Latest news with #HeartbeatOpera
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Pared-down ‘Vanessa,' in a strip mall, demands a trip to the Berkshires
NORTH ADAMS, MASS. — Deep in the Berkshires, just off the Mohawk Trail, in an abandoned strip mall anchored by an erstwhile Price Chopper, awaits a sleek, smart production of Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' that's worth well more than the tank of gas it may require to get there. Heartbeat Opera's streamlined vision of Barber's resurgent 1958 nail-biter — a bizarre love quadrangle with sharp psychological corners — arrives as the first opera ever presented as part of Williamstown Theatre Festival. And even among the unpredictable mixed bouquet of this 71st season — helmed by a collective led by playwright Jeremy O. Harris ('Slave Play') and featuring plays, dance, experimental musical theater, readings and an ice show at a local hockey rink — the bright white bloom of this 'Vanessa' still stands out. R.B. Schlather, whose recent productions of 'Giulio Cesare' and 'Rodelinda' have inspired a recurring migration of opera lovers upstream to Hudson, New York — directs this adaptation by Heartbeat artistic director Jacob Ashworth. It's an elegant paring of the opera's four acts (more often presented in three) down to an uninterrupted 100-minute sequence — an urgent plunge into darkness that would have delighted Strauss. Schlather made clever use of 'the Annex,' a flexible performance venue swiftly constructed for the festival in a defunct retail space. (Alas, my suggestion of 'the Rent-A-Center for the Performing Arts' came too late.) Set against a long white screen that, these days, all but assures overuse of eye-popping projections, Schlather's vision cannily opts for stark shadow play, looming silhouettes and a hard-edged monochromaticism, compellingly undone by creeping carpets of mist and washes of uneasy daylight. It's a 'Vanessa' that feels like a memory of a dream of the opera, highly concentrated but twice removed, its nuances rendered in high, haunting contrast that lingers when you close your eyes. A treatment this resolutely minimal could easily have veered into absurdist territory — remember those Calvin Klein fragrance ads from the '90s? Instead, Schlather's alchemy of intense focus and dreamlike freedom honors the cyclic spell of Barber's opera with reverence and verve. At the core of this production's compressed force is a lean new arrangement of Barber's score by Dan Schlosberg — doing double-duty in Williamstown as composer and music director for a revival of Tennessee Williams's 'Camino Real.' Barber's score, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize (along with the libretto by partner and collaborator Gian Carlo Menotti), is here meticulously distilled for a seven-piece ensemble of clarinet, trombone, trumpet, piano, harp, cello and violin. Listeners who experienced Gianandrea Noseda lead the National Symphony Orchestra in a concert performance of 'Vanessa' this past January will marvel at Schlosberg's maintenance of Barber's intensity and depth. Meanwhile, the ensemble's nimbleness felt perfectly equipped for the busy weather of the music. Like the production itself, the graceful restraint of the arrangement served only to sharpen its details. Every note felt like a precipice. It also left room for some powerful singing by the ensemble, which Ashworth's adaptation keeps to five singers. Soprano Inna Dukach was an instantly arresting Vanessa — heels in hand, pining erratically for the arrival of her long-delayed lover, Anatol. Tenor Roy Hage, as the son of the same name who shows up instead, imbued his Anatol with humanity enough to make you forget what an opportunistic jerk he is. My favorite singer of the evening was mezzo-soprano Ori Marcu, who effortlessly embodied Vanessa's woebegone niece Erika, the fleeting hopeful flight of her signature aria ('Must the Winter Come So Soon?') a highlight of the evening. Baritone Joshua Jeremiah's compassionate approach to the Doctor opened some show-stealing moments, especially his aria in the second half. And mezzo-soprano Mary Phillips made a memorable Baroness, her silences as weighty as the burnished tones of her voice were light. The balance of Barber's largesse and Ashworth's economy was most beautifully realized in the climactic quintet ('To leave, to break, to find, to keep …') deftly woven by the five singers and entrancingly tangled in thick lines of cello and clarinet. There are worries all around about the future of opera, its viability in a cultural landscape defined by its sudden, seismic shifts. But this 'Vanessa' was, among other things, a master class in resourceful thinking: how to make a lot from a little. How to make something new from something old. And how to give opera a more accessible place in our lives — even if that means a strip mall. 'Vanessa' runs as part of Williamstown Theatre Festival through Aug. 3.
