Merola trainees pass with high notes, marks
It felt more like a big musical party, with the women in brilliantly colored gowns and the men in black tie, than a final exam. But as it does every summer, the Merola Grand Finale put its young singers to an evening of demanding tests. For nearly three hours on Saturday, Aug. 18, the participants in this year’s stellar Merola Opera training program came and went from the War Memorial Opera House stage to prove what they had in a skein of arias and ensembles.
Harder in some ways than taking on a full role, when narrative momentum and theatrical trappings provide dramatic context, standing and delivering a big moment from Bellini, Monteverdi or Richard Strauss in evening wear on an empty stage is a feat. Impressive, even as the quality and character of the singing varied, were the poise and presence of these self-possessed artists-inthe making.
That was true right from the start, in a pair of engaging duets, one of them familiar and the other a discovery. An added pleasure for a Grand Finale listener is hearing bits of operas — Leoncavallo’s “Zazà” and Mascagni’s “L’amico Fritz” this year — unlikely to turn up very often in fully staged productions.
Mezzo-soprano Megan Grey stood out in the Mascagni, her voice potent and precise as she and tenor Brian Michael Moore, with his pleasing but slight thin voice, made the lyrical case that “life is love.” Mezzo Simone McIntosh’s tart and sarcastic Béatrice got the best of lively tenor Zhengyi Bai’s Bénédict in the Berlioz appropriation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing’s” stubborn, lovestruck combatants.
The last duet from the first half of the program delivered the single biggest charge of the night. In a ravishing, emotionally harrowing account of “Io vengo a domandar gra-
zia,” the powerfully anguished tenor Christopher Colmenero and impassioned soprano Marlen Nahhas brought that great Act II duet from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” to fully fleshed life. This one scene, in which the title character excavates his fervent, doomed connection to Queen Elisabetta, was enough to open a window on the entire opera.
Quick swerves between styles and centuries are a matter of course at a Merola finale. No sooner had the grinning tenor WooYoung Yoon celebrated the high C’s he’d just hit in “Ah, mes amis!” from Donizetti’s “La fille du régiment” than mezzo Alexandra Urquiola was spilling out her poignant if somewhat occluded garden dream to her psychiatrist in Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti.”
Sometimes, in a kind of instant proof of versatility, a singer will bridge a stylistic and language divide on her own. That happened when soprano Brittany Nickell segued from a lush take on Magda, from Puccini’s “La Rondine,” to tenor Christopher Oglesby’s fluent partner in an extract from Strauss’ “Capriccio.” Credit should be shared here with conductor Dean Williamson, whose able and responsive San Francisco Opera Orchestra tracked these and many other changes along the way.
The program took on a different, quickening pace after intermission, with five solos leading off. Soprano Kendra Berentsen brought a burnished amber tone and dynamic command to an aria from Massenet’s “Thaïs,” the more successful of two selections (the other sung inertly by bass-baritone Ted Allen Pickell) from that opera. Baritone Xiaomeng Zhang was sonorous if unrelentingly emphatic in “Dormo ancora?” from Monteverdi’s “Il ritorno d’Ulisse.” Tenor Addison Marlor revealed a big open tone, as ingratiating as his smile, in a winning selection from Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride.”
In the ensemble highlight of the second half, an incisive Meigui Zhang and the imposing, thunderous baritone Jaeman Yoon gave full weight to a fatherdaughter exchange in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
Director Marcus Shields, a Merola apprentice director, reserved his humorous staging touches for late in the proceedings. Soprano Cheyanne Coss and the physically pliable baritone Jacob Scharfman consulted a cell phone in the midst of their scheming from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale.” Shields briefly turned soprano Patricia Westley into a Papagena wind-up doll before she took on bass baritone Andrew Moore’s slow-to-rise but finally buoyant Papageno in their feisty, endearing love duet from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.”
Fittingly and affectingly, the entire Merola company assembled for a beaming choral farewell from “La Rondine.” Champagne flutes raised, they included the audience in a welldeserved toast to themselves. This night’s test, one of many to come in an opera singer’s career, was through.