Monday, May 7, 2007

National Philharmonic Opera

The sheer joyousness of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" comes through even when many elements of an opera performance are missing. The National Philharmonic Opera did "Barber" at Strathmore Music Center on Saturday night without sets, costumes, recitatives or supertitles -- even without lead tenor Vale Rideout (who was indisposed). Rossini's bounce and brightness bubbled through it all.

Music Director Piotr Gajewski conducted with verve and a sure hand. Jim Petosa narrated the abridged story with enthusiasm and interjections of humorous commentary. Matthew Chellis was a creditable fill-in as Count Almaviva, his voice strongest in the middle and upper range. He was a little tight and breathy at first, but improved as the action heated up.

As Figaro, Andrew Garland was all swagger and slyness, if sometimes a bit lacking in projection (the orchestra overwhelmed parts of "Largo al Factotum"). It was a nice touch to put Figaro in sneakers.

Elise Quagliata pouted prettily as an elegantly gowned Rosina, her voice bright (almost piercing at times) and her acting coquettish. Mark Freiman kept Doctor Bartolo silly and pompous throughout and was especially good in fast, patter-song passages. David Langan was suitably oily as Basilio, using his rolled "r" to amusingly sinister effect in "La Calunnia."

The frantic ensembles were especially enjoyable. So was the light show accompanying Act Two's storm music -- with the 27-member chorus pulling out umbrellas.

The non-staging did not always work: The singing lesson and shaving scene really need props. But the vivacity of Rossini's music overcame all the visual shortcomings.

-- Mark J. Estren

Violinist Jennifer Koh has a penetrating intelligence that drives her to find new approaches to familiar works. So when she played Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra under Music Director Jose-Luis Novo in the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts on Friday night, she made every phrase of her solo part sound new and urgent: shifting accents, lingering in unexpected places, creating mini-climaxes within phrases, and varying her tempo freely to suit her expressive needs. At any given moment you didn't know what she would do next, but you could bet it would be fascinating.

Koh played with so much freedom, in fact, that she and the orchestra went out of sync a few times, and the rhythmic pulse of the faster music occasionally disappeared, especially at her slow tempos.

Ultimately, though, Koh's white-hot imagination and her focused, sweet-toned playing made this a performance to remember.

The ASO showed its technical chops in the other works on Friday's program, the orchestra's last of the season. Silvestre Revueltas's "Sensemaya" sounded appropriately pungent, but Novo's deliberate pace damped its excitement a bit. Principal horn Steven Barzal acquitted himself well in the ridiculously difficult solo that opens Richard Strauss's "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," and Novo led a reading full of merriment and vivid incidents.

The high spirits carried over to a sparkling performance of Paul Hindemith's "Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber." Novo and the ASO brought out the droll wit of the second movement, especially in the jazzy central fugue, and infused the long lyrical paragraphs of the third movement with tender poetry.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone

The Woodley Ensemble, one of Washington's leading chamber groups, sang with gusto and sophistication at St. Columba's Episcopal Church Saturday in a Renaissance program dubbed "Musical Madness."

A madrigal, "Moro, lasso," by the deranged Italian composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, offered the most notorious example of the theme, the prince having murdered his wife and her lover caught in flagrante delicto. Delivered expertly by the singers, Gesualdo's famously shocking madrigal is ripe with deliberate ambivalence, voiced in wildly shifting semitones and perversely contorted harmonies exposing the poem's tortured grief. (The politically powerful composer never went to jail, but the popular belief that his radically expressive music was due to obsessive guilt over his crime has lately been discounted: His psychopathy emerged in his youth.)

The Woodley also gave a magnificent performance of Orlando di Lasso's "Prophetiae Sibyllarum" ("Prophesies of the Sibyl"), a massive series of sacred motets. Under Music Director Frank Albinder, the ensemble met all the music's tortuous harmonic changes and other expressive extremes, including brash changes of pitch and rhythm. Here, as in works by Jacob Handl, Christopher Marshall, Till MacIvor Meyn and an Igor Stravinsky arrangement, the Woodley sang with clean, resonant vowels, immaculate entrances, precise diction and rhythmic agility.

In three settings of unsettling poems by New Zealand composer Marshall (present Saturday), the ensemble easily captured the disturbing essence of the texts, highlighted by absurd melodic twists and pointed dissonances. The singers also gave an expressive account of Meyn's lurid music for Edgar Allan Poe's maniacal "The City in the Sea."

-- Cecelia Porter

The American Chamber Players recital at the Library of Congress on Friday presented some refreshingly unhackneyed repertoire. While the program of works for various combinations of instruments represented some heavy-hitting composers, all the music seemed chosen for affability and ease on the ear.

