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IN REVIEW: KC Chorale teams with Shakespeare Festival for satisfying program

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious spring, through a series of collaborations the likes of which Kansas City has rarely seen before. “Chromatic Collaboration” fused the Owen/Cox Dance Group with the musicians of NewEar, and “Symphonic Quixotic” saw the Kansas City Symphony joining forces with Quixotic Dance Fusion, both to great impact. On May 14th and 15th Charles Bruffy’s Kansas City Chorale teamed with the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival for an entertaining program of the bard’s words, both recited and sung, which again showed how productive our local organizations can be when they work together. The chorale sang an array of works set to Shakespeare’s texts, all but two from the plays, and four top local actors—Robert Gibby Brand, Merle Moores, John Rensenhouse and Cinnamon Schultz—read from the respective plays in order to prepare us to hear each piece.

The range of musical approaches to Shakespeare’s texts is broad, as he is probably the most frequently “set” poet not just in English but in any language. The earliest of the musical offerings here was from the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the rest of the program consisted of music by living composers. The seven (!) works of Matthew Harris showed great sensitivity to the texts (“Hark! Hark! The Lark,” “O Mistress Mine!”), despite a tendency toward forgettable harmonies: The hypnotic “Ding, dong, bell” of “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred” was quite effective, and he turned “When Daffodils Begin to Peer” (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) into a mildly raucous gospel romp. Nils Lindberg’s setting of the sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” was also musically plain, but Steven Sametz’ “When He Shall Die” (from Romeo and Juliet) traded in passionate yearning—set up beautifully by Cinnamon’s energetic recitation from Juliet’s monologue. Other composers represented were Mark Hayes (“Music to Hear”) and Emma Lou Diemer (especially “Take, O Take”).

But the strongest works were those by Vaughan Williams and the living Finnish composer Jaako Mäntyjärvy, whose works Bruffy and the Chorale have championed (and recorded) over the years. Vaughan Williams’ setting of “Full Fathom Five” (fromThe Tempest) contained surprisingly strong and bittersweet dissonances, and Mäntyjärvy’s piece to the same text also featured piquant, adventurous harmonic yanks and turns. It takes a master like Vaughan Williams to rise to the task of “The Cloud-Capp’d Towers,” its airy text-painting a deft foil to the poet’s vivid imagery of human existence (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”). Mäntyjärvy’s “Lullaby” likewise explored fascinating harmonic language, negotiated with skill by the Chorale, and his “Come Away, Death” featured a vague echo (on the words “weep, weep”) of the Renaissance master Gesualdo’s celebrated “Moro, lasso.”

The Chorale’s diction throughout was crisp and clean, making the use of printed texts almost superfluous. The actors played good-naturedly against each other, now comedic, now tragic. (Only a couple of times on Sunday at Asbury United Methodist Church did one yearn for amplification.) The highlight was perhaps the finale, where Rensenhouse read animatedly fromMacbeth (in which he will star at this summer’s Shakespeare Festival) and the Chorale sang Mäntyjärvy’s delicious setting of “Double, Double, Toil and Trouble”—complete with dark drones and swooping hag-like howls.

The Metropolitan Opera will spend more on its currently unfolding The Ring of the Nibelung than it ever has on a production in its history—some $16 million—but at the live HD broadcast of Die Walküre on May 14th there wasn’t much to show for it, at least in terms of sheer eye candy. In fact the 44-ton “Machine,” as the massive set for the production has been dubbed, didn’t really have much to do to for the opera’s nearly six hours, and the result was a surprising amount of proverbial “park and bark.” The 24 planks were fixed in the same handful of positions for much of the time, to the point where one began to wonder whether we were really seeing a “contingency plan” for a partly wounded apparatus. (The performance was delayed nearly 40 minutes while a computer glitch in The Machine was supposedly fixed.)

I liked the way the planks were set vertically for Act 1, with tree-bark patterns projected on them to suggest a forest, and the “Ride of the Valkyries” did not disappoint as tour-de-force: Each of the Valkyries sat at the top of a plank with a set of reins, and the planks dipped up and down like steeds. Robert LePage’s production felt like it needed more energy; Carl Fillion’s celebrated set design was fascinating to watch in action, but one wonders how well it will “wear” over the years.

Strong vocal performances made the afternoon rewarding. Jonas Kaufmann was a vocally resplendent Siegmund, and built powerful chemistry with the equally compelling Eva-Maria Westbroek: At times you felt they were just about to take to the floor for a tussle of lovemaking. Kaufmann is at his vocal prime, and he could easily become one of his generation’s great Wagner tenors—despite sounding more like a turbocharged lyric than a heldentenor. Hans-Peter König was downright scary as Hunding, his voice echoing like thunder and his heft lending a sense of threat to the part. Stephanie Blythe sang an aptly troubled Fricka, her voice in command but her acting even more so, allowing her to be more moral compass than nagging wife (as she is often portrayed). Deborah Voigt might be past the point in her career where her voice is ideal for Brünnhilde, but I loved the way she saucily played off her father’s tantrums: She emanated loads of personality. Bryn Terfel looked like he was overacting through much of his Wotan, though this is often the effect of watching opera in close-ups: A friend who was in the house during the performance said the exaggerated gestures actually carried quite well into the hall. Terfel’s voice was rich and dark if not overly magisterial—as one is accustomed to this role sounding. The music was gorgeously played in the pit, with James Levine seeming nary a bit diminished by his recent spate of illness. He conducted with the sweep and command of a young man, but the expertise and detail of one of the great opera conductors of our time.

Die Walküre will be encored at movie theaters around the KC metro. Check www.metoperafamily.org for times and locations.

Paul Horsley, Performing Arts Editor 

Paul studied piano and musicology at WSU and Cornell University. He also earned a degree in journalism, because writing about the arts in order to inspire others to partake in them was always his first love. After earning a PhD from Cornell, he became Program Annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he learned firsthand the challenges that non profits face. He moved to KC to join the then-thriving Arts Desk at The Kansas City Star, but in 2008 he happily accepted a post at The Independent. Paul contributes to national publications, including Dance Magazine, Symphony, Musical America, and The New York Times, and has conducted scholarly research in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic (the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship). He also taught musicology at Cornell, LSU and Park University.

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