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Baldwin-Wallace takes on Don Giovanni

By Daniel Hathaway

College opera directors casting about for a title that fits the abilities of young singers don't usually settle on Don Giovanni. As guest conductor Dean Williamson recently told his Baldwin-Wallace singers and instrumentalists, “You have to realize you've chosen to climb the Mt. Everest of Mozart operas. Usually you start with Figaro or something that's more straightforward. Don Giovanni is the one you do later in life. Friends who have sung the roles many, many times say that it takes even seasoned professionals three or four productions before they finally find it in their bodies and brains”.

But stage director Benjamin Wayne Smith saw an opportunity and leapt at it. “We're an undergraduate institution and Don Giovanni is a hard opera. But we have an amazing senior class right now that's rich with guys. If we were ever going to do it, this was the year!”

Smith has such depth of talent that he's been able to double-cast the work, which opens at the Kleist Center on the B-W campus in Berea on Wednesday, February 1 at 7:30 and runs through a Sunday matinee on February 5 at 2. “We're blessed to have two principals in each role, and they're really living up to the requirements of the piece”. Smith agrees that one of the things that makes Don Giovanni work with undergraduate singers is that they're fearless and in this case find themselves on top of the heap. “Since we don't have any graduate program, they have to be the leaders. Once you're a senior, you're the boss”. But the director also has some talent coming up in the ranks. “We also have strong lower class singers. Both Masettos are sophomores and one Zerlina is a junior. All but one of the freshmen in the vocal performance program are in the chorus, along with several members of the musical theatre department, which is a nice crossover”.

Conductor Dean Williamson, who has served as artistic director of now-in-limbo Opera Cleveland, is thrilled with the students' work. “I'm so impressed with all the talent and attitude of everybody. I came in early and spent a week with them in December and was pleased from the very first orchestra reading. They're very open and enthusiastic, just launching themselves with a lot of energy and willing to try new things. And it's good to have so much rehearsal time to educate and teach as well as polish and fine tune”. That luxury of time is rare in the professional opera world. “You're lucky if you get six hours with the orchestra—I once did a regional Don Giovanni on two two-hour orchestra sessions! But here we can have a great time, laugh a lot and explain what's going on in the drama — where the musical and dramatic jokes are and why Mozart suddenly goes berserk because of the heat of what's happening on stage. Old pros usually don't want to hear all of that. But I remember seeing a wonderful documentary on James Levine and the Met orchestra where the maestro said 'This is why I don't want to go anywhere else. In essence, I'm an educator. I know I talk too much, but that's who I am and how I like to work'”.

Ben Smith has devised a concept for the opera that the student cast can easily relate to. “I'm setting it in the 1950s in small college town America. In that world, instead of being noblemen, Don Giovanni and Don Octavio are fraternity guys — the nobility of the college. Donna Anna is the daughter of a prominent citizen, maybe the mayor. Donna Elvira is a southern belle who got swept off her feet by Don Giovanni and shows up looking for him. Zerlina and Masseto are townies rather than lower class servants. And the Commendatore is a retired army colonel. Instead of a statue in a graveyard, we have a war memorial like you find in the center of small towns. It's a fun period to live in and costume, and the students have a visual and mental reference of that pulp fiction period when youth ran wild. When Mozart was writing the opera, Western Europe and the American colonies were in revolution. In the 50s, the U.S. was just about to lose its innocence”.

Don Giovanni will be performed in the Prague version, which varies in some respects from what audiences usually hear. “Our major concession to the age of our singers is that we've cut the bejeezus out of the recitatives”, Smith says, “but we're still singing it in Italian with supertitles. The show will run about 2 ½ hours with intermission. It can get long even in the best hands”.

Williamson, who will conduct operas in Nashville, at Wolf Trap and in Denver during the next two seasons, is bringing years of pit experience to his task at B-W and actually relishes working with two sets of singers. “It makes things even more complicated, but I'm used to working with double casts. There are different emotional states with each group of singers, but you have to be consistent. One of my mentors told me that in Italian opera, you can only afford to be a minute off in your timing of an act from one night to another. There's an inner dramatic clock driving the ship and you have to keep in mind the long arc of what the drama requires. In opera, consistency is the better part of valor. With a seasoned cast, you can treat things more like chamber music, but with a younger cast, you have to conduct the opera in your head and lead them along or they might take you down a dark alley”.

One of Dean Williamson's challenges for Don Giovanni is making the problematic orchestra pit work. “We're going to try the classical Italian opera setup with strings on one side of the pit and winds on the other. I've learned over the years that there's a reason for that and all the other bizzare traditions of opera — why you do a rubato or take a fermata, why dynamic ranges in the scores run from pppp to ffff, why conductors do what they do. Italian conductors were crazy, but they were practical”.

Don Giovanni opens at the Kleist Center for Music and Drama on Wednesday, February 1 at 7:30 pm. Subsequent performances run through Saturday evening, February 4, with a Sunday matinee on February 5 at 2 pm (see the concert listings for details). Here are the names of the cast members:

Donna Anna — Adrianna Cleveland*; Alessandra Gabbianelli+

Don Ottavio — Andre C. Brown*; Max Nolin+

Don Giovanni — Alec Donaldson*; Aaron Dunn+


Leporello — Jonathan F. Cooper*; Zachary Rusk+

Donna Elvira — Brittany Fernandez*; Lauren Koteles+

Zerlina — Lindsay Espinosa*; Desiree Johnson+

Masetto — Justin Caithaml*; Joseph Zeigler+

Commendatore — Michael Revis

* indicates performing Feb. 1, 3 & 5; + indicates performing Feb. 2 & 4

Chorus

Alexa Campbell, Kia Frank, Rachel Goldberg, Bree Horton, Hannah Litterini, 
Erica Moffatte, Sarah Nadler, Stephanie Taubert, David Croglio, Ian Gregory Hill, 
Andrew Kotzen, Joel Logan, Dryden Meints, Christopher Roden, Michael Ryan & David Zody

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Published on ClevelandClassical.com January 31, 2012

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