It says much for the evening's breezy tone, in fact, that the most substantial piece played was Beethoven's Septet, Op. 20. An early work scored for clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass, the Septet unfolds in six movements, some of which go on at considerable length. But for all the apparent heftiness in scoring and structure, it stands as one of the composer's lightest works, very much distilling the mood of Mozart's serenades and divertimentos.

The ensemble -- led with verve and flawless phrasing by violinist Joanna Maurer -- offered playing of elegant finish and an apt note of bucolic celebration. Maurer's incisive, sweet-toned work was heard to considerable advantage in American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's cool and emotionally ambiguous Romance for Violin and Piano, for which she was sensitively partnered at the keyboard by Jean-Louis Haguenauer. And although space doesn't permit detailed review of all the fine musicians on the program, flutist Sara Stern deserves special praise for her virtuosic work -- parrying with Alberto Parrini's throaty cello in Martinu's sparkling Trio in F, H. 300, and negotiating the tortuous turns of Saint-Saens's Tarantella with clarinetist Loren Kitt.

-- Joe Banno

The Austrian Cultural Forum continued its six-week-long "An das Lied" series Friday night with a recital by tenor Johannes Foettinger and pianist Markus Vorzellner at the Austrian Embassy. The program, "The Diversity of 20th Century Song," sampled Vienna's conflicting musical trends -- forward- and backward-looking -- in the first half of the 20th century.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Songs of the Clown" did not introduce Foettinger in a flattering way: His stilted English diction and tight vocal production hampered the slight charms these songs have to offer.

More compelling were Hanns Jelinek's "Three Chansons on Poems by Enrich Kaestner," with bitingly satirical texts and music replete with parodies of pompous military marches and drunken waltzes.

Ernst Krenek's "Travelbook From the Austrian Alps" is an earnest neo-romantic work, with momentary flashes of Schubert's economy and elegance. Krenek expresses hopefulness, nostalgia, anger and disillusionment about his homeland, all of which Foettinger rendered believably. Here the tenor's vocal capabilities were shown to good effect, and Vorzellner provided great nuance and variety in his playing.

Despite radiant pianism from Vorzellner in three songs by Joseph Marx, Foettinger's discomfort with their soaring vocalism was patently obvious. The late romantic sensuality of these songs did not bloom.

Arnold Schoenberg's "Brettl-Lieder" of 1901 revel in a naughty sense of humor cloaked in the conventional music of the cabaret. In these, both performers excelled; particularly impressive was Vorzellner's virtuosic and wickedly funny accompaniment.

But the evening's best were the lean, mean "Lieder aus Wien" by Egon Wellesz, sung to poetry in Viennese dialect that came off like low-down slang. Here Foettinger finally threw caution to the wind, and exploited a full range of sounds from moans to screams that were exactly right.

The "An das Lied" series continues this evening with soprano Elisabeth Linhart and Vorzellner in a program of 21st-century avant-garde Austrian works.

-- Sarah Hoover

The Austrian Cultural Forum continued its six-week-long "An das Lied" series Friday night with a recital by tenor Johannes Foettinger and pianist Markus Vorzellner at the Austrian Embassy. The program, "The Diversity of 20th Century Song," sampled Vienna's conflicting musical trends -- forward- and backward-looking -- in the first half of the 20th century.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Songs of the Clown" did not introduce Foettinger in a flattering way: His stilted English diction and tight vocal production hampered the slight charms these songs have to offer.

More compelling were Hanns Jelinek's "Three Chansons on Poems by Enrich Kaestner," with bitingly satirical texts and music replete with parodies of pompous military marches and drunken waltzes.

Ernst Krenek's "Travelbook From the Austrian Alps" is an earnest neo-romantic work, with momentary flashes of Schubert's economy and elegance. Krenek expresses hopefulness, nostalgia, anger and disillusionment about his homeland, all of which Foettinger rendered believably. Here the tenor's vocal capabilities were shown to good effect, and Vorzellner provided great nuance and variety in his playing.

Despite radiant pianism from Vorzellner in three songs by Joseph Marx, Foettinger's discomfort with their soaring vocalism was patently obvious. The late romantic sensuality of these songs did not bloom.

Arnold Schoenberg's "Brettl-Lieder" of 1901 revel in a naughty sense of humor cloaked in the conventional music of the cabaret. In these, both performers excelled; particularly impressive was Vorzellner's virtuosic and wickedly funny accompaniment.

But the evening's best were the lean, mean "Lieder aus Wien" by Egon Wellesz, sung to poetry in Viennese dialect that came off like low-down slang. Here Foettinger finally threw caution to the wind, and exploited a full range of sounds from moans to screams that were exactly right.

The "An das Lied" series continues this evening with soprano Elisabeth Linhart and Vorzellner in a program of 21st-century avant-garde Austrian works.

-- Sarah Hoover