Watching veteran bass Samuel Ramey perform the supporting role of Leporello, the servant to Don Giovanni—the title role that Ramey played countless times throughout his long career—it was hard not to be struck by the irony of a singer at the twilight of a career juxtaposed next to a young singer, Italian baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, who has been principally thus far associated with Leporello singing the Don next to yesteryear’s Don of Dons. But old habits apparently die hard, and as D’Arcangelo was singing away, the still far more charismatic Ramey could be seen actually mouthing the starring role along with him throughout the evening. Even more ironically, at one point the staging calls for Ramey to mouth for D’Arcangelo, when the plot calls for one to pose as the other. It was the highest drama to be experienced in an otherwise problematic production that was hopelessly confused and convoluted. Unlike the responsive ensemble of Chicago Symphony musicians assembled for “The Abduction From the Seraglio,” this alternate set of players of more high profile orchestral personnel never got the right feel for this music, performing in a consistently stodgy and heavy-handed manner, despite conductor James Conlon’s best attempts to keep things light and moving. Even worse, the recitatives are left to be played by a harpsichord far from the stage that had singers falling even further behind. Add to all this that the cast assembled to sing these iconic roles are by and large ill-equipped to sing Mozart and substitute heavy vibrato and a lack of precision for music that needs to be flexible and transparent, and the contrast couldn’t be more dramatic than the excellence being displayed during the “Abduction” performances that are running in repertory with this poorly done “Don” that unfortunately, descends into hell long before the Don himself gets there in the climax. (Dennis Polkow)

Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” plays through August 17 at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, Lake-Cook at Green Bay Rds., Highland Park, (847)266-5100.

RECOMMENDED

For the first decades of its existence, Ravinia was the summer opera capital of the United States and concert opera was a significant element of the 22-year music directorship of James Levine, who was also music director of the Metropolitan Opera. That tradition stopped under Christoph Eschenbach but has continued on under James Conlon, who is also music director of the Los Angeles Opera and the Cincinnati May Festival, where this semi-staged version of Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” originated in 2006 conceived around Michael York narrating the spoken portions with a script by Marie Therese Squerciati that streamlines much of the action as well as wryly interpolates the proceedings for a modern audience with an Anglo sensibility that perfectly suits York’s narration. But make no mistake: it is the singing and the music that are the clear stars of this production, from Morris Robinson’s velvet-smooth deep bass and terrifying yet comical portrayal of the sadistic Osmin to Hanan Alattar’s stunning ease through the soprano stratosphere as Konstanze to James Conlon’s lively tempos and brilliant shaping of a chamber ensemble made up of non-vacationing Chicago Symphony members. What a rare treat it is to hear a Mozart opera in Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, with its 800-plus seats, close to the size of the theaters that Mozart had in mind when he wrote these works rather than the too large Harris Theater (Chicago Opera Theater) or the cavernous Civic Opera House (Lyric Opera) where nuance and subtlety are lost. The experience is nothing short of revelatory and long may this glorious tradition continue. But next time around, please, Ravinia, keep the standards consistent and hire a professional chorus, preferably members of the CSO’s own unparalleled ensemble rather than a volunteer chorus. For this work a chorus is only heard twice, but they are crucial and climactic moments that mar what precedes them, kind of like baking a cake from scratch and using canned frosting to top it off. (Dennis Polkow)

Mozart’s “The Abduction From the Seraglio” plays through August 16 at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre, Lake-Cook at Green Bay Rds., Highland Park, (847)266-5100.

The last time veteran actor Michael York was in Chicago, performing the role of King Arthur in “Camelot” on a national tour last year, he had hoped to not only see the city inside and out, but the rest of the country as well. “You have to read the fine print on these things,” York admits. “Coast to coast, eight shows a week and you travel on the rest days, so you’re always catching up with yourself. It’s quite demanding.”

Things will be more relaxed this time around as he narrates and performs the role of Pasha Salim in Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” at the Ravinia Festival across two performances with a day off in between.

Lest anyone worry about York’s operatic prowess, the role of the Pasha is a speaking part, though pivotal in the opera. “This was actually the first opera I ever attended at 14 years old in Glyndebourne,” York recalls, “and I was totally enchanted. It marked me for life. It offers so much: spectacle, music, laughter, betrayal, sex. I’m an opera lover, and love working with music. It’s pure self-indulgence. As narrator, I join all of the great bits together and play the ruler in charge of the court where all of these Europeans are sequestered. The piece is more relevant than ever, given the whole Muslim context of the piece. Pasha Salim is a great example of the extraordinary magnanimity and clemency that we expect of all great statesmen.”

