Review: 'The Mikado'

Virginia Opera
Gerald Steichen conducting
March 30, Richmond CenterStage

Could “The Mikado” be any campier or more physically animated than it is in the production that Virginia Opera has been staging this month? Hard to imagine.

Stage director Dorothy Danner puts her cast through double-time paces that rarely slow to a jog, let alone a walk; and her direction maxes out the show’s comic lines and gestures. This is Gilbert & Sullivan that dances along the fine line between exhilaration and exhaustion. And it exacts a musical price.

In the first of two Richmond performances that conclude the production’s run, many of the singers sounded to be expending more energy in sprinting and gesticulating than in projecting their voices. Diction got lost in the rush, and not just in the speedy patter numbers. (Fortunately, the caption operator’s reflexes were quick enough.) Remarkably, voices rarely sounded strained; but too often they were underpowered. The pointed satire of W.S. Gilbert’s plot line and text rarely came across.

Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner who can barely wield his axe, is the comic hinge of the show, and Kevin Burdette proved to be a gifted comedian. In scrolling out Ko-Ko’s “little list” of those who “would not be missed” – updated and localized, per now-usual practice – and in other key comic scenes, Burdette’s gestures and timing were spot-on. His voice strengthened as the evening progressed.

Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, as the sneering aristocrat Poo-Bah, and Dorothy Byrne, as Katisha, the imperiously hideous “daughter-in-law elect” of the Mikado, were suitably over-the-top, playing up their characterizations to Monty Pythonesque excess and wearing their elaborate costumes like second skins.

Matthew Plenk and Katherine Jolly, as the young lovers Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum, flirted with excess just as effectively, if differently. Plenk milked the earnest naïveté of Nanki-Poo, and vocalized to match – on more than one occasion, he seemed about to break into “Nessun dorma” or some other staple of impassioned tenor vocalization. Jolly played Yum-Yum as a Muffie, a self-absorbed preppy prom queen; her voice veered between Lucia and Betty Boop.

Jeffrey Tucker, as the Mikado (emperor of Japan), was gleefully bloodthirsty and vocally commanding.

The company’s male chorus, the “gentlemen of Japan,” were in fine collective voice and reveled in their elaborately choreographed production numbers. The female chorus made less of an impression.

Conductor Gerald Steichen obtained an efficient, but somehow under-animated, performance from the orchestra, drawn from the Richmond Symphony.

Virginia Opera’s production of “The Mikado” concludes its run at 2:30 p.m. April 1 in the Carpenter Theatre of Richmond CenterStage, Sixth and Grace streets. Tickets: $31-$111. Details: (866) 673-7282; http://www.vaopera.org/

Earl Scruggs (1924-2012)

Earl Scruggs, the North Carolina-born banjoist whose syncopated three-finger picking technique became the driving force of the bluegrass style and one of the signature sounds of American music, has died at 88.

An obituary by Christopher Lehman-Haupt in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/arts/music/earl-scruggs-bluegrass-banjo-player-dies-at-88.html?_r=1

BBC's spring Schubertiade

How many composers wrote enough music to fill eight full days of radio airtime? How many wrote enough that’s worth hearing for that long to the exclusion of all other composers’ music?

Franz Schubert is one of very few. And the beginning of spring may be the perfect time for the epic Schubertiade that BBC3, the BBC’s classical music station, will air from March 23-31. The Guardian’s Tom Service observes that radio “is a peculiarly Schubertian medium, the most intimate way of connecting a composer and listener.”

The BBC3 audio stream can be accessed here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/bbc_radio_three

His master's fan

The Roanoke Times’ Ralph Berrier Jr. profiles Kinney Rorrer, a banjo player (who counts among his ancestors the old-time banjo star Charlie Poole) and broadcaster whose Danville home is full of antique phonographs and more than 3,000 wax cylinders and
78-rpm records that are played on the machines. “My granddaughter is probably one of the few 6-year-olds in the state of Virginia who knows what a Victrola is,” the collector says. Rorrer also notes that his record players work just fine during power outages:

http://www.roanoke.com/extra/wb/306274

Review: eighth blackbird

March 14, University of Richmond

“Less Is More,” the program that eighth blackbird presented in the final concert of its eighth season of residency at the University of Richmond, could just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, have been called “more or less.”

