Local opera productions blend comedy, tragedy
Behind beautiful music sometimes lurks the shadow of violence.
Something horrible awaits the audience in the final scene of many operas. And at least one composer, the Renaissance’s Carlo Gesualdo, was a murderer.
Two concerts this weekend touch upon this aspect of music. And while they may cause an occasional shudder, they should ultimately leave audiences uplifted.
The New Jersey Festival Orchestra and Opera at Florham will offer a semi-staged performance of Pietro Mascagni’s tragic one-act opera “Cavalleria rusticana,” leavened by A. Louis Scarmolin’s comic “The Interrupted Serenade” on Sunday at the Ridge Performing Arts Center.
The Harmonium Choral Society will indeed sing one piece of music by Gesualdo at its “Dark Night of the Soul” concert Saturday and Sunday at the Morristown United Methodist Church. But it will also sing music that sweeps away the clouds in one of its typically varied and exhilarating programs.
“Who wouldn’t want to perform ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ firstly, and then secondly who wouldn’t want to listen to it?” said David Wroe, music director of both the New Jersey Festival Orchestra and Opera at Florham. “It’s the iconic verismo opera, isn’t it, which set off a whole new genre of kitchen-sink drama style operas.”
Written for an opera competition in 1890, Mascagni’s opera is about a Sicilian love triangle and ends with a fatal knife fight.
Tenor Raul Melo will sing the role of Turiddu and Kristin Sampson will sing Santuzza, left pregnant and abandoned by Turiddu. Joshua Jerimiah will be the cuckolded Alfio, whose wife, Lola, is Turiddu’s latest lover.
The opera contains top-drawer arias for Turiddu, Santuzza and Alfio, a dramatically charged duet for Turiddu and Santuzza on the steps of the church on Easter Sunday, and a glorious Easter hymn for chorus.
The little known “Interrupted Serenade” from 1950 also involves jealousy, but applies a much lighter touch to the age-old passion. Scarmolin, its composer, was a New Jersey resident of Italian extraction, according to Wroe. He spent 30 years teaching in the New Jersey school system.
“It’s a charming Edwardian little tryst which takes place mostly in the house of a man and wife,” Wroe said. “The man completely loves his wife very dearly but is overbearing in both his love and his protection and his feelings towards his wife. The wife, Clara, and Clara’s brother want to make a point of this and play a little trick on him whereby the brother pretends to be the wife’s lover.”
Leading the cast of both operas is Melo, a tenor who has sung major roles at the Met such as the Duke in “Rigoletto” and Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly.”
“This is a magnificent singer,” Wroe said. “Raul is an experienced tour-de-force in the music world. I’ve worked with him at Lincoln Center, with other companies I’ve worked with. But it will be his debut with the Festival Orchestra and Opera at Florham and we’re lucky to have him.”
Soprano Sampson is also new to both companies but Wroe is high on her talent.
“Kristen Sampson, who is Santuzza, is another wonderful singer, fast making her name in the business,” Wroe said.
This concert will not be singers standing in front of music stands. Although there will not be scenery, the performers will be in costume and will move about the stage. Maria Todaro, a singer with past connections to both Opera at Florham and the Festival Orchestra, has been tabbed by Wroe as stage director.
“She will be making her directing debut with the festival orchestra with these two works,” Wroe said. “She is a wonderful actress who has taken both leading roles and also character roles … And she’s a wonderful teacher as well.”
No costumes, no scenery, no knife fights will happen at Harmonium’s concert this weekend. Yet it will run a wide gamut of emotions.
The concert takes its name, “Dark Night of the Soul,” from a lovely work by Ola Gjeilo, born in 1978. The words come from a poem by 16th-century Spanish poet and mystic Saint John of the Cross and it describes the journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God.
“It’s very unusual,” said Anne Matlack, music director of Harmonium. “He uses piano as the driving force and then he uses the chorus as the color.”
Also unusual is the career of Carlo Gesualdo, the third Prince of Venosa, who killed his wife and her lover in 1590, murders that were particularly lurid even for that violent time. Matlack said that Gesualdo’s music, fairly mundane before the crime, became increasingly strange yet compelling afterwards.
“He wrote crazy music that sounds like somebody wrote it in 1999,” Matlack said. “It’s very chromatic and jumping all over the place in terms of what the voices do.”
The concert will also include several living, non-murderous composers. Trevor Weston (“Ashes”), Andrea Clearfield (“Farlorn Alemen”) and Kenneth Lampl (“Jerusalem: A Meditation for Peace”) have all attended rehearsals and provided their input for the chorus. The Lampl piece will open the concert and be sung in Harmonium’s surround sound in which the chorus is placed all around the audience.
HARMONIUM CHORAL SOCIETY
WHAT: “Dark Night of the Soul”
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, March 7 and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 8
WHERE: Morristown United Methodist Church, 50 S. Park Place, Morristown
TICKETS: $25; $20 for seniors and students
INFO: 973-538-6969; harmonium.org
NEW JERSEY FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA
WHAT: “Love Triangles – Comic and Deadly”
WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday, March 8
WHERE: Ridge Performing Arts Center, 268 S. Finley Ave., Basking Ridge
TICKETS: $75, $58, $46, $26; $13 for students
INFO: 973-408-3978; njfestivalorchestra.org