by Daniel Hathaway
At once historical and metaphorical in its subject, Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia delivers a lot in a compact package. The eight singers of Oberlin Opera Theater and fifteen instrumentalists of the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble delivered an outstanding performance of the British composer’s 1946 chamber opera last Wednesday evening in Hall Auditorium — one that left the audience with a lot to think about. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin and Daniel Hathaway
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing an opera that will fit the voices of undergraduate singers. Oberlin Opera Theater director Jonathon Field had both practical and philosophical considerations in mind when he decided to produce Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, which opens for a four-performance run in Hall Auditorium on the Oberlin College campus on Wednesday, November 11.
“If you look at the makeup of any college vocal studies program, most likely 80% of the students are female,” Field said in a telephone conversation. “Lucretia offers a lot of roles and opportunities for female singers. And singing Britten always makes students better performers. I think it’s the way that the words fit the musical lines so completely. It’s quasi-melodic, yet the singers have to get the pitches absolutely right for it to make emotional sense. The music is rhythmically complex, but not impossibly dense. And like a lot of his operas, Lucretia is lightly scored, so that’s perfect for young voices.” [Read more…]
by Jarrett Hoffman
“I could not make this opera stranger than it already is,” Oberlin Opera Theater director Jonathon Field told ClevelandClassical in a recent interview. After witnessing the opening night of Oberlin’s production of La finta giardiniera, with its jumbo-sized rabbits that march in slow motion across the stage, I have to disagree. If this opera was strange to begin with, Field didn’t hold back in giving it an extra nudge off the deep end. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin & Daniel Hathaway
Mozart’s La finta giardiniera is an ideal teaching opera for young singers, with its wealth of approachable arias and challenging recitatives. It also boasts a plot so complicated that few have been able to sum it up in a paragraph. “I could not make this opera stranger than it already is,” director Jonathon Field said in a telephone conversation. Tenor Daniel McGrew, who sings the role of the Count, said, “It takes a long time just to get to know what it is about.”
Soprano Rebecca Achtenberg, who plays Sandrina, read four different synopses before she auditioned. “The plot is complicated and I have relished developing ways of explaining it as quickly as possible. But I think if you take out all of the side plots it is pretty simple: girl gets stabbed by her lover, girl goes off to find him, a lot of mistaken identity, a lot of love triangles, and finally, everybody ends up with the person they should. Of course, the intricacies are important to the fun, but I think the plot clears up as the characters develop throughout the opera.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
German-American composer Kurt Weill called his Street Scene an opera, but there are enough influences from the other side of musical theater to make the piece an intriguing hybrid. Oberlin Opera Theater explored all the facets of Weill’s 1947 “Broadway opera” in its masterful production in Hall Auditorium on Wednesday evening. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
German-American composer Kurt Weill had one foot in opera and the other on Broadway when he wrote Street Scene in 1946 with lyrics by Langston Hughes and book by Elmer Rice, based on Rice’s play of the same name. Oberlin Opera Theater director Jonathon Field chose what Weill alternately called his “Broadway Opera” or his “American Opera” for their fall production.
Street Scene will open in Hall Auditorium on the Oberlin campus on Wednesday, November 5 with subsequent performances on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon. Unlike other Oberlin opera productions, the same cast will appear in all four shows.
The production of Street Scene has inspired several add-on events. A 1931 film of Elmer Rice’s play was shown last week at the Apollo Theatre, and lectures by Bruce D. McClung and Kim Kowalke and a Weill-Style Cabaret are also part of the schedule (see the Concert Listings for details.) [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
After the Blitz, England needed some comedy, and Benjamin Britten stepped up to provide a good dose of it with his 1946 chamber opera, Albert Herring, which premiered at Glyndebourne in 1947.
Populated with characters who might have stepped right out of Miss Marple’s village of St. Mary Mead, Britten’s three-acter was adapted from a story by Guy de Maupassant and translated from France to Suffolk.
The village is in a tizzy because no candidates for May Queen measure up to the formidable Lady Billow’s exacting moral standards. As a compromise, the village committee decides to switch to a May King and nominates Albert Herring, son of a widowed greengrocer whose apron strings have kept him so tightly bound that he’s oblivious of temptation. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“I love Albert Herring because these are my people,” exclaimed Jonathon Field, director of Oberlin Opera Theater, in a recent telephone conversation. “I remember having tea with my grandfather in the little town of Leatherhead in Surrey, England. I know these people inside and out!” On Wednesday, March 12 at 8:00 pm at Hall Auditorium, Oberlin Opera Theater presents the opening night performance of Benjamin Britten’s acclaimed chamber opera Albert Herring.
The opera’s lively tale is filled with comic characters ranging from dully straitlaced to scandalously mischievous. Audience members will find themselves rooting for timid Albert, the most unlikely of heroes, whose secret longing for excitement turns the town upside down. “It’s about knowing you need to make a change in life, and getting that push to actually do it,” Field said, adding that “Britten’s operas always have an oppressed innocent. By the end, Albert sort of tells everybody off and breaks the chains that bind him.”
Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, Britten’s three-act comic opera is set in the English village of Loxford in 1947. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
“It’s David Lynch characters in a Dick Van Dyke setting doing Monty Python things,” said stage director Jonathon Field about Real Time Opera’s production of NOVA, which goes up on Thursday for three performances at Cleveland Public Theater. The production is a collaboration between Field, librettist Paul Schick and composer Lewis Nielson. “It’s raunchy, but sublime,” Field said.
The outrageous plot centers around a sales pitch for Nova, a life-sized android.
Salesman Ed tries to convince husband Al that purchasing the robot will make his life better. Nova is better at giving cocktail and dinner parties and knows how to make a great martini. She promises to be a more efficient and dependable love partner than wife Marlene. But even after a series of ten erotic escapades during a “dance” sequence based on Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils, Ed’s still not sure.
by Daniel Hathaway
Jonathon Field never fails to bring new insights into his opera productions, and Oberlin Opera Theater’s fall show, Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel is full of details that add to the delicious ambiguity of what many of us think of as a children’s opera. After all, it’s a fairy tale decked out with a wicked witch, a gingerbread house and guardian angels. But scratch the surface of this musical rendering of a Brothers Grimm story and disturbing topics come to light.
When we first meet Hansel (Marisa Novak) and Gretel (Alexis Aimé), they seem like normal adolescent siblings who are locked in a continuous squabble — until you notice that there’re a lot of physical blows being exchanged. That’s a stock element in all kinds of comedy from Punch and Judy shows to animated cartoons, but as the scene goes on and mother (Kayleigh Decker) and father (Daveed Buzaglo) come home, the level of physical violence begins to add up to a diagnosis: this is a dysfunctional family who are plagued by hunger, overshadowed by drunkenness and who take out their frustrations on each other with fists and brooms (their cottage industry has stockpiled plenty of weapons close at hand).
You can set that level of analysis aside if you like, but it keeps coming back. [Read more…]