EGN NEWS DESK
It was that rarest of sights once I walked into the Cleveland Orchestra’s corridor on Sunday afternoon: a darkish curtain drawn throughout the stage.
Rare, that’s, in a live performance corridor. Orchestras don’t are likely to have dramatic unveilings earlier than they begin to play. And whereas Cleveland has carried out near-annual opera displays over the previous twenty years, the ensemble has virtually at all times been onstage alongside the singers, because the stagings have labored round (and generally integrated) the presence of dozens of gamers.
But for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which ended a sold-out four-performance run at Severance Music Center on Sunday, the orchestra was lowered into an honest-to-goodness pit, and the curtain was closed in the beginning, simply as it might have been in an opera home.
It was a reminder that opera — costly to placed on and to not everybody’s style, although with a passionate fan base — has been ever tougher to search out in American cities. And a reminder that orchestras can — and will! — summon the assets to fill even a little bit of that hole.
As the Cleveland Orchestra’s president and chief govt, André Gremillet, mentioned in an interview, “This metropolis doesn’t in any other case have world-class opera.” Cleveland Opera, an organization that did current world-class choices for a number of a long time, pale away about 15 years in the past, and a few corporations left in its wake supply only a smattering of smaller-scale performances.
And but there’s a starvation for the artwork kind, and a possibility for orchestras across the nation to develop their audiences. “There are people who find themselves not right here each week,” Gremillet mentioned, “who will come to the opera — and greater than as soon as.”
It helps that Cleveland has, in its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, a deeply skilled opera conductor who for a time shared his obligations right here with a management place on the Vienna State Opera.
Cast with contemporary, youthful voices and performed with poised transparency by one of many world’s nice orchestras, “The Magic Flute” was the twentieth opera presentation of Welser-Möst’s Cleveland profession, which is able to finish in 2027 after a quarter-century — astonishing longevity in right now’s music world.
Seating-in-the-round halls like Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and David Geffen Hall in New York lend themselves to experimental stagings just like the high-tech model of Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” in Los Angeles in 2019, however don’t enable for conventional components like, properly, a curtain. Severance, with its silvery Art Deco touches, is a extra old-school theatrical area, and Nikolaus Habjan’s “Flute” staging echoed that conventional high quality, if little of the corridor’s magical environment.
Tricked out with a couple of cute puppets, Habjan’s work was easy and plain, even a tad bland, and maybe overly reliant on that curtain, which opened and closed continuously and was enthusiastically integrated into the motion. The manufacturing was much less enchanting than Yuval Sharon’s Cleveland staging of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen,” with singers’ heads coming out of a wall of animation, or his spare, ominous “Pelléas et Mélisande.”
Denise Heschl’s “Flute” costumes supplied variants on formal put on; Heike Vollmer’s set relied closely on a scaffold-style platform that has grown acquainted to Cleveland audiences from current semi-staged opera performances, kitted out this time with some bars of white gentle. Only Paul Grilj’s lighting actually added to the piece, often filling the corridor with a haunting pale grayness.
But definitely nothing within the manufacturing distracted from the excellent musical efficiency. Among the perfect causes to do opera in live performance halls is that they are typically extra intimate (at the very least comparatively) than American opera homes.
With 2,000 seats, Severance is about half the scale of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and much smaller than the opposite massive legacy opera theaters in Chicago and San Francisco. (Texas’s two main homes, in Houston and Dallas, buck that state’s status for grandiosity and are fortunately nearer in scale to Severance.)
This allowed the “Flute” performances to have unaffected readability and restraint, with out pushing. Julian Prégardien was a plangent Tamino and Christina Landshamer a sweet-voiced Pamina. Kathryn Lewek, one of many world’s reigning Queens of the Night, managed each super-high precision and appreciable heat. Ludwig Mittelhammer was a Papageno whose clowning by no means tipped into overdone mugging; Tareq Nazmi, a easily resonant Sarastro; and Dashon Burton, a rich-toned Speaker.
And whereas not a typical virtuosic orchestral showpiece, “The Magic Flute” shows Cleveland’s wondrous cohesion and magnificence. This ensemble’s glory is within the self-effacing particulars: the light piquancy of the strings plucking because the Three Boys had been launched; the mellowness of the horn and bassoon combining as Tamino and Pamina launched into their trials.
Welser-Möst’s music-making tends brisk, however on this case it felt much less quick than easily flowing, and never with out weight or fullness. There was ethereal lucidity within the choral singing, too, which, beneath Lisa Wong’s course, had nuance and a readability of diction that matched the soloists’.
Cleveland’s operas haven’t hewed to the usual repertory, wandering as far towards rarities as Strauss’s “Daphne.” This has led to stark variations by way of viewers attracts: Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” was decidedly not bought out final 12 months, whereas “The Magic Flute” introduced full homes (and loads of households). Early in June, the Philadelphia Orchestra is performing “La Bohème,” utilizing a beloved title not simply to draw new audiences but additionally merely to usher in the crowds which have taken a very long time to return to concert events because the pandemic.
Welser-Möst and Cleveland are taking a distinct tack, doubling down on extra recondite works. Next season will carry a live performance model of Janacek’s “Jenufa,” and the orchestra mentioned on Monday that 2025-26 will embrace Beethoven’s “Fidelio” in live performance, and that Welser-Möst’s last season the next 12 months will culminate in a staging of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”
All that is, in fact, not low cost. Gremillet estimated {that a} staged manufacturing prices about twice as a lot as presenting the identical opera in live performance, which is itself far costlier than a traditional symphonic weekend.
But doing it may well deepen the taking part in of even a terrific ensemble. “This orchestra has at all times been nice,” Welser-Möst mentioned in an interview. “But what I wished from them once I began was extra flexibility, and a extra singing sound. And after we did ‘Rusalka,’ Dvorak’s Ninth was a distinct piece for them. After ‘Rosenkavalier,’ ‘Till Eulenspiegel’ was a distinct piece for them.”
As the orchestra searches for Welser-Möst’s successor, Gremillet gave a touch that he’d desire a music director who can preserve these common displays as a pillar of the Cleveland season. “There’s one thing about expertise conducting opera,” he mentioned, “that to me indicators a whole conductor.”
And there’s one thing about presenting opera that indicators, to me, a whole orchestra.
