Tuesday night was the only full concert conducting appearance at this year’s festival by Oregon Bach Festival Artistic director designate Matthew Halls. It was a doozy. Entitled “A Night at the Opera”, it was a nearly seamless exploration of operatic masterpieces by the three birthday boys of the opera this year: Wagner, Verdi and Britten. With evocative images projected on the rear wall of the stage, the OBF orchestra and a stellar array of vocal soloists presented a succession of operatic gems to the assembled gala crowd.
I love playing opera. It’s something that I rarely get to do as a symphonic musician (except for the occasional concert version of a few arias or an overture here and there), and it definitely flexes different musical muscles. For example, tempos are much more fluid than in much of the symphonic repertoire. Rubato is the rule, rather than the exception. You have to think on your feet, and it is a lot like I would imagine being in a large school of fish would be like, responding to the hitches and twitches of those in your section and the rest of the orchestra, adapting to the nuances of the vocal lines.
Soprano Tamara Wilson is perhaps the most spotlighted of the festival’s vocal soloists this year, and with good reason: she’s spectacular. She had three major arias on the concert – Pace, pace mio Dio from Verdi’s La traviata, Ernani, Ernani involami, from Verdi’s Ernani, and the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. She has a nearly ideal (to my ear) voice for Italian opera, and floated the high notes and cadenzas of the Verdi with effortless beauty. In the Wagner, which she acknowledged won’t be the source of any complete roles for her due to their demands and the nature of her voice, she displayed ample power and emotional involvement in one of the most ravishingly beautiful climaxes to an opera ever written. I cannot wait to hear her career and voice develop over the next few years – she is an impressive and exceptional artist!
For the instrumental numbers, Wagner’s sublime and low-key Siegfried Idyll closed out the first half, while the concert was opened by Verdi’s La forza del destino overture, with the Prelude to Act I of La traviata filling in between two vocal selections. The second half began with the Prelude to Tristan, leading into the Liebestod. Then came my favorite part of the evening, a selection of orchestral interludes and arias from Britten’s Peter Grimes. One of the most heart-rendingly beautiful arias was the soliloquy ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ sung with great emotion and extraordinary tone by tenor Nicholas Phan. Hearing Phan in this aria, I have complete sympathy with the critic who described him as one of Peter Pears’ ‘natural heirs’. I have such a connection to the music of Britten, ever since I was a student at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh, and walked the shingle beach where Peter Grimes was set (and was recently given an outdoor complete performance by the Aldeburgh Festival). The combination of this aria and the backdrop of an immense carpet of stars was stunning. The opera’s Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia (with amazing solos by principal violist Tom Turner) were played, each between the arias, and gave a sense of the overall arc of the opera. It is incredible music, so satisfying to play, and it wasgreat for the Bach Festival audience to get exposed to it – with the advent of Hall’s tenure at the helm of the festival, doubtless we’ll be seeing a lot more of the great British music from Purcell onward, and that is a very good thing. The other vocal selections from Grimes were the ensemble pieces “From the Gutter” and “Embroidery”. All beautifully sung, and featuring the darkly glittering orchestrations that characterize Britten’s writing in this great masterpiece of 20th century opera. Such an interesting and beautifully realized concert conception. It bodes well for the future of the festival.
One reply on “obf – a night at the opera”
We were there. It was sublime. Thanks for your insights.