San Francisco Classical Voice

OPERA REVIEW

Stern Grove
Stephanie Blythe
Lawrence Brownlee

San Francisco Opera Orchestra

July 30, 2006

Stephanie Blythe

Lawrence Brownlee

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Opera for All

By Michael Zwiebach

Stepping into the lovely setting of Sigmund Stern Grove in San Francisco, it's easy to see why the Sunday summer concerts there are so popular. It's also easy to see that among these picnickers are members of the young, hip crowd that classical music organizations would give their eyeteeth to lure into subscriptions. Last Sunday, it was the turn of San Francisco Opera to show its wares, and the organization invited mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and young tenor Lawrence Brownlee to sing with the Opera orchestra. It was an inspired idea: The audience of about 7,000 was treated to a flat-out spectacular display of virtuoso singing from the most difficult parts of the repertory. For one day, opera snobs and opera know-nothings were united in admiration.

Blythe, an established star in her absolute vocal prime, has a large voice with a deep contralto extension that allows her to sing Fricka in Wagner's Ring (last year in Seattle, for example) and any of the other heavy dramatic roles in the 19th century repertory. She gave the audience a taste of this ability, singing Ulrica's incantation, Re dell' abisso (King of the abyss, make haste), from Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, which opens the S.F. Opera season in a little more than a month. Fighting the festive mood and the summer's day, she brought commanding vocal authority to the hushed opening, showing a control that only increased as the aria reached its climax in the second section. Blythe gave us a true crescendo to a thunderous high A-flat and G, and at the end she subsided to a low G, all without a sign that either end of her extraordinary range had even been tested.

On the other end of the spectrum, Blythe is deeply involved in the bel canto repertory (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and, these days, Handel). While in Verdi's operas singers take part in a drama, in bel canto operas, they are the drama. The technical demands of this music are legendary, but so are the expressive requirements: Phrasing has to be interesting and varied, as single phrases get repeated quite a bit. You have to be able to improvise on a line, sustain a long aria, and master a panoply of technical devices.

Interestingly, Blythe didn't try to score many easy points with the audience. One selection in the first half was a thoughtful account of Julius Caesar's aria Aure, deh, per pietà from Handel's Giulio Cesare. It is Caesar's lament after escaping from a military disaster. The big repeated line is "al mio dolor" (to my woe), which Blythe delicately underlined by removing some of the resonance and vibrato from her tone. Ideally, you would want to hear this aria in a smaller opera house instead of outdoors in front of microphones. Some smaller details would have emerged. But it says something for the singer's intensity that she commanded attention even in this soft and inward-looking music.

Brownlee makes his debut

Blythe's counterpart, Lawrence Brownlee, a 2006 Richard Tucker award winner, made a stirring debut in San Francisco. He is already well known on the opera circuit as a coming star, and now we know why. His high tenor voice is comfortable in the stratospheric reaches of Rossini's music and is impressively large. He will be at home on big stages like the Met. His technique is beyond reproach and he handles Rossini's long lines sensitively. If he didn't warm the heart, he certainly stunned the senses. He has room to grow, expressively, but don't let that stop you from catching his next performance.

Brownlee provided a selection of fiendishly difficult Rossini, beginning with Languir per una bella from L'Italiana in Algeri, a showpiece that rocked the audience back on its heels. Listening to the penetrating tone of the high notes and the absolute evenness of the runs and ornamentation was enough to establish the singer's credentials. He followed that with a somewhat uninteresting performance of Donizetti's Ah, mes amis!, famous for the nine high Cs in its concluding movement. Brownlee had already made hitting those notes a foregone conclusion, so there wasn't much surprise or exultation when he nailed all of them.

Brownlee's coup was Cessa di pi� resistere, an aria that Rossini cut from Barbiere di Siviglia's final scene. Juan Diego Flórez has recently turned heads singing this long and demanding aria. You felt Brownlee's effort to get through it. Still, he managed it in style, sending the audience into a tizzy. A duet from Tancredi, which closed the concert, showed Blythe and Brownlee to be surprisingly well matched, although her voice is far more powerful.

Congressman Tom Lantos made an appearance and was followed by a moment of silence for the recently deceased patron of young singers, James Schwabacher Jr. Two Adler Fellows were also included on the concert. Soprano Melody Moore sang a heartfelt Dove sono from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and an unfizzy but perfectly acceptable Jewel Song from Gounod's Faust. Bass Jeremy Galyon's traversal of Leporello's "Catalogue" aria (from Mozart's Don Giovanni) was stolid, unfunny, and undercharacterized, but the notes were there. We should expect to hear more than basic vocal prowess from an Adler Fellow.