In the cruelly exacting high tessitura of the protagonist, Michael Hendrick revealed impressive stamina and an attractive, powerful “young dramatic” voice ideally suited to leading Czech tenor roles.

IN REVIEW: ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY The centerpiece of Bard Music Festival’s exploration of the music and world of Leos Janacek was the American stage premiere of Osud (July 25). Its conversation piece, however, was (hands down) the stunning if idiosyncratic Performing Arts Center by Frank Gehry which opened earlier this year. With Osud, Gehry made his debut as a theatrical designer, offering the strikingly textured set (two huge contrasting sculptural units evoking floral reproductive biology), though the program billing two more experienced theatrical design figures (Craig Webb as associate set designer and John Conklin as design consultant) suggested a more complicated collaborative process. With brilliant 1920s costumes (by Kaye Voyce) and Jennifer Tipton’s customarily masterful lighting, the show looked wonderful as a progression of memorable, camera-ready images. JoAnne Akalaitis’s production scored some points in Act I’s crowded spa, but the repetitive, stylized movement by the omnipresent ensemble soon grew tiresome in Act II, which the libretto (in one of its few cogent features) casts as an interval of passionate domesticity between two structurally parallel permeable “public scenes.” To an already tangled narrative, Akalaitis introduced hyperkinetic bravura where simplicity might have served best.

Osud, written after Jenufa (with which it shares many a musical gesture) but unperformed even on Czech soil until 1958, remains a problem piece due to its oddly unbalanced story and uncompelling text (by teenaged librettist Fedora Bartsova, massively rewritten by Janacek), which tells of the composer Zjvny’s unhappy life with (and loss of) his beloved Mila. While there is some power and semi-autobiographical resonance in the story, its opacity finally fails to engage fully either heart or brain, though much of the music is excellent. Whatever its inherent limitations, Osud proves moving in the context of Janacek’s lifelong struggles, so the socio-historical framework provided by seminars and linked events from festival co-artistic directors Leon Botstein and Jonathan Levi seemed an apt approach.

The musical side received fine value in the Sosnoff Theatre’s outstanding acoustics. Botstein regularly overwhelms singers in concert opera with his mighty American Symphony Orchestra; the balance he achieved here, with the ensemble’s fine players in a well-placed pit, proved very satisfying, if not a revelation of outstanding interpretive powers. Botstein cast very strongly. In the cruelly exacting high tessitura of the protagonist, Michael Hendrick revealed impressive stamina and an attractive, powerful “young dramatic” voice ideally suited to leading Czech tenor roles. Sounding radiant in soprano territory, mezzo Christine Abraham sang and acted sympathetically as his gained-and-lost Mila. Linda Roark-Strummer etched Mila’s mad mother vividly, some float and sheen remaining to balance her harsher outbutsts. Paul Mow displayed an excellent tenor of clear promise as the intermittently appearing Dr. Suda. Notable among many fine singers in ensemble roles were the alert, rich-voiced mezzo September Bigelow (Kosinka) and the incisive, very young tenor Trey Cassels (Hrazda).

DAVID SHENGOLD

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-456309761.html

by David Shengold

Opera News