The six selections ranged from an
ultra-minimal composition, built from a single note, to a piece crammed with about as many sounds as six musicians can produce; and the musical energy levels ranged from the frenetic to the near-static.

The sextet – pianist Lisa Kaplan, percussionist Matthew Duval, violinist-violist Yvonne Lam, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Tim Munro and clarinetist Michael J. Maccaferri – opened the program maximally, in Kurt Rohde’s “this bag is not a toy” (2011).

In Rohde’s “concerto without orchestra,” the musicians, most playing multiple instruments – among which are a water bowl, a plastic tub, clapping hands, harmonicas (with and without accordion attachments) and a paper bag – dive into a first movement that’s a hyper-energetic blizzard of colliding and overlapping tones. This gives way to a comparatively languid central movement, which is followed by a jittery finale that trails off into what the composer terms a “ghostly echo” of figures and thematic fragments from the first movement.

The program’s other large-scale offerings were a reprise of David Lang’s “these broken wings” (2007), which eighth blackbird introduced at UR in the 2008 concert that also featured the premiere of Steve Reich’s Double Sextet (which subsequently was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music); and sextet arrangements of two of György Ligeti’s piano études (1985-94), “Fanfares” and “Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw),” the former (by Kaplan) amplifying the prismatic tonal qualities of the original, the latter (by Munro) fleshing out the piece’s moodiness and bittersweet qualities.

The Lang piece, the most easily detachable and musically durable part of “singing in the dead of night,” a collaborative work with composers Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon and choreographer Susan Marshall, was this program’s most “classical” work in terms of form and instrumental interchange.

On first hearing four years ago, “these broken wings” struck me as a modern homage to the baroque concerto grosso; I’ll stick with that characterization, and welcome this abstract music’s liberation from the theatrical company it initially kept. The ’birds sounded to be more comfortable with the percolating syncopations of its first section and the rolling groove of its finale.

On the “less” side of this program, there were Alvin Lucier’s “Fidelio Trio” (1987), a piece in which the pianist repeatedly plays an A while the cellist and violist ever so gradually slide out of and ultimately back into that pitch, and “Durations 1” (1960), one of the shorter (10 minutes) examples of Morton Feldman’s abstract-expressionist style, in which flutist, violinist, cellist and pianist quietly play the scored notes at lengths of their choosing, producing a soundscape of subtlety and ambivalence. Both works could be called “what is music?” music, not so much musical essays as invitations for the listener to contemplate the quality and character of musical tone.

Had the ’birds polled the audience for its favorite among this program’s wildly varied selections, the winner quite likely would have been “The Body of Your Dreams” (2003) by Jacob Ter Veldhuis, a Dutch
“avant-pop” composer also known as JacobTV. In this piece, piano accompanies and expressively amplifies a manipulated tape recording of voices from a late-night television commercial for a belt that supposedly “will vibrate fat away” by jiggling tummy flab with electronic jolts. It’s hilarious both in principle and practice, and pianist Kaplan made a thoroughly merry exercise of it.

Virginia singer makes Met finals

Will Liverman, a 23-year-old baritone from Virginia Beach, has been named one of nine finalists in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2012 National Council Auditions. After winning in Eastern regional auditions, he will compete in the finalists’ concert on March 18 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

Liverman, who is studying for a master’s degree at the Juilliard School, currently is in his first season with the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center for young singers at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He also won a 2012 George London Foundation Encouragement Award.

He sang roles in Puccini’s “Tosca” and Copland’s “The Tender Land” last summer at Glimmerglass Opera.

UPDATE 1 (MARCH 17): A profile of the singer, by Teresa Annas of The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk):

http://hamptonroads.com/2012/03/va-beach-baritone-finals-metropolitan-opera

UPDATE 2 (MARCH 19): Liverman was not one of the winners. He and three others passed over by the finals judges each will receive $5,000.

'Honor the notes'

Stephen Sondheim, the patriarch of American musical theater, weighs in on the “heavily revamped version” of The Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess,” a current hit on Broadway, in an interview with The New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/arts/music/some-ground-rules-for-revising-operas-and-musicals.html