Review: RPO delivers brilliant take on Carnegie Hall show
On Thursday, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra gave an impressive account of an infrequently performed American opera with a compelling local connection.
In advance of the RPO's upcoming appearance at Carnegie Hall on May 7 as part of the Spring for Music Festival, the Eastman Theatre audience was offered a "first listen" of the presentation New York City audiences will soon experience.
The first listen was a concert performance of composer Howard Hanson's opera Merry Mount, an intense and rather unnerving look at religious fundamentalism among New England Puritans and one preacher's descent into lust-induced madness.
2014 is, in fact, an ideal year to bring Merry Mount into the spotlight: It is the 80th anniversary of the opera's stage premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. And it has been 90 years since Hanson began his indispensable tenure as director of the Eastman School of Music.
On this particular evening, the music was executed brilliantly by the RPO, with a full and evocative tone that brought Hanson's profound gifts as orchestrator to the fore. With clarity and intensity, guest conductor Michael Christie of the Minnesota Opera demonstrated a fluid conducting pattern and a grand style that was well-suited to the straightforward melodicism in the score.
For its part, the chorus — comprised of both the Eastman-Rochester Chorus and the Bach Children's Chorus of Nazareth College — was in fine collective voice, capturing the pious fervor of the fearsome Puritan community much in the same way that the townspeople in Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes constituted a palpable threat to the lead characters.
The portrayals of the characters of Merry Mount were far less consistent. As the Puritan preacher Wrestling Bradford, baritone Richard Zeller possessed a voice that was warm and pleasant, but it lacked the power and towering menace needed to convey a fiery, self-righteous man who becomes unhinged.
And though Zeller was believable as a man overcome with romantic feelings for Lady Marigold Sandys — one of the pleasure-seeking Cavaliers he seeks to defeat — the eventual brutality to which he yields when unable to reconcile his religious belief to his desires is far less convincing.
As Lady Marigold, Sara Jakubiak had a dynamic and galvanizing presence. The soprano's vibrato was a clarion trill, and she embodied the character with sincerity and dramatic resolve. Jakubiak's heartfelt interpretation was the linchpin of the entire performance, which may have fallen flat otherwise.
Bass Charles Robert Austin was excellent as the Puritan elder Praise-God Tewke, with strong vocal stature and a gravitas that is absolutely necessary for Hanson's music.
By contrast, in portraying the elder's daughter Plentiful Tewke, mezzo-soprano Ashley Hibbard's voice was simply too light for the score, which requires singers less inclined toward Mozart and more predisposed to the heftier vocal literature of Richard Wagner, Britten or even Richard Strauss.
Due to the depictions of American religious life and the susceptibility of the characters to hypocrisy and mob mentality, fans of 20th-century American opera may notice certain plot similarities that Carlisle Floyd's Susannah and Robert Ward's The Crucible share with their predecessor Merry Mount. For its part, Merry Mount is so infrequently performed — and this new performance is intriguing enough — that it certainly merits your attention.
Kushner is a Rochester-based freelance writer and opera librettist.
If you go
What: RPO presents Howard Hanson's opera Merry Mount.
When: 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 12.
Where: Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs St.
Price: $15 to $92; $10 for students.
For tickets: (585) 454-2100 or rpo.org.