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Season endings
Boston Lyric Opera’s Bohème, plus Morimur, Jacques Zoon, and the Lydians
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ

I was anticipating the Boston Lyric Opera’s season-ending production of La bohème with some trepidation. The last time BLO presented the world’s most popular opera (the opera the musical Rent is based on), in 1992, the unthinkable happened. The production botched one of opera’s most foolproof moments — the death of the heroine, Mimi. Practically anyone can do this right. Productions with klutzy singers, amateur orchestras, and tacky scenery have pulled it off. But stage director Keith Warner had a terrible idea and no one stopped him. When Mimi dies, he had her lover, Rodolfo, pull down a red curtain that had been hanging obtrusively across the back of the stage to reveal behind it an auditorium full of snobby operagoers literally looking down their noses, through opera glasses, at the poor suffering bohemians. It was a vile moment that had nothing to do with Puccini’s ravishing music (who else could put a gorgeous tune to a description of a tubercular coughing fit?) or four-handkerchief libretto. There had been some wonderful singing actors in that cast, including a golden-voiced young Met baritone, Mark Oswald, as Marcello (Rodolfo’s painter roommate) and the riveting Angelina Reaux (who’s probably better known for her Kurt Weill evenings than for her operatic roles) as the endearingly witty and sexy Musetta (his on-again-off-again girlfriend).

No one as good as Oswald or Reaux is in the BLO’s new production (at the Shubert through May 17). Marcello and Musetta, Frank Hernandez and Angela Turner Wilson, are still the liveliest figures on the stage, though Hernandez’s voice lacks a distinctive color and Wilson’s tends to shrill at the top, which in turn underlines the coarseness of her mugging. The most detailed performance is by baritone David Kravitz in the small role of the foolish landlord, Benoit (he looks like Felix Bressart in The Shop Around the Corner and plays the part with a similar nervousness). Baritone Vitali Rozynko is an unusually vivid Schaunard (the musician roommate), but bass Branch Fields (Colline), who had a tiny part in last season’s Don Carlos, is not yet ready for vocal prime time, even in a one-aria role.

Soprano Nicole Folland, whom I found to be pretty much a blank as the Countess in the BLO’s forgettable 1999 Nozze di Figaro, is still blank as the adorable seamstress. "They call me Mimi," she sings in her first-act aria, "but my real name is Lucia." It should be obvious why she’s really a "Mimi." But Folland is more a Lucia — prissy, stiff, more schoolmarm than bohemian. She has the prettiest voice in the company, though it has a correct, "mature" sound rather than a more appropriate youthful freshness. Good-looking tenor Stephen Mark Brown impressed me as Edgardo in the BLO’s 1997 Lucia di Lammermoor, then less so as Gounod’s Roméo (1999). His acting has improved — he actually played a character this time, though he gets hammy, bursting into phony sobs. His light silvery voice is thin for Puccini, so tone and pitch get derailed when he forces.

The BLO hasn’t learned from its mistakes. In 1992, John Conklin’s set was dreary; now Erhard Rom’s set (in co-production with the St. Louis Opera, with costumes from a different Bohème at the Santa Fe Opera) is still dreary. Stephen Lord’s tempos were sluggish in 1992 and new conductor David Agler’s tempos, for Puccini’s most conversational, most quicksilver, most dazzlingly efficient score, are still sluggish.

The new stage director, Elkhana Pulitzer, has the good sense not to get in the way. I like how some of the stage action actually responds to particular musical gestures (Rodolfo tears up his play in tempo; at the Café Momus, Marcello nuzzles Musetta’s neck to an orchestral quiver). No stage director can make a charmless singer charming — and this opera depends on charm. But Pulitzer’s near-fatal problem is that she hasn’t found a way to convince you that these characters fall instantly and desperately in love, which is the point of Puccini’s uninhibited romanticism. This Rodolfo seems merely to be making a pass at Mimi, and Mimi just seems to be going along for the ride.

A noticeable contingent of the audience, clearly unengaged, left during intermission. And yet, by the final act, with no smart-ass "concept" to interfere with the music, what hearts chilled by the low emotional temperature — and hardened by Boston’s most uncomfortable seats — weren’t melted at the death of Mimi? Pass me a kleenex.

BOTH THE BSO AND THE CELEBRITY SERIES have finished, so we’re into this season’s final sputter of events. I was surprised at the sparse-ish turnout for Morimur, which was one of last year’s surprise classical-recording hits (on ECM). This was the embodiment of violin teacher Helga Thoene’s cockeyed but fascinating idea that Bach’s great Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin, which ends with an astounding 13-minute Chaconne, was really an elegy for his first wife — an idea debunked by scholars like Harvard’s Christoph Wolff, who believe that the Partita predated her decease. Numerological spellings-out of secret messages are among the shakiest of arguments (I once read a book that "proved" in this way that Shakespeare was really Edgar Allan Poe). Still, despite the claptrap, it’s not far-fetched to believe that in the Partita Bach quotes chorales that deal with themes of mortality. On the disc, members of England’s Hilliard Ensemble sing Bach chorales between movements of the Partita played by violinist Christoff Poppen, then return during a repeat of the Chaconne to highlight (as with a yellow marker) the chorale "borrowings." The music is exquisite, the singing ravishing, and the violin playing impressive if not particularly searching.

