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OPERA REVIEW
A 17th Century Mythological Play Springs
April 27, 2001
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By Michael Zwiebach
Acknowledging that Baroque opera is no longer a stranger to the world's stages, the San Francisco Opera Center chose to present Francesco Cavalli and Giovanni Faustini's 1651 masterpiece, La Calisto, for their 2001 Showcase of Adler Fellows. I can happily report that, on the evidence of Friday night's performance at the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason, under the sensitive musical direction of Gary Thor Wedow, the young singers have learned their lessons well. On the dramatic side, the show is flawed, but it is still well on the credit side of the Opera Center's ledger.
In the opera, taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Jupiter and Mercury descend from Olympus to survey the damage in the wake of Phaethon's fall in the chariot of the sun, which has caused Earth to be scorched dry. The king of the gods takes a fancy to a follower of Diana, the nymph Calisto. When she rejects him, he transforms himself into the shape of Diana and makes love to her. Juno soon discovers the cheat and, in a rage, metamorphoses Calisto into a bear. Jupiter, in response, raises the nymph to divinity in the form of a constellation of stars, the Great Bear. Meanwhile, Diana furtively loves the shepherd Endymion while rejecting the pleas of the lovesick satyr-god Pan.
While the opera deals in mythological metamorphoses, the musical means used to tell the tale are far from larger than life. The vocal lines are extraordinarily flexible and have a natural conversational flow. Even when a character falls into a moment of lyric introspection, the movement, inflections, and stresses of spoken language are never far in the background. So, for example, when Diana's meeting with Endymion is interrupted by her inflexible follower, Lymphea, she first vents her frustration in quick recitative and then, turning inward, reflects — in four short lines — on the rigorous demands of her chastity.
The challenge for the singer is to make the musical change proceed from the movement of Diana's thought. Since performance indications are few in Cavalli's score (instrumentation is not given most of the time), singers need to be varied in their choices of vocal timbres and in their sense of rhythm and tempo while at the same time preserving the musical line. All of the singers on Friday night made conscientious efforts in this direction, mostly with success. Suzanne Ramo brought her bright, lyric soprano to the role of Calisto and invested it with much more varied color than she has shown in other local performances. She mixed vibrato and straight tone effectively, and her sorrowful address to the parched Earth at the opening of the opera was subtly sung and affecting. As an actor, she too often indicates with facial expressions rather than being in the moment and listening to the other singer. Her rejection of Jove's advances would be stronger if motivated from genuine anger at his suggestions. In a way, Katia Escalera, in the role of Diana, was the evening's star, because she also played Jove in disguise. She sang brilliantly and was equally believable in farcical scenes and moments of serious emotion. Her farewell to Endymion drew me in, her tone becoming steadily softer and lighter, progressing inward to a final, delicious upward-resolving appoggiatura (appropriately, on the word "moro"). Escalera is an imaginative singer and a vivid and natural presence on stage.
Kwang Shik Pang, as Jove, displayed a weighty voice that easily commanded the little Cowell Theater, and he had a good sense for the rhythm of the verse in his dialogues with Mercury. As Mercury, Kyu Won Han also was in fine voice, but he sang a little woodenly and relied too much on stock gestures — a fault that must be laid partly at the door of the director, Richard Harrell. Twyla Robinson's lyric gifts were put to the test as Juno. Her strong voice occasionally blurred notes in rapid passages, but she compensated with excellent diction (a compliment that must be paid to the entire cast). In her big solo, after having punished Calisto, she made quite a convincing transition from anger to pain and unfulfilled desire. Elena Bocharova's Endymion contributed several finely spun bursts of melody to the evening. Philip Horst went a little over the top in portraying Pan. Granted, he is a satyr, but he has to share the stage with others. His companions (an athletic Kathryn Chambers as Satirino and Matthew Trevino as Sylvano) managed this better. Brian Anderson's campy Lymphea was well sung, and he has a bright tenor sound. But again, Harrell gave him only stock comic business in place of specifics. As the goddesses of the prologue, Lisa van der Ploeg, Saundra DeAthos, and Twyla Robinson (again) made excellent impressions.
Gary Thor Wedow deserves tremendous credit both for his work with the singers and, in collaboration with Lawrence Lipnik, for his fine realization of the score, which includes an absorbing (intentionally anachronistic) array of percussion and some additional choral participation in places such as Calisto's echo aria. The orchestra played with zest and attention to the singers. Harrell's direction was functional but less than inspired. The designs by John Coyne and Robert Hill were attractive, but I occasionally wished that Hill had allowed more light on the stage. (Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph.D. in musicology from UC Berkeley, specializing in opera, and a lecturer for the San Francisco Opera. ) ©2001 Michael Zwiebach, all rights reserved |