Compassion is also a major trait of King Arthur, but “the great thing about ‘Camelot’ is that Lancelot does all of the showing off and the role of Arthur fits within a small range and the songs fit comfortably within the register,” notes York, written as it was for Richard Burton, who starred with York in “The Taming of the Shrew,” York’s first film across a long cinematic career that began back in 1967.

Two years ago York played Salieri in a version of “Amadeus” directed by playwright Peter Shaffer himself at the Hollywood Bowl. “There is that great speech where Salieri thinks he’s heard the voice of God and the Grand Partita strikes up, and we had it strike up live, and it made the hairs of one’s neck stand up on end. Here, I get to stand there in the midst of those glorious ensemble pieces that close the acts, and it is glorious.”

Like Shakespeare, which York has done so often that he wrote a book about performing the Bard, York sees Mozart as having a mutual “hair-raising sensibility and compassion, which is why they’re both still done today. They would have really got on, don’t you think? Can you imagine the collaboration? That would have really been something.” (Dennis Polkow)

Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” plays at Ravinia Festival’s Martin Theatre at 7pm August 14 and 2pm August 16, (847) 266-5100.

RECOMMENDED

Back in the early years of the twentieth century, “Ravinia Opera” was the summer opera capital of the country, a tradition that James Conlon has revived since becoming Ravinia music director and which should particularly thrive now that he is music director of the Los Angeles Opera, similar to James Levine using his Metropolitan Opera music directorship to the advantage of his Ravinia music directorship for decades. And though some might quibble about Conlon’s choice of one of the most popular operatic warhorses that is heard far too often already for this year’s opera, at least with the currently top-reigning Butterfly Patrica Racette in the lead—who sang the role to great acclaim with Conlon last year in L.A. and is taking the role to the Met later this year—along with Conlon conducting the Chicago Symphony, the sound should be glorious. Too bad Ravinia insists on skimping by not having the CSO Chorus participate as well, although unlike last week’s Placido Domingo Gala, which provided neither texts nor supertitles, at least there will be supertitles to follow Cio-Cio San’s singing suicide after her abandonment by her arrogant American husband. Tenor James Valenti, who sang the role at the New York City Opera last season and is replacing celebrated but aging tenor Frank Lopardo, who cancelled June 19, citing “personal reasons,” will sing Pinkerton, and mezzo-soprano Ning Liang, who starred in the Frederic Mitterand 1995 film version of “Butterfly” as Suzuki reprises that role here (Conlon conducted the score for that film). (Dennis Polkow)

Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook at Green Bay Roads, (847)266-5100. Sat 7:30pm. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Frank Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls” has always been more popular and more revived than his “The Most Happy Fella,” in part because there has never been a movie version of “Fella,” and also because the musical demands of the show are so extraordinary that it is rarely performed. Yet “Fella” is a more complete synthesis of music and drama and many consider it to be Loesser’s masterpiece, which was the composer’s own view. Loesser took over five years to complete it, pulling out all stops for the show. Having been unsatisfied with some of the cardboard characters in “Guys and Dolls,” Loesser decided that this time around he would not only write the show’s music and lyrics, but the libretto as well, turning to Sidney Howard’s “They Knew What They Wanted” for his subject matter. He fleshes out Howard’s characters considerably in his adaptation, creating some of the most three-dimensional characters to turn up on the musical stage—so three-dimensional, in fact, that some of the show’s language had to be trimmed back for McCarthey-era sensibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It was fifty years ago that “West Side Story” brought to full maturity the style of musical theater that had been pioneered by Rodgers & Hammerstein in the early 1940s with such works as “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel,” a style that put as large an emphasis on dance as it did music, and insisted that musical numbers actually carry forth the action, not merely comment upon it. Choreographer Jerome Robbins had conceived of a contemporary updating of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that would play out on New York’s Lower West Side against a Catholic/Jewish backdrop as far back as the late 1940s, but it was composer Leonard Bernstein who made the change to Puerto Ricans versus the children of European immigrants, having wanted to incorporate the Latin rhythms and tri-tone harmonies of the bebop revolution a la Dizzy Gillespie with the slang language and speech patterns of the movement (“cool,” “Daddio”) used by the whites, and mambo rhythms and spicy Latin syncopations became trademarks of the Hispanics in an era when “world music” was a phrase only uttered by ethnomusicologists. The amazing thing about “West Side Story” is not only how swinging and fresh it remains musically, but with the current illegal immigration debate, it may well be more socially relevant today than when it was premiered. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It has become a cliché in music-theater circles to claim that the role of Mama Rose in “Gypsy” is the greatest Broadway score ever written for a female lead and indeed, in terms of demanding the most of both a top-flight actress and a first-class singer, the role is in a class by itself. That Patti LuPone, who came to prominence originating the completely sung Broadway role of “Evita” but whose acting was deemed too superficial to remain in “Sunset Boulevard,” has agreed to tackle a role for more dramatically demanding at a stage of her career when her pipes are not what they once were is a fascinating development, but the bets are high that LaPone would not take a risk like this if she wasn’t able to pull it off. But even if the performance is a bona fide train wreck, like last week’s pre-New York Ravinia tryout of Elaine Stritch’s new show, even that should be interesting. Thus, all theater-loving eyes and ears will be on Ravinia this weekend as LaPone attempts her first-ever Mama Rose in a staged production directed by Lonny Price and in the classy company of the Chicago Symphony—conducted by Paul Gemignani—playing the full orchestrations of this beloved Jule Styne score, which in case anyone forgot contains such iconic Broadway classics as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Let Me Entertain You” with the last lyrics that a young Stephen Sondheim wrote for another composer.(Dennis Polkow)

