Maryland Opera Studio

MARYLAND OPERA STUDIO: IL BARBIERE DISIVIGLIA &

DIE ENTFÜHRUNGAUS DEM SERAIL

Maryland Community News Online

Thursday, April 7, 2011

‘The Barber'

by Topher Forhecz | Staff Writer

One of the legends surrounding Gioachino Rossini's "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" or "The Barber of Seville" is that it took the prolific opera composer only 12 days to complete his two-act comedy.

Even if the opera were written in less than two weeks, it doesn't feel that way to the students of the University of Maryland School of Music's Maryland Opera Studio who will perform it at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Friday.

"It takes more than that to learn it," singer David Blalock says. "I can tell you that much."

A second-year graduate student at the University of Maryland, Blalock is one of two Figaros cast in the production.

In the story, Figaro comes to the aid of a young count named Almaviva who hopes to win the favor of the young Rosina by virtue of his personality and not his wealth.

The opera will be performed in Italian with English subtitles. Although Blalock is not fluent, Italian is one of four languages opera students must study, and he works with instructors on proper enunciation. The key, he says, is repetition.

"I don't walk around without having a Rossini tune in my head this semester," Blalock says.

"The Barber of Seville" has been one of the most performed operas in America since its debut in the early 19th century. As such, certain traditions have been established that director Pat Diamond hoped to break for this production. In the first act, when Figaro approaches the count and tells him to disguise himself as a soldier so he can be stationed in the same home as Rosina, Diamond decided to have Blalock depart from the typically lighthearted manner in which the plot is hatched.

"It's tradition that I explain it sloppily and very drunk and at one point I hiccup, but with the way we're playing it — with the stakes very high — instead of making it a joke, we make it kind of serious," Blalock explains.

The humor of the love story, based on the 1775 play, Pierre Beaumarchais' "Le Barbier de Seville," Diamond says, is one reason the opera has become so popular.

"Anyone in the audience can relate to the need that these two characters — the count and Rosina — have to be together and all of the obstacles that they overcome in order to make that happen," he says.

Accompanying Diamond is conductor Miah Im, a faculty member at the University of Toronto and former music director of the Maryland Opera Studio. She and Diamond first met at the Aspen Music Festival in 1999.

"Pat's one of my favorite directors to work with. There's an enormous amount of mutual respect," Im says. "I think what was really interesting for us when we were discussing this piece before we had even begun to stage, before we had even started musical rehearsal. I really felt we were on the same page musically and dramatically speaking."

Im says she finds Rossini more difficult to conduct than Mozart, to whom the Italian is often compared. Rossini was inspired by Mozart, who died in 1791 — a year before his birth.

Im says both composers had an appreciation for strong melodies.

What makes "The Barber of Seville" so difficult, she observes, is that singers are allowed to embellish some of their parts.

"The orchestra also has to be extremely spontaneous, sensitive and responsive to how the singers are singing. I really don't delineate between the singers and the orchestra," Im says. "I consider them one entity."

To help prepare her players, Im has the orchestra sing lines from the opera during some rehearsals.

"I am of the firm belief that if you can't sing what you're playing, then you have no idea how to play it," Im says.

tforhecz@gazette.net

KRONOS QUARTET: THE AMERICA PROGRAM

Music review: Kronos Quartet’s ‘America Program’

By Anne Midgette, Published: April 12

The Kronos Quartet’s “America Program” at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Sunday night did a lot more than just present American music. It offered some thoughtful perspectives on what it means to be American — without lecturing, without analysis, simply through music. It may have been the best match of idea and execution I’ve heard from Kronos, ever.

Kronos, of course, is the original rock band of string quartets. It plays contemporary music and makes it feel like pop, down to the exemplary production values of Sunday’s concert: The lighting design gently supported the music with a dash of color, a single projected image or a gesture as simple as intensifying the beam of a spotlight at the moment when Johnston’s fourth quartet, “Amazing Grace,” entered its coda.

But I’ve heard Kronos plenty of times in the past, and I’ve never been quite so pleased with the experience. David Harrington, the violinist who founded the group in 1973 and its lone original member, has a shaggy, slightly hoarse way with the violin that I’ve been critical of. On Sunday, though, this rough touch gave the program a homespun air that was eminently appropriate.

The music was contemporary, but the America that it depicted was not. This concert was not about nationalism but iconography. Its America was a can-do, eager place: the America of Reginald Marsh, of WPA murals, of hobos crossing the country on trains — literally depicted in the final piece, Harry Partch’s “U.S. Highball: A Musical Account of Slim’s Transcontinental Hobo Trip.”

