Opera festival puts spotlight on Jane Eaglen, rising singers
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Festival Opera has a new asset this year in the presence of soprano Jane Eaglen as artistic director of its Mastersingers Project for Young Dramatic Voices. One of the major Wagnerian singers of our time, the English-born singer was the prime protagonist of Wagner’s Bruennhilde and Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera from 1996-2004. At 58, she is pursuing a second career as a teacher, currently on the faculty of New England Conservatory in Boston.
Saturday evening, this smaller of the city’s opera companies presented Ms. Eaglen in the intimate setting of Shadyside’s First Unitarian Church. Billed in advance as “A Wagnerian Idyll, Jane Eaglen Recital,” it was not quite that. With the excellent Yang Lin at the piano, the celebrated diva showcased members of her training program.
Ms. Eaglen sang only two brief pieces. Standing in the aisle at the front row, she opened the event with Sieglinde’s “Du bist der Lenz” (from “Die Walkure”) and concluded it with the last of Wagner’s Five Songs on poems by Mathilde Wesendonck. She remains an imposing presence — her voice still bright and powerful, her attention to expressive nuance appealing and direct.
For the remainder, Ms. Eaglen took a seat in a first row pew with a music stand in front of her, conducting ensemble segments with a small baton. Wagner’s orchestral accompaniments challenge pianistic skills, but Mr. Lin played with unfailing accuracy and attention to color and detail that went far to compensate for lack of an orchestra in the big scenes. In the final segment, which placed a different singer in each of the five Wesendonck Songs (composed for piano), the pianist came into his own — bringing out piquantly passages that the composer expanded in the opera “Tristan and Isolde.”
The present project, underwritten by board president Eugene Myers, is doubly appropriate. Big voices, especially with young singers, are often misunderstood because they take longer to develop, often have rough spots in the developing years, and must not be pushed too quickly into heavy repertory. Festival Opera has two ongoing projects that demand dramatic voices: the revival of its mini-Ring cycle, in four annual installments beginning with Wagner’s “Rhinegold” on July 13, 15 and 21; and the continuation of its Richard Strauss series, offering the Pennsylvania premiere of “Arabella,” July 20 and 22. Because the company performs its operas with reduced orchestrations in the Winchester Thurston school’s modestly sized and very amenable Falk Auditorium, the combination of Ms. Eaglen’s expert preparation with the comfortable performing venue is close to ideal for giving these young singers a chance to test the waters.
The participants were mostly women — eight sopranos and mezzos to two baritones — no tenor, no bass this year. They varied in accomplishment and development, the most highpowered, polished and ready-for-prime-time performances appearing in two extended duet scenes: the Ortrud-Telramund confrontation from Act 2 of “Lohengrin,” and the Isolde-Brangaene dialogue that begins Act 2 of “Tristan.”
Most impressive among the evening’s young artists was baritone Joel Balzun, an already mature artist with a voluminous sound that he had always under control, capable of scaling down and coloring the words for the meaning and emotive purposes. In “Lohengrin,” where the evil Ortrud persuades her husband to sabotage the upcoming marriage of the opera’s hero and heroine, mezzo-soprano Danielle Wright personified Ortrud’s villainy with pointed projected tones, interacting with Mr. Balzun’s Telramund to convey the insinuating treachery.
In the scene from “Tristan,” Elisabeth Rosenberg poured out Isolde’s passionate lines of expectation (for Tristan’s arrival) with opulence and ease, Kaswanna Kanyinda’s lavish deep mezzo tones providing a convincing foil as the agitated servant Brangaene.
The evening’s most subtle phrasing and coloration of the words came from soprano Mia Skolnick, first in Elsa’s Dream (from “Lohengrin”), where her bright sound suggested simultaneously innocence and strength, later in an exquisitely phrased rendition of the song “Im Treibhaus.” Lauren Fiedler’s glowing vocal timbre and glamorous stage persona were gratifying, although her voice is more lyric than dramatic, and she pressed her sound harshly in Eva’s ebullient solo scene from “Die Meistersinger.” She was more at ease with the first Wesendonck song, “Der Engel.”
Baritone David Lee, too, has a voice more lyric than dramatic, but he delivered Wagner’s mellifluous “Song to the Evening Star” (from “Tannhaeuser”) appealingly. Brooke Dirks gave listeners the opportunity to hear a Wagner rarity: a song from Goethe’s “Faust” on the same text as Schubert’s famous setting known as “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” Less polished but nonetheless promising were renditions of Brangaene’s “Warning” by mezzo Chantelle Grant, and of the song “Stehe still” by soprano Jessine Johnson.