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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > March > 01
Monday, March 1, 2010
Review: ‘Albert Herring,’ Butler Opera Center
Though it debuted in 1947, Benjamin Britten’s comic opera has only fairly recently gotten the love from the opera world with productions popping up on calendars more and more.
The University of Texas’ Butler Opera Center mounts a comely new production of its own which opened this past weekend.
Perhaps it’s Britten’s particularly cruel British comedic sensibility hits home with today’s audiences? Then again, perhaps it’s only now that Britten’s status as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century is now a given.
Like his more popular opera ‘Peter Grimes,’ Britten’s ‘Albert Herring’ centers on an outsider character misunderstood by uptight British society as represented by a small town riven with hypocrisy and intolerance.
Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant — but thoroughly British in Britten’s interpretation — ‘Albert Herring’ is vicious satire on societal propriety as portrayed in early 20th-century Britain that leaves no character unscathed.
When the autocratic Lady Billows (in this production played by soprano Emily Ward) finds no suitably chaste young woman to be crowned May Queen in the village’s annual celebration, she is convinced by the a council of villagers to elect the hapless grocer Albert Herring (tenor Brad Raymond). Albert is, after all, a simpering momma’s boy.
After being dressed in the clownish humiliating May King costume for the village festival, Albert benefits from a glass of surreptiously spiked lemonade which leads him on an all-night bender. After a night of reckless wanton behavior, Albert returns to the village defiant in his new-found embrace life’s more licentious behavior.
The notable highlight of UT’s production was the orchestra led by Jim Lowe, the Butler Opera Center’s new conductor. Lowe (whose resumes includes stints with Houston Grand Opera and conducting the recent Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of ‘Gypsy’ starring Patti LuPone) wrested considerable panache out of the 12-piece chamber orchesrta of student musician. And that’s not an easy feat given that Britten’s score is chock full of deft musical craftsmanship and witty, ironic references to both the whole operatic canon and popular British music. (Britten quotes everything form Gilbert and Sullivan operattas, Baroque operas and even the late Romanticism of Richard Strauss). Lowe’s musical direction is some of the best seen yet from the Bulter Opera Center.
Though the voices in Sunday night’s cast were generally good, (a few secondary roles are double cast), Marc Reynolds’s limp stage direction left some cast members and their characters adrift.
Those who rose above it — and whose voices also stood out — shone.
Raymond makes Albert his own dramatically and vocally, utterly convincing at first as the hapless nerd, a convincing buffoon as the May King and finally a rather sardonic convert to life’s pleasures — and musically strong and distinct throughout.
As Albert’s erstwhile buddy Sid, baritone James Van Rens (who recently had a small part in Austin Lyric Opera’s charming ‘The Star’) was the complete opera package: a performer with excellent comedic acting chops and a rich voice full of clarity and seasoned with superb articulation.
Ditto with baritone Brian Pettery, in a secondary role as the Vicar. Vocal clarity and theatrical aplomb made his character stand out in a cast filled with many secondary characters.
An awkward set by Anne McMeeking had a split staircase serving as the main scenic element but its institutional modernist style were out-of-place next to Michaele Hite’s luscious period costumes.
Though in places uneven, this production of ‘Albert Herring’ nevertheless gives notice that this bitterly funny Britten comedy is not to be ignored.
‘Albert Herring’ continues at 7:30 p.m. March 5 and March 7. McCullough Theatre, UT campus. $20 ($10 for students). www.music.utexas.edu.
Photo by Jon Smith.
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Review: New Music Co-op ‘Invisible Landscapes’
Silence permeated the new compositions played Saturday night by Austin’s New Music Co-op at Ceremony Hall, one of three different concerts — under the banner ‘Invisible Landscapes’ — the music collective presented which focused on the music of California-based composer Michael Pisaro in collaboration with percussionist Greg Stuart.
Warm water morphing into air was the primary image behind Pisaro’s ‘Ascending Series(7) (Evaporation),’ a 25-minute piece. A commission from the New Music Co-op, called for seven bowed instruments — in this case two violins, a viola, a bass and three percussionists who used bows on the rims of floor tom drums to create a soft, ethereal scraping sound. ‘Ascending’ started with a tone that formed something of backbone of the sound. Then, after slowly crescendoing, the tone seemed to evaporate, longer stretches of silence marrying the ever quieter moments of the almost white noise coming from the percussive bowing. Ambient noises from outside the auditorium made delightful guest appearances while ‘Ascending’ demanded careful, meditative listening.
New Music Co-op member Nick Hennies debuted his ‘Second Skin With Lungs’ which had five musicians at floor toms making a circle around the audience. Slowing using their hands to make circular motions across the drum skins, the musicians created a gentle wave of sound, sometime no more than a whisper.
Also getting a debut was Travis Weller’s ‘Toward and Away From the Point of Balance,’ a mesmerizing 10-minute piece for a string trio and The Owl, Weller’s inventive 16-string instrument that produces haunting sounds. Toward’ arched from silence to purpose and back to silence with moody slivers of harmony roughed up a bit with the string players injecting near-silent and other-worldly scraping sounds.
Sound may have been the product of Saturday’s concert, but, cleverly, silence emerged as the subtle star.
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Ballet Austin’s 2010-2011 season
Romanticism rules much of Ballet Austin’s 2010-2011 season.
Along with its usual holiday presentation of ‘The Nutcracker,’ the company will dance ‘La Sylphide,’ widely credited as the first romantic ballet and first staged by the Paris Opera ballet in 1832. The story of a young groom who leaves his bride in pursuit of a tempting, beautiful sylph runs, perhaps appropriately, Feb. 11-13, 2011, right up against Valentine’s Day.
Then on Mother’s Day weekend (May 6-8), the company presents the ballet version of Mozart’s romantic opera, ‘The Magic Flute.’
Ballet Austin opens its season Sept. 24-26 with re-mounts of two works by artistic director Stephen Mills, ‘Carmina Burana’ and ‘Kai.’
A as-yet-to-be-announced program for the Studio Theatre Project March 25-April 3 will play in Ballet Austin’s 270-seat Austin Ventures Studio Theater at the company’s downtown Austin headquarters.
The apprentice company, Ballet Austin II, will reprise Mills’s popular ballet for young audiences ‘Not Afraid of the Dark,’ Sept. 18-19 at the Paramount.
See www.balletaustin.org for more information.