It started with Johnston’s “Amazing Grace,” which to my ear evoked various moments of the American experience through many kinds of music, all centering on the familiar hymn tune. It began with a busy industriousness, like a barn-raising, with the four instruments actively working away at their parts, passing the theme around without letting it distract any of them from the task at hand, letting their individual voices intersect without compromising individual integrity. The sounds ultimately

streamlined into metallic, Jet Age swoops before finally, at the very end, cycling back to a brief evocation of the beginning.

Missy Mazzoli’s “Harp and Altar” also went back to an earlier America, channeling an excerpt of Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge: To the Brooklyn Bridge,” with taped vocals by singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane (both Mazzoli and Kahane are hot properties among New York’s young musicians) emerging from the busy choir of strings.

Steve Reich’s “WTC 9/11,” which Kronos gave its world premiere last month, treats a more recent past. Reich is a composer who follows his interests doggedly, one step at a time, to new places; this piece combined his signature juxtaposition of taped and live instruments to the manipulation of the spoken word, in a sober memorial, as sad and brief as the catastrophe of Sept. 11 itself and as compact as a gravestone. Reich worked with the taped voices of eyewitnesses, from the air traffic controllers who first noticed a plane heading in the wrong direction — the spaces between their words extended in a static blur over a repeating, jagged alarm tone from the violins — to the people who followed Jewish tradition by sitting Shmira for months over the unburied remains of victims. The repetition of the taped words, echoed in music by the strings, becomes a portrayal of the act of remembering: the sound of people trying to get their testimony right, creating a tale that will be told again.

After the break came voices of the dead: “Structures,” a tough, beautiful piece by Morton Feldman, with individual notes and chords suspended sweet and full and translucent as green grapes (“It should sound like Schubert!” Harrington told the audience Feldman said), and Partch’s long hobo piece, arranged by Johnston. The composer and singer David Barron sports a hobo-like fuzzy gray beard and performed the lead quite brilliantly, while the strings offered energetic onomatopoeia. This is quintessential American mythmaking, the narrative of a hobo making his way to Chicago; it was doubtless my own limitation that my lack of interest in the story led to my finding this putative masterpiece slightly tedious. The piece, however, was a perfect cap to the theme of this eminently worthwhile evening.

The Kronos Quartet will perform public readings of works by student composers at the University of Maryland at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Tuesday.

© The Washington Post Company

The Baltimore Sun > Entertainment > Music > Clef Notes & Drama Queens

Kronos Quartet's association with Clarice Smith Center includes two free events this week

The contemporary music scene would sure have been a lot less interesting over the years without the Kronos Quartet doing its high-level advocacy.

The brilliant, ever-inquisitive ensemble has developed close ties to the University of Maryland's School of Music and the Clarice Smith Center, where there was a Kronos concert Sunday night featuring Steve Reich's new, 9/11-based piece (I couldn't make it, so if any of you were there, please send me your thoughts).

This week, you can catch what are billed as "free engagement events" at the center.

On Tuesday at 8, the Kronos Quartet will give a ...

public reading of works by student composers, which has got to be awfully cool for the composers and should be fascinating for the audience.

And, as a kind of prelude to Tuesday's event, at 5:30, Kronos artistic director David Harrington will give a public "listening party" -- he'll share some of the works he's considering for the group and discuss the process of choosing repertoire.

Free admission to both presentations.

PHOTO (by Jay Blakesberg) COURTESY OF CLARICE SMITH CENTER

Posted by Tim Smith at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About Tim Smith

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., I couldn't help but develop a keen interest in politics, but music, theater and visual art also proved great attractions. Music became my main focus after high school. I thought about being a cocktail pianist, but I hated taking requests, so I studied music history instead, earning a B.A. in that field from Eisenhower College (Seneca Falls, N.Y.) and an M.A. from Occidental College (Los Angeles). I then landed in journalism. After freelancing for the Washington Post and others, I was classical music critic for the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, where I also contributed to NPR. I've written for the New York Times, BBC Music Magazine and other publications, and I'm a longtime contributor to Opera News. My book, The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Classical Music (Perigee, 2002), can be found on the most discerning remainder racks.

I joined the Baltimore Sun as classical music critic in 2000 and, in 2009, also became theater critic, giving me the opportunity to annoy a whole new audience. In 2010, my original Clef Notes blog expanded to encompass a theatrical component -- how could I resist calling it Drama Queens? I hope you'll find both sides of this blog coin worth exploring and reacting to; your own comments are always welcome and valued (well, most of them, at least).

Think of this as your open-all-hours, cyber green room, where there's always a performer or performance to discuss, some news to digest, or maybe just a little good gossip to share.

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