Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Los Angeles’ own Baroque period practice ensemble, Musica Angelica returned to the concert stage last weekend alongside their much regarded Music Director Martin Haselböck. And though it was the weekend after Valentine’s Day, love was in the air. Or at least a version of it as expressed through matrimony. The program, which I saw in the second of two performances at Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church, centered around two J.S. Bach cantatas widely believed to have been written for weddings: No. 202 “Weichet nur, betrübe Schatten” and No. 210 “O holder Tag, erwünschte Zeit.” Both are filled with charming arias and can be as pensive and dark as they are bright and celebratory, perhaps reflecting a very different context on the role of marriage and romantic love in the 18th century. Bach fills each work with clever structural elements such as in No. 210 where the number of players is slowly reduced throughout the work until arriving at “Schweigt, ihr Flöten, schweigt, ihr Töne” (Be silent, you flutes, be silent you notes). Bach whittles away the musical world to just flute and voice in much the way a wedding recognizes an important relationship of two individuals in the context of a greater society.

The musicians who became the “lovers” in these musical pairings all had great moments on Sunday. Soprano Mary Wilson was the soloist in both works and sang with a clear, bright, and even tone. She's known to local audiences for her prior performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and it was exciting to hear her again in some of the Baroque material that makes up an increasing part of her performance schedule. Her partners in these duets included flautist Stephen Schultz and oboist Gonzalo Ruiz. Ruiz also played in the reconstructed Oboe Concerto in D minor that was included in the program. The dexterity and detail in his performance was thrilling to hear. Bach may have been thinking of many things when he composed, but the need for breath in the oboe player here wasn’t apparently one of them. Ruiz did more than soldier through the rapid-fire ornamentation, and stole much of the afternoon’s thunder away from his fellow musicians. The show started with Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor with soloist Cynthia Roberts. This piece came off a little punchier and rough hewn than one might expect even from a Baroque ensemble, but this edge softened by the conclusion of the piece and left for plenty of wonderful playing that followed.

Labels: Musica Angelica

Musica Angelica may be L.A.’s best-kept secret when it comes to classical music. Which in some sense is too bad considering that our local period practice Baroque ensemble under music director and conductor Martin Haselböck routinely creates some of the finest musical evenings in town. This weekend the ensemble presented their annual operatic offering, a staged version of Mozart’s Zaide. For many Mozart fans, Zaide is the one that got away. A mid-career opera with some very beautiful music, Mozart abandoned the work after completing the first two acts with no overture and no conclusion in order to work on Idomeneo. He never returned to the score, which surfaced again in a large fragment after his death. But the work has lived on due to the beauty of what remains. Zaide is often cobbled together with other Mozart bits and pieces to create a more full fledged production, which was the case in the Musica Angelica performance as well. Haselböck inserted Mozart’s Symphony No. 32 for an overture, which is a typical practice. More unusually, though, Haselböck and director/collaborator Brian Michaels used a vocal quartet, KV479, which Mozart originally wrote as augmentation for another opera by another composer, to complete the Zaide score. Some new dialog was added to create a quick, but logical ending to the Turkish “rescue” opera, which revisits popular themes of its day.

The augmentation worked well for the essentially comic opera. Haselböck and his orchestra sounded lively with good clarity and, as usual, was the show's biggest asset. The four principle roles were taken by a number of satisfying young singers. Valerie Vinzant, a recent graduate of the L.A. Opera Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program, sang Zaide with a bright silvery tone. She’s an attractive and interesting performer who was well matched with Andrew Bidlack in the role of Zaide’s lover, Gomatz. Bidlak was recently one of San Francisco Opera’s Adler Fellows and has been making his way with his pleasing, sizable tenor. He was very enjoyable to listen to. They were joined by Christoph Genz as Allazim and Christian Hilz as Sultan Soliman. All four vocalists did especially well, considering that they were performing on stage with the orchestra and conductor behind them. And even in the second performance of the day on Sunday, they all sounded fresh and highly engaged. Best of all none of them were taking the comic trappings of the opera or the basic staging too seriously. The four performers were arranged side-by-side on stage, initially with each one ensconced at their own desk or chair. The performers moved about using the pieces of furniture to represent other objects such as boats, but there was little rhyme or reason to this as if it were being improvised as they went along. There was a series of puppets as well, each representing one of the four characters, that the cast would manipulate or perform with on occasion. And while I never quite understood the point or significance of this, the staging on the whole was not so intrusive as to derail the comedic spirit of the performance. Hilz's comic introduction to the makeshift final act was especially good-spirited and made for a worthwhile turn through an operatic rarity. There are two more Musica Angelica performances this season, including Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, so check out their site for more details.

Labels: Musica Angelica

(l-r) Céline Ricci, Florian Boesch, Isabel Monar, Martin Haselböck, Marina Rodriguez-Cusi, and Jordi Domènech. Photo: mine 2008

You know those fleeting moments we all have where suddenly we question everything we believe in? Well I have one every time I see a Handel opera. I think to myself – after Handel, why did anyone even bother to attempt writing an opera. He did it all and frankly outside of Massenet, I don’t think anyone ever had anything more to say on the subject after that. Of course, later I come to my senses, but memories of the high still linger long after the drug is gone. As performers enter and exit over the hours for their various turns at the aria mill in an endlessly convoluted plot, time ceases to exist for me in some way.

Needless to say, it is an extra treat when the performance is as good as the one the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra held on Sunday at Schoenberg Hall on the UCLA campus. The work was Handel’s Radamisto (or is that Radamsito as the typo on the cover of the free libretto everyone got that afternoon proclaimed?) and Musica Angelica gave a performance under Martin Haselböck far superior to what one might expect given the comparable scarcity of resources available for this concert performance. The playing was crisp and dynamic – a sheer joy to listen to. The cast was quite good overall. Sure there were no A-list celebrities here, but no horrid slouches either. My favorites were Céline Ricci’s Fraarte, Isabel Monar’s Polissena, and Florian Boesch’s Tiridate. Boesch did pull this brief air guitar stunt toward the end, which I wasn’t 100% sure what to think about, but he exuded the kind of fun-loving menace one might expect from an Armenian King in love with his brother-in-law’s betrothed. The countertenor who sang the part of Radamisto, Spaniard Jordi Domènech, was a bit of a sidler when it came to hitting the notes but he was cute in a cro-magnon way and delivered on more than a couple of his arias despite his shortcomings. But what do you expect from a guy who won’t kill his girlfriend when she begs him to, thereby forcing her instead to throw herself into the river. (Although you know she won’t drown because it’s only Act II, and this is the 18th century).

But, of course, love conquers all and all that good stuff, and it was a great afternoon. So, for all you wimps who gave up in the home stretch around the end of hour two just to return to your "lives" and your "families," eat your heart out - you missed it, at least until Santa Fe Opera mounts a fully staged version of this work this summer with David Daniels in the title role. In the meantime, remember, Baroque opera may leave a body count in the average audience and is not for the faint of heart, but there is nothing else quite like it.

Labels: Music Reviews 07/08, Musica Angelica