Racette and Moody and Beethoven and Strauss!

Music Director Robert Moody and the Portland Symphony Orchestra continued their Beethoven cycle Tuesday evening with a performance of the Eighth Symphony. When young, obsessed with, and studying the symphonies, I found Number 8 his weakest, its spry, lightness holding the least amount of interest for me. As I've grown older, my mind has changed and it has become something altogether different and seen and heard in a new light. The PSO's performance brought forth all of its strengths, humor and sense of fun. In one of the technically most assured performances I've heard from this orchestra the symphony burst with appropriately taut, crisp, life, its syncopated and exaggerated rhythms, crazy key modulations, instant dynamic changes all brought to the fore. Nowhere was this more true than in the fourth movement, with its sense of propulsive energy, the madcap quality of the extended coda and Beethoven seemingly making a joke at how a symphony should end. The applause came fast and furious and the faces of Maestro Moody and his orchestra were unmistakably those of who knew they'd just done something fairly spectacular.

Before the concert Moody explained his arranging four separate pieces from operas of Richard Strauss to constitute a sort of “symphony.” He requested the audience withhold its applause between its “movements” . . . even when guest star, soprano Patricia Racette entered for the final scene from Salome, emphasizing Ms. Racette's desire to "enter the stage already as Salome.” The notion of cobbling together a symphony from four fairly disparate works seemed on one hand, an odd one, yet on the other, an intriguing exercise in charting the development of a composer.

The two opening "movements” exhibited Strauss’ debt, and dedication, to the Wagnerian model. With its shimmering, pianissimo strings, and delicately gauzy winds, the Prelude from Guntram could easily have been mistaken as a preliminary draft for Lohengrin. Similarly, the love music from Feuersnot had elements that bore more than a mere whiff of Parsifal. This is not to dismiss Strauss’ originality, for in this music could also be heard elements of future works including both Salome and Elektra. In Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils, the orchestra was convincing in putting forth Strauss' brand of perfumed Orientalism as well as letting loose with a wonderful display of a sometimes breathless savagery.

Padded with added brass and a small village of percussionists, the PSO reveled in the luxuriousness of those four pieces, producing an ever increasing richness of sound that grew, exponentially, to its climax: the Final Scene from Salome.

Ravishing in a figure hugging gown of dark purple, Ms. Racette entered the stage to complete silence with time seemingly standing still until violently broken by the jagged cello wail and drum thunder that begins opera’s most celebrated scene of deranged beauty. Racette's voice, with its Sills-like brightness is deceptive in its size, her silvery tone shining through the roles most difficult passages with ease. There is an enormous difference between singing with a full Strauss orchestra in the pit versus having the band onstage and at times I feared Moody would get carried away by the opportunity of showing the sheer sound-capacity of such an ensemble, particularly in the score's loudest sections. The soprano did get overpowered, not where one would think, but rather in some of the role's lower passages where she could still be heard, if just barely, as the orchestra roared with thunder. Some brakes, perhaps, should have been applied in such moments. The major climaxes however, held no such problems, with Racette's voice easily soaring, the high notes, bright, focused and secure. Her phrasing, nuance of text and belief in this music made me, now more than ever, wish to experience her in the complete role. She really was that good. (Note: It was recently announced Racette will be bringing the role to LA Opera next season: California, here I come!)

If the singing were all that mattered, a bonus was having Racette's well thought out absorption of the role. While never straying from the small space allotted to her on the crowded stage, Racette's facial expressions, arms and hands brought a full portrait of Strauss and Wilde's twisted teen. As her arms extended, one could see the platter holding the prophet's severed head as she sensuously brought it up to her own before going in for opera's most demented kiss. At Herod's order of her murder, Salome's arms shot up, to protect or protest, but ultimately proved useless as her face realized the final horror. It was lugubriously delicious.

Patricia Racette Storms through Shostakovich's "Lady"

I knew I'd not be able to attend, but wondered why I hadn't heard much on U.S. soil of Patricia Racette's turn as Katerina in Stalin's favorite opera (joking!) Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk." All that changed with a simple google search and reviews and photographs were turning up everywhere calling her performance - and the production, overall, a triumph for English National Opera.

Not all of the reviews were raves - but most were - and there were tons . . . the production (and Ms. Racette) garnering the kind of excitement for an operatic event we all too rarely see or hear of here in the States.

"Patricia Racette charts Katerina’s transformation from bored, resentful chattel to emancipated woman with steely control, and unswerving musical authority;"
Andrew Clements - The Guardian

"...Patricia Racette looked remarkably close to Leskov’s original description of his girl from Kursk, small, dark-eyed and with “a high white forehead, and black, almost blue-black hair”. Her performance tended to be understated, and may not match everyone’s idea of Katerina. . . . yet Racette’s voice and presence grew as the horrors of the plot unfolded"
Fiona Maddox - The Guardian

Patricia Racette’s Katerina holds a glittering concentrate of fury in her dark eyes and her finely tempered voice. a central performance of immaculate control and engagement."
Anna Piccard "The Spectator"

"Patricia Racette, singing with sometimes raw intensity, played this repressed Katerina with impressive authority, her very stillness a window on the emotions locked within."
Richard Fairman - The Financial Times

"Patricia Racette makes us believe in her utterly as she veers between the desperation of being downtrodden in a loveless marriage to the triumph of controlling her own destiny back to the twin despairs of imprisonment and sexual betrayal, making Katerina’s extreme actions seem inevitable to us in the audience."
David Karlin - Bachtrack