In the reverberant acoustic of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, the music blossomed. And yet hearing it in live performance only underlined for me the way this notion actually diminishes the power of the Partita by reducing the devastating Chaconne to a chorale accompaniment.

THE HIGHLIGHT OF BOSTON BAROQUE’S SEASON ENDER was flutist Jacques Zoon (now on sabbatical from the BSO) in Mozart’s D-major Flute Concerto (the one originally composed for oboe) — Zoon’s very first public concert playing a period instrument (a modern copy of an 18th-century four-key flute). This was evidently a last-minute change from the Mozart Flute Concerto in G listed in the program, and the orchestra, under Martin Pearlman, had some difficulty staying with Zoon. But he was amazing: the rapid articulation in the outer movements (how he bites into a phrase) never diminishing the rainbow palette; the uncanny seamlessness between "speech" and "song"; the technical dexterity (those trills and runs!); the caressing; the teasing; the rhythmic life; the character! What a loss if the rumors of his not returning to the BSO prove true.

The big piece on the program was Mozart’s "Great" but unfinished C-minor Mass — arguably an even finer work than the great but unfinished Requiem. Pearlman, the orchestra, and the small chorus wisely emphasized the work’s poignance over its grandiloquence — something that couldn’t be said for all the soloists. When mezzo-soprano Patricia Risley appeared as Cherubino in the BLO’s Figaro, I admired her spunk but had qualms about how externalized her emotions seemed. What she got away with as Cherubino became a serious miscalculation in the Mass. She’s surely better suited to the brash Americanness of Jordan Baker, whom she played in the Chicago Lyric Opera production of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, than to Mozart’s spiritual refinement.

Soprano Juliana Rambaldi had the enviable task of singing one of Mozart’s most sublime arias, "Et incarnatus est." But her glinting timbre was marred by an odd shakiness. Climactic high notes were like what happens when you squeeze a toothpaste tube too hard — suddenly there’s much more than you want, and it’s all over the place. Tenor Stanford Olsen was fine, and in the smallest of the solo roles, bass-baritone Kevin Deas did the most stylish singing.

THE LAST CONCERT in the sixth season of Emmanuel Music’s seven-season survey of the chamber and non-operatic vocal works of Schubert could have been an elegiac occasion. The program ended with the one of the greatest works in the literature of chamber music and one of Schubert’s very last compositions, his String Quintet in C; and in this performance, cellist Rhonda Rider, who in 1980 became one of the founders of the Lydian String Quartet, was playing her last concert as a linchpin of this beloved ensemble. She’s leaving to concentrate on solo work, on commissioning new music, and on Triple Helix, a piano trio she was also a founder of; she’ll be succeeded by Joshua Gordon. The Lydians have had only one other cast change, back in 1987, when Daniel Stepner replaced Wilma Smith as first-violinist. In the Schubert, they were joined by Paul Katz, from 1969-1995 cellist in the now defunct Cleveland Quartet (he’s now teaching at the New England Conservatory).

The sentiment of the occasion only briefly informed this vigorous, urgent performance. That came in the first movement, when the unearthly melody introduced by the two cellos (after an intensely suspenseful build-up) gets repeated as a duet for cello and viola near the end of the movement. Here, Rider and Mary Ruth Ray, partners of 22 years, let that melody sing with the most profound tenderness, a hymn of friendship and cooperation that was echoed by Stepner and second-violinist Judith Eissenberg (another kleenex, please). At the very end, as if to banish second thoughts, the final coda raced breathlessly into the annals of memorable performances.

The program was to begin with Craig Smith accompanying soprano Sarah Pelletier and tenor William Hite in songs to Ossianic texts (pieces mostly written by the 18th-century Scottish poet James Macpherson and attributed to the legendary bard Ossian) and settings of poems by Johann Rochlitz. Pelletier was ill, however, and Hite, substituting a few "chestnuts" ("Im Abendrot," "Die Forelle," "Ganymed"), held the fort on his own. He sang the mystical "Im Abendrot" ("At Dusk") with an exquisite half voice and delivered the two heavenly Rochlitz songs, the enchanting serenade "An die Laute" ("To the Lute") and the haunting "Alinde" (does Alinde really appear at the end or is it her ghost?), with refined commitment. There’s no more intimate Schubert accompanist than Smith, but he also shone in the extended proto-sonata piano interludes of the long Ossianic "Die Nacht" ("The Night").

Forty-five Schubert concerts down and one more year to go!

Issue Date: May 9 - 16, 2002
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