My Saturday evening suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday August 5, 2011 Grant Park Music Festival opera scenes concert.
Ryan Center singers sparkle in Grant Park program
BY ANDREW PATNER August 6, 2011 6:22PM CDT
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
▪7:30 p.m. Saturday
▪Harris Theater, 205 W. Randolph
▪Free
▪grantparkmusicfestival.com
Over the years, the giant Lyric Opera of Chicago and the small-budget but hugely attended Grant Park Music Festival have had an up-and-down relationship. Depending upon who was in charge of various constituent parts of the two groups, joint programs could be thrilling, deadly dull or non-existent.
The two motherships parted a few years ago, and Lyric now presents an annual “Stars of Lyric Opera” concert with its own orchestra at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion (this year set for September 10).
Friday night for a packed house at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park, though, it sure looked and sounded as if everyone has kissed, made up, and was showing off their best artistic abilities when ensemble members of Lyric’s professional training program, the Ryan Opera Center, joined with the Grant Park Orchestra and its principal conductor and artistic director Carlos Kalmar for a well-designed evening of seriously accomplished delightful comic opera acts from Mozart, Donizetti, and Rossini.
The program, which repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, even had Lyric’s public and customer relations star (and valued author and raconteur) Jack Zimmerman as narrator, offering hilarious and original deadpan verse to accompany the Mozart rarity The Impresario (Der Schauspieldirektor) and succinct but equally uproarious summaries for the two acts from the Italian opera entries.
Thirteen Ryan members, ranging from six first-year singers through five second-year returnees to two third-year “seniors,” offered remarkable balance and control in works heavy on trilling, patter, ensemble, and near-infinite finales. The mistaken identities, comic asides and stage timing of Act 2 of Donizetti’s 1843 Don Pasquale and Rossini’s 1817 La Cenerentola (Cinderella) were catnip for these young singers -- each of whom made you want to hear her or him again and soon. All will appear, usually in small roles, in Lyric productions in the 2011-12 season. But more than once, a cover or understudy from the Center has gone on for the billed performer, and a star has been born at the Civic Opera House.
René Barbera, a third-year tenor from San Antonio, Texas, is already well on his way to wider attention; his natural high tenor brought him three top awards, best male singer, best zarzuela interpreter, and audience favorite in Placido Domingo’s annual Operalia competition, held last month in St. Petersburg, Russia. A natural bel canto tenor, he made “Povero Ernesto!” his own to open the Donizetti.
Korean-born first-year baritone Joseph Lim, a 2011 Grand Finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, was given tiny character parts in the Mozart and Donizetti, but handled them as if a veteran.
First-year sopranos Kiri Deonarine of New Jersey and Emily Birsan of Neenah, Wisconsin, duked it out as the dueling divas of Mozart’s brief 1786 divertissement. First-year Detroit tenor Bernard Holcomb was suitably torn between them as the title character. When Zimmerman rhymed “catty” in introducing the work’s trio with “sugar daddy,” the audience awarded him with applause equal to that showered on the young singers.
Third-year baritone Paul La Rosa of New Jersey was back on his game as Dr. Malatesta in Don Pasquale, with first-year bass-baritone David Govertsen of Wheaton in the title role and second-year German soprano Jennifer Jakob as Norina showing good potential.
Second-year Louisville native bass-baritone Evan Boyer had a breakout evening as the class “A” jerk Don Magnifico in Rossini’s Cinderella tale, untwisting Italian tongue-twisters and looking as if he was having a good time doing so as well. Birsan and first-year mezzo Cecilia Hall of North Carolina were in-the-mood evil stepsisters.
Second-year tenor James Kryshak of New York State has already shown his stuff with the main company, and here was able to demonstrate his agility with the high Rossini line as Ramiro, the disguised prince. Second-year baritone Paul Scholten, of Muskegon, Michigan, was a sympathetic Dandini, Ramiro’s valet. Govertsen also reappeared as the tutor Alidoro but this closing act belonged to second-year mezzo Emily Fons of Milwaukee as Angelina, the despised but large-hearted cinder-sweeping stepdaughter (Fons has a big role in the Lyric season-opening Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach coming up).
Whether the sublimity of Mozart or the wicked decorations and staccato rhythms of Donizetti and Rossini, orchestral leadership is essential to repertoire that has to come off sounding much lighter and easier than it actually is. Kalmar, who has done more opera conducting in Europe than in the States, shifted gears naturally between styles and genres, and the Grant Park players were right with him -- and the singers -- every inch of the way.
Comments