"American soprano Patricia Racette ... brings authority and intensity to the title role . . . Thanks to Wigglesworth’s empowered conducting, a superb performance from ENO’s orchestra, and Racette’s consistent strength, the opera hits hard."
George Hall - The Stage

"Patricia Racette smoulders as Katerina, and John Daszak brings a fine heroic tenor to the repulsive lover Sergei . . . Mark Wigglesworth . . . brings a detailed and illuminating reading to the score. Not to be missed."
Clare Colvin - Express

"Heady stuff with great musical punch, led by Patricia Racette’s sympathetic and attractively strong Katerina, and the powerfully hedonistic Sergei of John Daszak. Her restrained movements at the start become more fluid and dramatic as she emerges from her cocoon, and his swagger and natural stage presence personify an opportunist who can’t resist her."
Mark Ronand - Theatre Review


Brava, Pat!

Man on the Moon: An Opera about Buzz & Joan Aldrin

Jonathan Dove has created a joyful, touching and thought provoking drama of such intimacy covering such a broad spectrum of emotion and events tied to the first lunar landing, that it’s difficult to believe all of this could effectively be captured in a work of such brevity. But it works. Nathan Gunn and Patricia Racette should have won some sort of acting awards for their moving portrayals of Buzz and Joan Aldrin. (While each looks distinctively like themselves, their resemblances to their roles are almost uncannily spooky).

This is the fourth work I’ve heard from Mr. Dove, and I feel I know what to expect, yet each time, end up being surprised. Initially, his music often seems like a spin-off of John Adams. Yes, he does use many similar effects (those famous minimalistic repeated brass chords, woodwinds racing up and down scales and arpeggios seemingly faster than humanly possible, etc.,) and yet, such such densely, richly orchestrated writing doesn’t feel necessarily like part of the “minimalism” movement. What truly distinguishes Dove’s operas from almost anyone else writing in this genre is this most important thing: his attention to, and setting of his texts. Each time a character sings, his or her words take on a richer, larger expressivity than had they been uttered by an actor, extending the emotional range to, well, operatic proportions, which is precisely the point. In this regard, Dove has exceeded anything else he’s previously accomplished in this genre.

His writing for both Mr. and Mrs. Aldrin is rather powerful stuff. Buzz’s role runs the gamut from witty pre-flight check-up jitters covered by macho-bravado to the opera’s most poignant and revealing aria where the astronaut – a likeable but slightly vague man, opens his eyes in heart in a moment of extraterrestrial beauty. Nathan Gunn’s tight, flexible baritone is perfect in this music and his voice and Dove’s writing for it sound as though tailor made. Gunn portrays the nonchalant astroscientist with a bravado that covers up myriad insecurities and a manic-quality belying his depression. Gunn also captures the darker side, Aldrin’s almost blinding anger at being demoted to the “2nd” when NASA selects Neil Armstrong to be the First Man on the Moon. But something happens up there and the aria Gunn sings is simple and beautiful.

Being an opera written for television, the visual element cannot go unmentioned. We are given one of those impossibly beautiful shots of the earth as seen from the moon and Dove’s score here captures aurally the breathtaking sight Aldrin must have felt; the sense of awe and wonder as well as the humbling knowledge that he is the first human to have ever seen this before. A daunting task to put down in music and another composer might have done it differently, perhaps better even, but in this context what Dove achieves is no less than remarkable and Gunn infuses the moment with brilliance. Simultaneously, Racette's Joan, years later listening to this recounting of her beloved’s epiphany, understands, but too late. This makes for for some pretty powerful stuff.

Racette’s Joan is a wonder. A nervous, martini swilling, chain smoking wreck she moves from her self-medicating to magazine cover smiling nuclear wife and mom as quickly as she can crack that dazzling smile. She looks a little puffy in those great yet somehow ghastly 1970’s designs and she sounds like a million bucks. Again, Dove writes some exquisite melodies and Racette nails them all, including some powerhouse high notes and, in particular, one ravishing high pianissimo. The music capturing the lunar landing with Armstrong’s heroic belting out of those famous words “The Eagle has landed!” – and what ensues – the brief, moment of triumphant joy is shared between the Control Room scientists in Houston, and Aldrin’s family listening from their living room, with Joan’s voice soaring über alles, is as joyous a bit of operatic writing as has been written in the last 100 years. Joan ends the scene, singing in a state of near ecstasy “I always knew, if they could land, then they could leave, if they could leave, they could fly. If they could fly, they can come back to earth. Buzz will come home!”

As high as that moment is, Dove, the dramatist does something remarkable here, as, on the same breath as her last syllable, Joan repeats the phrase, “Buzz will come home” twice more, lower and her emotion changing from spousal joy into an unknown fear of what his return will bring. It’s a brilliant moment with Racette nailing the hair-trigger change of emotion with dramatic flair.

This opera is truly unique - a genuine hybrid and possibly impossible to stage live as it requires an enormous cast, has 58 scenes clocking in at a mere 48 minutes.

I purchased my copy through premiereopera.com (I am not affiliated with premiere, just a happy customer) and couldn’t be happier with the quality. I am only a little sad (but not surprised) that this remarkably accessible work on a very American subject has never aired on American television. The performances by all, especially Racette and Gunn are truly noteworthy. Anyone with less than an hour to spend and the desire to be moved by something new - really should check this out!