![]() ![]() Without supertitles, all the Spanish, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Latin, Italian and Quechua sung (and occasionally spoken) by the characters would have been lost, but at least we should have heard their voices singing. It worked, but the dense orchestration overbalanced the voices in conversational scenes, duets and arias. ![]() López’s first act bombards the audience with the powerful brass- and woodwind-heavy orchestra in music that seemed designed to make us feel like hostages. Things eventually come to a violent end for the terrorists and one hostage. One tangy sequence details simultaneous liaisons between the opera singer and the Japanese dignitary and between his translator and the revolutionary soldier who sang the prayer. One of the terrorists, Carmen, delivers a lovely prayer, and another, César, sings a touching soliloquy that realizes this situation can only end badly. López’s music differentiated a wide array of characters, aided by director Kevin Newbury who shaped the original production in Chicago.Ī Russian diplomat awkwardly declares his love for the opera singer. After several weeks in the same space, there are love duets and a revealing series of solo arias that highlight individual personalities. The fictional story is more heart-warming than the reality in 1996.Īct II pays off with the obvious operatic potential of a diva and a range of characters thrown together from various levels of society. In Patchett’s story and Nilo Cruz’s libretto, the thrown-together characters find a way to co-exist as they discover their adversaries are actually human. Patchett’s novel tweaked the location to the vice president’s home, and introduced a visiting Japanese dignitary whose favorite opera singer is there to sing a song to him. The story centers on a notorious 1996 incident in Lima, in which self-styled revolutionaries invaded a party in the Japanese embassy demanding justice for the poor, and held dozens of dignitaries hostage for 126 days before Peruvian forces intervened. It all came to fruition with a bang on Friday in a performance with many positive aspects. There is no way all this would fit into the tiny Wheeler Opera House. George Manahan, who is no stranger to opera here, conducted the Chamber Symphony (expanded with extra brass and woodwinds) to fill the music tent with the score’s expansive sound. With so many well-trained singers on hand, casting the many solo roles in Bel Canto is more feasible than for some professional opera companies. Voices played a role in all three major performances this past weekend, including majestic singing from mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (conducted by James Conlon in a return after several years’ absence from Aspen), two impressive ‘student’ voices in a ravishing new work on Saturday afternoon, and an exciting, semi-staged presentation of Bel Canto, Jimmy López Bellido’s big-boned opera based on the best-selling book by Ann Patchett.įleming championed the opera in her role as advisor to Lyric Opera of Chicago, and spearheaded efforts for Aspen to mount it for the first time since its debut in 2015. Talent level is up significantly among the four dozen singers and pianists on the cusp of opera careers, and they seem to have been integrated more generally than before into the festival’s programming. Judging by what we have seen and heard halfway through this year’s Aspen Music Festival, the programming, level of performances and balance of familiar and unfamiliar music are on track to be the richest we’ve experienced here.Ĭhanges in the opera and voice program, rebranded as Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS with the arrival in 2019 of soprano Renée Fleming and conductor Patrick Summers as co-artistic directors, have much to do with that assessment. Vargas holds a gun on soprano Katherine Henry in Bellido’s Bel Canto © Blake Nelson United States Aspen Music Festival 2023 : Benedict Music Tent, Harris Hall, Aspen, Colorado. ![]()
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