New York Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Best Classical Music of 2025, So Far
'Salome' Those looking for the full, lurid grandeur of Strauss's 'Salome' could find it this spring in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera. But in February, the scrappy company Heartbeat Opera pre-empted the Met with a thrillingly pared-down version, putting the audience just feet from the action and reducing a huge orchestra to two percussionists and an octet of clarinetists who played a total of 28 instruments, including a handful of saxophones. Presented in the intimate surroundings of the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, with the performers exposed between two blocks of seating, the queasy-making story unfolded with raw clarity. ZACHARY WOOLFE Read our review of Heartbeat Opera's 'Salome.' Takacs Quartet Among the glories of the renovated Frick Collection, which reopened in April, is a new space for chamber performance, replacing the museum's much-venerated music room. The roughly 220-seat, curved Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, subterranean but airy, with crackling acoustics, was put through its paces in a burst of six excellent concerts, featuring a variety of ensemble sizes, instruments and repertory, from Tudor to today. Most indelible was the veteran Takacs Quartet, coruscating in works by Beethoven and Janacek. And, in Brahms's Piano Quintet, the group's electric music-making was abetted by Jeremy Denk on a late-19th-century Steinway. WOOLFE Read our overview of concerts at the Frick's new concert hall. Yunchan Lim When Yunchan Lim said, right after winning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2022 with a barnburner Rachmaninoff concerto, that he wanted to play Bach's 'Goldberg' Variations, the reaction was largely amused disbelief. Not every teenage virtuoso turns so quickly to performing Bach's 75-minute labyrinth, which requires preternatural reserve and concentration more than technical fireworks. But in April at Carnegie Hall, Lim, now 21, showed that his true gift is for restrained poetry, as he rose from studious, polite opening minutes to eventually offer a 'Goldbergs' of heightened, nearly Romantic intensity and contrasts. It was an exhilarating journey. WOOLFE Read our review of Lim's 'Goldbergs.' Sondra Radvanovsky What makes a great Tosca? To get a sense, watch the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who returned to the Metropolitan Opera in January with what amounted to a master class. She embodies Puccini's breakneck tragedy at its finest, with a fearlessness that is both musical and dramatic: an openness to vulnerability, even fragility, that can inspire sympathy but, with a formidably strong core, whip into the fury of fight-or-flight desperation. I won't soon forget the penetrating softness of her 'Vissi d'arte' or the chilling sotto voce with which, standing above Scarpia's corpse, she growled, 'And before him all of Rome trembled.' JOSHUA BARONE Read our review of Radvanovsky in 'Tosca.' 'Akhnaten' Philip Glass's 'Akhnaten' has been performed on major opera stages in the past decade with something of a monopoly: the same production, by Phelim McDermott, starring the same countertenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo. But at the Komische Oper in Berlin this spring, the director Barrie Kosky unveiled a refreshingly different vision for the work: pure abstraction and a minimalism that, in climaxes of opulence, mirrors the deceptive richness of Glass's score. The company's chorus, in near-constant movement, was heroic, and John Holliday's sound as Akhnaten was gorgeously expressive and, in an ideal reflection of the role, as human as it was heavenly. BARONE Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Faust' Review: Heartbeat Opera Deals With Gounod's Devil
New York Heartbeat Opera's radical adaptations of classic titles can soar or fall flat, but one constant has always been music director Dan Schlosberg, whose ingenious maverick arrangements—such as February's 'Salome' for eight clarinetists and two percussionists—never fail to stimulate. Until now.
New York Times
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: A Game of Light and Shadow in Gounod's ‘Faust'
The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she's a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov. In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod's 'Faust' for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to 'Manuscripts don't burn,' the most famous line from Bulgakov's novel 'The Master and Margarita.' A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren's note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil's lines: 'What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.' This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren's take on 'Faust,' which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara. Before 'Faust' was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today. The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And 'Faust,' which isn't performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of 'Faust' in his film adaptation of 'The Age of Innocence.') Now, however, it's harder to come by. The Met hasn't even presented it in over a decade. Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I'm convinced she's the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of 'Faust,' particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou). But she doesn't stop there. Light and shadow, in her production, lead naturally to a vocabulary of cinematic Expressionism (in Zhou and Forest Entsminger's scenic design) and puppetry (by Nick Lehane and nimbly performed by Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman). Puppetry, though, gives way to a magic and artifice, an analogue of Mephistophelean manipulation and control that, winking and occasionally slapstick, undercut Holdren's poetry elsewhere. Either of those, light and shadow, magic and artifice, could make for an entire production. Here, they pile onto each other, saturated and impatient, with the added weight of other elements like queerness, feminism and, for just a moment, silent film. Individually, they all feel true to the opera; together, they make a mess of it. Mostly, the result is still the story of Gounod's opera, except the ending: Marguerite, instead of ascending to heaven, is liberated from Faust and Mephistopheles, free to have her baby and live on, idyllically, with Marthe and Siebel (here a female character rather than a trouser role). It's a fitting victory for this production, in which the women are also the strongest performers. As Marthe, the mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet had a characterful presence and a warmly robust sound. Her fellow mezzo AddieRose Brown was an agile, earnest Siebel, while the soprano Rachel Kobernick's Marguerite was equally captivating whether intimate, like singing 'Il était un Roi de Thulé' to herself, or ecstatic, towering over Faust and Mephistopheles in the opera's climax. Ashworth, one of Heartbeat's artistic directors, led a shape-shifting ensemble of eight from his violin (among other instruments). They heroically muscled through two straight hours of an arrangement, with quotes from Gounod's 'Ave Maria' and Mendelssohn's incidental music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' that transformed the opera's orchestra into the kind of enterprising, colorful chamber group you'd hear in the pit for a play or a silent film. At times the players were hammy partners to Mephistopheles, sung by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward with hearty friendliness and a jovial flamboyance. In smaller parts, Brandon Bell was a bumbling Wagner, and Alex DeSocio's Valentin had gorgeous brawn with the occasional hard edge. As Faust, the tenor Orson Van Gay II's tone was elegantly smooth but chewy through his imprecise French. Enunciation was less of a problem in the English-language spoken scenes, but those moments, too, were a challenge for the cast. Few opera singers are persuasive actors, and when 'Faust' was an opéra comique, dialogue was more declamatory and stylized compared with the post-Stanislavsky, realistic delivery that audiences have come to expect. Holdren's 'Faust' had an intriguing dramaturgical tension between casual dialogue and grandly melodic arias, but that requires a level of acting that these singers were never able to reach. And, in a production already teeming with aspiration and ideas, it may have been asking too much.
South China Morning Post
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Why upstart US opera company's stripped-down productions have found an audience
Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance – in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. Advertisement 'We did Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' said Schlosberg, Heartbeat Opera's musical director and one of its founders. Its name came 'from the idea that singers would be feet away from you', Schlosberg said. 'And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm's length and that would make a resonance in your heart.' Today, when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed US$1 million. But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200. Advertisement 'Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,' said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat's artistic director. 'We don't do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.'
