As the love-struck villager Levko, tenor Michael Hendrick mixed a malleable blend of steel and velvet.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night (1880), based on a story from the same Nikolai Gogol collection that gave rise to Mussorgsky’s unfinished Fair at Sorochintsy, presents extraordinary difficulties for a regional company. Not only is it a balletopera, but it requires an understanding of Ukrainian folkloric traditions and types. Happily, it was evident from the start that director Darko Tresnjak had weighed the problems and arrived at a clear visualization. Gordon’s sets – stylized this time, rather than realistic — captured the work’s spirit, deploying houses that could be opened or closed like storybooks and pushed about the stage, a pseudo-pond in the middle background, a puppet show (devised by Tresnjak) miming the action of a local legend told by one of the characters. When a group of rusalki (water spirits) emerged in the last act, they both sang and danced, keeping their graceful undulations on a scale compatible with the stage. (No choreographer was listed, so one assumes the director staged this too.)
For Sarasota’s first performance (March 13), apparently the U.S. premiere, Valery Ryvkin paced the score with wit, verve and colloquial nuance. As the love-struck villager Levko, tenor Michael Hendrick mixed a malleable blend of steel and velvet. Others achieved amusingly quirky vignettes – Stephen Eisenhard as Kalenik, the local drunk; David Langan as the Mayor, Levko’s father; Michael Reder as the officious Town Clerk; Jones as an enterprising Distiller. The ripest female character, the Mayor’s Sister-in-law, found a congenially blowsy interpreter in Ory Brown. As Ghanna, the ingenue, Amy Ellen Anderson spiced lyricism with temperament, while Bender, as the rusalka Pannotchka, gave an account warmer and more glowing than her Micaela.
La Rondine (seen March 14) was played in airy sets by Jeffrey W. Dean that allowed easy movement. James Meena conducted Puccini’s score with a souffle touch, and Stephanie Sundine directed the cast’s comings and goings in operetta fashion; though the last act lurches into sentimental melodrama, she didn’t let the syrup congeal. Singing likewise stressed lightness, focusing on the touchingly fragile Magda of Carol Ann Manzi and the fresh, vulnerable Ruggero of tenor Richard Sanchez. As the secondary couple, Carissa Casbon, an exuberant Lisette, proved too hearty for Robert Lischetti’s delicately traced Prunier. Eisenhard’s firm Rambaldo anchored the story’s romantic fantasy to a core of reality. Janet Pittman, Wendy Waller and Cynthia L. Ballentine (Magda’s friends), Reder, Pablo Veguilla and David de Jong (Rambaldo’s cronies) acted and sang with colloquial ease and humor.
Serviceable Italian is the lingua franca of singers, but French and Russian pose subtler demands. Sarasota’s language coaches, not identified in the program, had done their job well. The company’s projected titles, while uncommonly thorough, are too faint to read during brightly lit scenes. JOHN W FREEMAN
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-42571128.html
by John W. Freeman
Opera News