Saturday, August 16, 2014

Inadvertent Theseus: Ariadne @ Glimmerglass, part 2

Christine Goerke, who was a Glimmerglass Young Artist once upon a time, and who is also wicked funny, by now has the Diva moves down. (It probably helped that the audience gave her big hand just for showing up on stage.) But she also managed the nuance of an artist going from not expecting much to finding herself drawn in to the Composer’s art. (The Prima Donna seems a little stunned at the huge applause she gets for Es gibt ein Reich, and looks over at the Composer with a combination of surprise, admiration, and gratitude.) At this point, coming off a tremendous success in Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Met, Goerke has a voice that can more than fill Glimmerglass’s 800 seat Alice Busch Theater. It was fairly clear that she was reining in the volume at times, but we like an Ariadne with power to spare.


Seriously, if she sang it like the performance before, no problem there.

Rachele Gilmore has pretty quickly become one of the go-to sopranos for the role of Zerbinetta, and with good reason. She had one of those insane Halo jump short-notice Met debuts subbing in the role of Olympia for Kathleen Kim. So it was no surprise she tossed off Zerbinetta’s coloratura without a hitch. Zerbinetta being something of a Strauss/Hofmannsthal combo of Despina and Don Giovanni, she works her way through the guys’ applications, has a brief thing with Harlequin, but it’s the Composer who turns her head. As the opera progresses, you can see her thinking maaaaaybe she’s done with the old gods.


Catherine Martin has a lush, muscular voice, and she captured the Composer’s comic lows and poignant highs in a way that makes me hope we won’t have long to wait for her Octavian.


Likewise the three nymphs, Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, seem to be a gateway to bigger things, although most of what they do in this opera is sing cosmic harmonies. Jeni Houser, Beth Lytwynec, and Jacqueline Echols were nicely aethereal together, and we’ll look forward to hearing them again individually (in Echols’s case, next year as Pamina).


On the mundane side, what the four clowns – Carlton Ford’s Harlequin, Brian Yeakley’s Brighella, Gerard Michael D’Emilio’s Truffaldino, and Andrew Penning’s Scaramuccio -- may lack in otherworldliness they made up for with Eric Sean Fogel’s fairly intricate choreography.


Strauss’s evident hatred of tenors notwithstanding, Corey Bix, oar in hand, made it across the high seas of Bacchus intact. No mean feat.


Actor Wynn Harmon was appropriately officious and dismissive as the Major Domo (“I leave it to you to work out the specifics” is probably his mantra) and Matthew Scollin’s Farmhand looked as perplexed by it all as my Montgomery County farm-owning boss when I try to explain to him that I’m blowing off work for an opera out beyond where even he lives.

2 comments:

  1. mooore like! (they should really install *like* button for blogspot, -td)

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    1. Making comments work with iPads would also be nice. And more font options.

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