Opera Saratoga announces robust summer season
Opera Saratoga will present Donizetti’s opera buffa “Don Pasquale” and the Broadway musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” plus the premiere of a new children’s opera with music by Clarice Assad in a 10-day festival season starting June 30 at Universal Preservation Hall. The slate of summer events, along with a winter/spring recital series at Caffe Lena, was announced at an event on Thursday at UPH.
The company has selected its roster of 21 young artists and also named two guest artists, both bass baritones and alums of the training program. Andy Papas will play the title character in “Don Pasquale” and Eric McConnell will appear as the D’Ysquith Family, a unique eight-character role in “A Gentleman’s Guide,” a madcap murder mystery (with lots of costumes changes) that won four Tony Awards in 2014, including best musical.
Both the opera and the musical will be fully staged and performed with orchestra. Because contracts are yet to be signed, the names of conductors and stage directors weren’t part of the announcement.
The new children’s opera “The Selfish Giant” is based on an Oscar Wilde story as adapted by librettist Lila Palmer. The 45minute long show for five singers and piano was developed by the American Lyric Theater and will receive free matinee performances on July 1 and 8. The property has already been distributed for classroom use via a streaming version. During the month of May the company will visit local schools for live performances. Inquiries for bookings are welcome.
America Sings, the vocal series at Caffe Lena, features BIPOC artists in programs of American song. This year the performers are mezzo Cierra Byrd on Feb. 19, soprano Helena Colindres on March 12, tenor Wooyoung Yoon on April 23, and baritone Carl DuPont on June 18. Also coming up is the annual showcase of young artists “Stars of Tomorrow” on June 2 at the Spa Little Theater.
The season was curated and organized by managing director Amanda Robie and head of music staff Laurie Rogers. The troupe has been functioning without an artistic director since Laurence Edelman left the position last summer after a widely praised tenure that began in 2014. Development director Katrina Fasulo said that the search for a new artistic director is ongoing.
Subscriptions for the festival go on sale Jan. 17 and individual tickets will be available in midFebruary. Seats are priced $25$100. For the full schedule and tickets go to: operasaratoga.org.
Innovations at the Met
Meanwhile at the Metropolitan Opera, recovery from the pandemic continues. Besides also dealing with a recent sabotage of its computer systems, which were down for a week, the company has been facing poor attendance and reluctant donors. One surprising remedy to this situation is a greater emphasis on contemporary opera.
Two recent world premieres at the Met — Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’ “The Hours” – played to sold-out houses. That’s compared to sales of around 70 percent of capacity for standard rep (the Met has 3,800 seats). General manager Peter Gelb is going with what works and committing to launching every season with a new production of a contemporary work and including a lot more recent material in the normal course of things. Recent seasons usually had one or two contemporary pieces, but next year it’s going to be six – four new productions plus revivals of the Blanchard and Puts.
One way to look at this is that the Met is playing catch-up. Regional companies have been
producing new operas at a significant pace since at least the turn of the millennium, finding them effective at creating buzz and addressing timely social issues. Yet whether they actually generate more sales is questionable and world premieres are expensive and complicated. Actually as the smaller companies face their own financial recoveries, their current ventures into contemporary opera seem to be fewer. Looking at three prominent summer troupes, Glimmerglass Festival, Santa Fe Opera, and Opera Theater St. Louis, each company has a strong recent history of contemporary work but is now avoiding that terrain entirely, at least for this year.
Maybe the changes at the Met don’t actually represent a national trend and instead are a simple catering to the taste of an audience comprised largely of the cultured elites of the big city. Think of it like Broadway, where there’s always a supply of classics for the tourists and traditionalists, alongside a steady stream of thoughtful and edgy newer stuff.
Here’s the list of the other contemporary works coming up next season at the Met: Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” Anthony Davis’ “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” Daniel
Catan’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” and John Adams’ “El Nino.”
Additions to the winter season
The always interesting Musicians of Ma’alawyck has announced three new programs for the coming months, some in unexpected venues and two involving dance. On Saturday Jan. 28, it’s an all-Romanian program with works by Enesco, Ligeti, Ivanovici and others. The chamber group will be joined by Bucovina, a professional folk dance duo performing in traditional attire. The location is Dance Fire Studio and Fitness in Niskayuna.
The Schnee Ball (Snow Ball) returns on Saturday, Feb. 18. In lavish Viennese tradition, patrons will be served a multicourse meal and dance waltzes, galops and polkas to the strains of an orchestra. Apparently it’s tradition that the concert portion of a ball is called the intermission and it will be quite an intermission with an expanded complement of musicians performing instrumental and operatic selections. At some point the young piano virtuoso and high school senior Michael Lowry will make an appearance in the persona of Franz Liszt. The venue is the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs.
“Celestial Melodies” is next on Saturday, March 11, with music by William Herschel and his contemporaries. Herschel was an astronomer and composer whose life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries. Also, Max Kaplan will premiere a new piece based on current NASA research. All of this will be accompanied by a planetarium show of how the stars looked during Herschel’s era. The venue is miSci, Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady. An encore presentation (without the stars) will take place on Sunday, March 12, at the Schuyler Mansion in Schenectady. Get all the details at musiciansofmaalwyck. Orchestra and quartet return
The Czech National Symphony Orchestra is returning to the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on Saturday, Feb. 18, with an inviting program of the Brahms Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. Music director Steven Mercurio will be on the podium and the guest soloist is Robert McDuffie. The orchestra last appeared in Troy in February 2019 with an all-Bernstein concert that was presented by the Troy Chromatics. This time it’s the Music Hall that’s making the event happen.
The Kronos Quartet has been making string quartet music cool for more than 40 years, but the group has probably not been to the Capital Region in at least a decade. On Sunday evening, Jan. 28, at Universal Preservation Hall, Kronos will be back to present a program of seven works that were written or arranged for them, including music of Bob Dylan and Billie Holiday plus Terry Riley’s classic “Cadenza on the Night Plain.”