“Gypsy” plays at Ravinia Festival, August 11-13 at 7:30pm, Lake-Cook and Green Bay Roads, Highland Park; (847)266-5100. 

RECOMMENDED

Kudos to Ravinia for assembling the same forces—including soprano Dawn Upshaw, conductor Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus—as can be heard on the spectacular just-released recording of Osvaldo Golijov’s new opera “Ainadamar” (Deutsche Grammaphon). Argentine-born and of Eastern European descent, Golijov has been able to synthesize a wide variety of music traditions into an original voice that is far more than the sum of its parts and which speaks to musicians and audiences alike. (The Chicago Symphony, in hiring Golijov as a new composer-in-residence for next year, announced that the CSO will perform this work as well, but Ravinia is scooping them with this area premiere.) “Ainadamer” is Arabic for “fountain of tears” and the name of an ancient well near Granada where poet Federico Garcia Lorca was killed in 1936 by Fascist Falangist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. That incident is told in sometimes ferocious flashbacks in a libretto by playwright David Henry Hwang while Golijov’s music movingly evokes Spanish flamenco, folk traditions, Arabic chant and musical cues, descriptions of which often surrounded the highly musical and mystical Lorca’s manuscripts. (Dennis Polkow)

Wed/14 8pm, Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook and Green Bay Rds., Highland Park, (847)266-5100. $10-$30.

RECOMMENDED

Okay, so sometimes the performances have been better than the works themselves: no matter; Ravinia’s five-year “Sondheim 75” series has been a gas for performers and audiences alike, and it’s a shame to see it all come to an end this year with the staging of one of the most obscure works of the Sondheim canon, “Anyone Can Whistle.” Despite having been financed by Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and Frank Loesser, among others, the 1964 work closed after a mere nine performances on Broadway and has been staunchly defended by Sondheim aficionados as having been too far ahead of its time ever since. Never having been given the opportunity to achieve the popularity of his later works, stagings are infrequent and so with Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald and Michael Cerveris all back, if anyone can make this piece “sing,” as it were, they can. John Mahoney narrates and Sondheim himself will be on hand for a pre-concert pavilion discussion an hour before the Friday evening curtain. (Dennis Polkow)

8pm, August 26, 7:30pm, August 27, Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook and Green Bay Rds., Highland Park; (847)266-5100.

RECOMMENDED

Decades before Mel Brooks spoofed Nazism in “The Producers,” Viktor Ullman composed his one-act allegorical opera “The Emperor of Atlantis” as a powerful parody of Hitler and the Third Reich. Composed when Hitler was in power and Jewish composer Ullman was at Theresienstadt, the work was rehearsed there but his captors stopped its would-be performance when they realized its daring subject matter. Ullman would go on to die at Auschwitz, but his long-lost work gets the last laugh, as it were, with a rare one-night-only staging in a synagogue thanks to conductor James Conlon’s championing it after decades of deafening silence. The sextet from Richard Strauss’ “Capriccio” will open the evening, a work composed at the same time but with Strauss getting all of his due and glory while Ullmann was writing his work in a concentration camp. The chamber orchestra will be made up of players from the Chicago Symphony and the Ravinia Festival Orchestras and the singers will include Bryan Gilliam as the Emperor, Alvin Crawford, Ryan McKinley, Steven Spears, Norman Reinhardt, Hanan Alataar and Alison Tupay. The opera will be staged by Ed Berkeley with subtitles. A post-concert discussion on banned Holocaust music with Conlon, Gilliam and Ravinia President and CEO Welz Kauffman will follow the opera. (Dennis Polkow)

This production is now closed.