The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times, monday, july 10, 2006
E5
KATONAH, N.Y., July 8
When Will Crutchfield began directing his Bel
Canto at Caramoor series at the Caramoor
International Music Festival here in 1992, he
insisted on the flexibility offered in the series title. He
mainly wanted to give new life to the bel canto repertory,
a distinct body of Italian opera defined historically
by the careers of Rossini and Verdi, at either end, and
stylistically by a focus on the beauty and the virtuosic
potential of the voice, to the virtual exclusion of other
theatrical and operatic values, like sensible librettos and
deeply considered orchestral writing.
But Mr. Crutchfield also took the view, in common with
other bel canto adherents, that comparatively few modern
singers understood true bel canto singing. And while he
expressed every confidence that he could persuade singers
to adopt his ideas, and thereby rescue this repertory
from its reputation as a junkyard of vacuous, formulaic
clatter, he also argued that his series should take its name
literally – simply as “beautiful singing” – and periodically
offer works by better composers from other eras, from
Purcell and Gluck to Handel and Mozart.
Mr. Crutchfield has largely delivered on his promise to
make his singers think carefully about the expressive possibilities
of bel canto singing. If anyone needed evidence
that he could turn a sow’s ear into something closer to
a silk purse, his account of Bellini’s “Puritani,” which
opened this year’s series on Saturday night, was it.
The opera, first heard in 1835, was Bellini’s last, and it
has the usual bel canto maladies, starting with a libretto
so poorly conceived that even Mr. Crutchfield, a former
music critic for The New York Times, describes parts of it
in his program notes as “absurd to the point of hilarity.”
Opera fans summarily dismiss complaints about librettos
as being beside the point. But if the point is the idealized
exploration of emotion as magnified by music, it is a serious
problem when this emotion arises from a laughable
text. It becomes merely the facsimile of emotion, a guess
at what characters might feel if they lived in the alternate
universe of the bel canto sensibility.
That’s a questionable goal, but Bellini and his colleagues
had a solution: the mad scene. For the central character
With Bel Canto’s
Possibilities,
the Voice’s
Full Potential
By ALLAN KOZINN
in “I Puritani” – Elvira, the daughter of a Roundhead
nobleman during the English civil war – virtually the entire
opera is a mad scene. She is to be married to Arturo,
a Stuart loyalist, but on their wedding day, he runs off
to save the life of Enrichetta, the deposed queen. This
drives Elvira over the edge and lets Bellini move her from
despair to flightiness and back through the three acts.
These moments, with Elvira’s madness supplying the builtin
suspension of disbelief, are the opera’s best: except for
Arturo’s third- act music, everyone else has little more than
dull boilerplate. The connecting tissue draws fully on the
style’s vulgarities – the insistent on-the-beat cymbal-crashing,
chirpy wind writing and unimaginative harmonic progressions
– yet offsetting those are wonderful brass choir passages
and even some subtlety in the aria accompaniments.
Judging from the consistent and tightly matched work
of the estimable cast, Mr. Crutchfield’s advice about bel
canto singing is that a pianissimo packs more punch than
a shout, and he’s on to something. Sumi Jo, as Elvira,
made her flightiness magical by keeping her sound on
a tight leash, and if that made certain leaps sound more
cautious than virtuosic, her caution helped her nail the
role’s high notes.
Barry Banks, as Arturo, began with a slightly constricted
sound, and his range of color was never vast. Yet he
brought considerable power and suppleness to Arturo’s
music, and he didn’t shy away from the falsetto high F
that caps his last act “Crudeli, crudeli.”
The performance also benefited from the solid, shapely
contributions of Daniel Mobbs as Giorgio, Elvira’s uncle;
Eric Jordan as Gualtiero, her father; and Weston Hurt
as Riccardo, her rejected suitor. Laura Vlasak Nolen and
David Ekstrom sang the smaller roles of Enrichetta and
Bruno, and Mr. Crutchfield drew an alert and generally
well- polished performance from the Orchestra of St.
Luke’s, the Caramoor Bel Canto Soloists and the Concert
Chorale of New York.
The Caramoor International Music Festival runs through Aug.
12; (914) 232-1252. Will Crutchfield is to conduct a program of
Mozart arias on July 16 and Rossini’s “Tancredi” on July 22.
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Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.