Monday, June 23, 2008

'Love's Comedy' at GMU

Twenty-eight years before he offended polite society with the loveless marriage in "Hedda Gabler," playwright Henrik Ibsen outraged it by implying the impossibility of a loving union in "Love's Comedy." Dating to 1862, the play argues that passionate love cannot survive everyday reality. So Falk, a poet, loses his lover but keeps his idealism while Svanhild, his love, accepts a conventional marriage to another.

It sounds like the plot of an opera or operetta -- and now it is one. Rick Davis, artistic director of George Mason University's Center for the Arts, crafted the English libretto from Leon Katz's adaptation of Ibsen, and Kim D. Sherman wrote the music for the work, which premiered Saturday night at George Mason.

The production was a mixed success. Without scenery and with singers in street clothes, and music provided by two pianists (Victoria Gau and Julie Neish), the presentation seemed more rehearsal than opening night. It was often ragged, as if some parts were not quite finished at curtain time. And the best voices were in subsidiary roles: soprano Danielle Talamantes as Anna, Svanhild's sister; mezzo-soprano Linda Maguire as Mrs. Halm, the girls' mother; and tenor Matthew Loyal Smith as Lind, Falk's friend.

The principals never quite made their cardboard characters come alive. As Falk, baritone David Schmidt declaimed as often as he sang, his condemnations of conventionality sounding more cynical than principled. Soprano Abigail Shue projected Svanhild's core strength better than her vulnerability. Sherman's music was defiantly tonal, inoffensive and unexceptional, with choruses that sounded like wan Gilbert and Sullivan. Conductor Stan Engebretson kept things moving well enough -- but like any potential gem, "Love's Comedy" needs cutting and polishing before it will shine.

-- Mark J. Estren

On his two most recent albums, 2002's "Moffou" and 2006's "M'Bemba," Salif Keita banished most of the Western styles and electrified instruments he used to employ. The magisterial Malian tenor didn't take quite so austere an approach Friday night at Lisner Auditorium: Two members of his nine-person band played electric guitar, as did Keita himself occasionally, and Ousmane Kouyate was given two opportunities to meld jazzy picking and scat singing. Yet the concert emphasized the style of the performer's most recent recordings.

The show followed the pattern of Keita's other post-"Moffou" performances, as up-tempo tunes flanked a middle section of quieter material. This time, though, the gentle interlude lasted most of the two-hour-plus show. After the opening number, the singer switched from French to English to implore the crowd to "stand up and dance," but such gentler songs as "Ladji" soon led most of the audience to sit back down.

That's not to say that the music was undanceable. Keita's group included three percussionists, whose rippling polyrhythms chattered with the chiming guitars and kora (a traditional West African lute). Even when the tempos were moderate, the beats were as dynamic as Keita's powerful voice, whose intensity can still startle. The singer's ability to shift register or emphasis without turning shrill or raucous remains a marvel.

Although he performed few of his older hits, Keita did reward calls for "Mandjou," a rousing anthem from his late-'70s stint with the Ambassadeurs. That song began the show's up-tempo final section, which brought people back to their feet. The evening ended as so many previous Keita concerts have, with the singer and his band nearly overwhelmed by the dozens of gyrating fans who joined them onstage.

-- Mark Jenkins

It was the athletic dimension of orchestral leadership that was on display at Saturday evening's concert in the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall, where four of this year's nine National Conducting Institute participants led the National Symphony Orchestra in a program of big, splashy, colorful symphonic hits. What was hidden behind the scenes, however, was the three weeks of intensive tutelage the institute also offers in the business of being an orchestral conductor (the marketing, the public relations and the politics) -- and whatever subtle or profound musical ideas these conductors might be hatching.

Adam Burnette, Dongmin Kim and Benjamin Bolter, all of whom study or have studied at Indiana University, and Kenneth Lam, a Peabody student, have come to the institute with a lot of conducting experience, and each has been in the business long enough to have developed a musical persona. Burnette was a big-picture man, sweeping through two movements of the Berlioz "Romeo and Juliet" symphony with a batonless exuberance that made the ballroom scene almost orgiastic. Lam took on the Liszt "Prometheus" tone poem with a sense of urgency that left no space for breath but that highlighted excitement and expectations. Kim's reading of Copland's "El Salon Mexico" focused on details and punctuation, and allowed solo voices the space to speak idiomatically. And Bolter spotlighted the showiest aspects of Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 and made it look easy.

The orchestra pretty much gave each conductor what was asked for: clarity and balance where demanded and a certain amount of ambiguity and muddiness otherwise.

-- Joan Reinthaler