degree in music and looked at several programs, deciding on UConn because of the opportunities to perform within the School of Fine Arts. In addition to his work with the Connecticut Lyric Opera and the Opera Theater of Connecticut, he has performed with the UConn Opera Theater and was a member of the ensemble for Opera Boston’s “Beatrice et Benedict.”
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.
The dignified profiles of Dante and Michelangelo adorn the proscenium arch of the neo-Renaissance theater inside Columbia University’s Italian Academy. During a concert there by the Ensemble Origo on Thursday, I often gazed up at them, wondering what these luminaries of Italian art and high letters would have made of the evening’s program of motets, madrigals and “moresche” by Orlando di Lasso.
There was little lofty poetry among the texts, save for a setting of Petrarch’s “Canzoniere,” “If my weary lines can fly so high as to reach her,” set in elegant five-part harmony and performed with cool poise and accuracy by the Origo singers. But that text only threw into relief the bawdiness of the surrounding material, most of which might be summed up under the title “If my leering lines can swoop so low as to breach her.”
The program, with its eye-popping contrasts between high-minded art and lowbrow entertainment, was a reconstruction of music performed in honor of the 1568 wedding in Munich of Renate of Lorraine to Wilhelm V, the Duke of Bavaria’s heir. Those festivities stretched over 18 days with musical contributions by Lasso that included a Te Deum, a motet performed during dinner, an evening of moresche (risqué songs sung in the pidgin Italian of African slaves) and a commedia dell’arte show filled with other stereotyped foreigners and lewd innuendo.
Recent scholarship has shown that Lasso’s moresche contain genuine snippets of Kanuri, the language of the Bornu Empire in what is now northeastern Nigeria, which was an important source of slaves for the European market. Mixed with Neapolitan dialect and onomatopoeic gibberish, these words lend an intriguing hint of authenticity to these rustic songs.
Composer David Dzubay has been named the recipient of the 11th Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize presented by the University of Connecticut, a $25,000 award to compose a new work for a specific area of musical arts that will be performed by UConn students and faculty and recorded.
Dzubay, who is chair of the composition department and director of the New Music Ensemble at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, will be composing a concerto for flute and violin with wind ensemble, with the working title “Rapprochement.” The work will debut with performances in March 2017 in Storrs and at UConn’s Stamford campus.
The competition, organized by the School of Fine Arts, is an international award that supports and promotes composers and the performance of their new musical works. Every second year, entrants are asked to compose a piece for a specific area of the musical arts, chosen by the head and other faculty of the music department.
The prize was established through a gift from Raymond and Beverly Sackler, major philanthropists and generous donors to UConn.
“The Sackler Composition prize is a unique award and one of the largest prizes given for the composition of new musical works. It is so important that we continue to encourage the composition and performance of new music,” says Anne D’Alleva, dean of the UConn School of Fine Arts. “The performance experience made possible by this competition is a wonderful learning opportunity for our students. It not only expands their musical horizons but gives them an added professional credential when they are seeking opportunities after college.”
David Dzubay, 2015 Sackler Award Winner (Alain Barker Photo)
Dzubay says the new work will be one of his longest compositions, containing three movements with multiple sections that allows a focus for both soloists and ensemble combinations.
“I’ve got a good start on this work,” he says, noting the specific requirements of the Sackler Prize. “I approach works from a variety of angles. I do a lot of improvising on the piano to generate chords, melodic ideas, and progressions, and these angles start to affect each other.”
Dzubay has received commissions from Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Fromm and Barlow foundations, among others. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles, and soloists in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia, and is published by Pro Nova Music and recorded on the Sony, Bridge, Centaur, Innova, Naxos, Crystal, Klavier, Gia, and First Edition labels. Recent honors include Guggenheim, Bogliasco, MacDowell, Yaddo, Copland House, and Djerassi fellowships, a 2011 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2010 Heckscher Prize.
