Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Sept. 9, 2024) – You can’t put a price tag on taste.
It can cost upwards of $1 million to produce an opera, but one opera company in Pittsburgh spent less than one-tenth of that amount in a smart, discriminating return to the stage on Sunday complete with sweeping strings and soaring voices.
Instead of cutting costs by compromising on the quality of the production, Pittsburgh Festival Opera — the smaller of Pittsburgh’s two main opera companies — spent the majority of its limited resources on crafting a top-tier musical experience as its first major return to the stage since the pandemic years decimated its attendance.
No pressure.
For this first production, the company hired the best singers and musicians that it could and simply left out other expensive parts of the traditional theatrical experience like physical sets, blocking and lighting.
Concert opera
This kind of production is called a “concert opera,” and as opera companies and other performing arts companies around the country face inflated costs for building and shipping sets and costumes and the like, it’s become a more popular way to perform.
Concert opera can rankle traditionalists who enjoy the grandeur of opera, but for those who attend primarily for the music, they are a bounty for the ears, a more distilled, concentrated experience when done well.
Sunday’s performance in the newly renovated Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland was an elegant, stunning performance of a rarely heard gem of the Italian opera repertoire: “Adriana Lecouvreur” (Francesco Cilea, composer; Arturo Colautti, libretto), based on the real-life 18th-century French actress of the same name.
Supertitles projected above the stage translated the Italian lyrics to English. The plot is typical opera convolution — a soldier pursuing Lecouvreur is really a prince in disguise; the actress’ stage manager is in love with her; a princess married to another man pursues an affair with the disguised prince; and a bitter rivalry ends with Lecouvreur’s death by poisoned violets just as her prince proposes marriage. It’s all set to a whirling, attractive, Puccini-esque score that whisks the action along with a window into each character’s emotions.
The musicians
Typically, an orchestra plays in a “pit” under the stage for an opera. On Sunday, the orchestra, made up largely of members of the Pittsburgh Opera orchestra, was onstage and the singers stood at the front of the stage to sing. Conductor Christopher Franklin, principal conductor of Minnesota Opera, kept the balance between musicians and singers clear and clean, a much more difficult feat with everyone on stage together.
The vocal caliber of the cast was superb. Festival Opera artistic director Marianne Cornetti, a native Pittsburgher, has had a storied career that has carried her to the Metropolitan Opera and all of the world’s great stages. This production of “Adriana Lecouvreur” is her brainchild, and hers was a standout performance Sunday, spinning out a rich mezzo above the orchestra and bringing uncommonly vivid color and bite to the role of the jealous princess.
Operatic singing is caricatured so often in pop culture today that it’s easy to forget that a truly developed voice is something exquisite and athletic to behold. Sunday was a welcome reminder of this.
The evening’s other standout was baritone Michael Chioldi, whose powerful, supple voice brought a sympathetic depth to the aging stage manager’s unspoken, unrequited passion. Hungarian-born soprano Csilla Boross was also excellently demure in the title role.
The only casting misfire was tenor Victor Starsky as Maurizio. He’s earlier in his career than most of the rest of this star-studded cast, and while he delivered a passionate performance as the disguised prince, it was hard not to compare his voice to his co-stars and conclude that his full potential isn’t quite yet realized.
New niche?
Pittsburgh Opera is the larger of the city’s two opera companies and does not program concert operas. That company still programs full productions with all of the trappings and accoutrements and launches its own season in October.
Is there enough support in the city for two companies? The concert opera space is distinct enough that it doesn’t feel like the companies are competing on the same stage. It’s also quite niche. I’d estimate the crowd at around 300 people on Sunday. That’s not a bad figure for a first return to the stage with a new concept.
The only question will be whether Steel City audiences can be convinced that the musical quality of these concert operas are worth the ticket prices. At a discounted $45 for young professionals, I could imagine some of that crowd (my peers) tuning out in favor a more “complete” operatic experience. That isn’t to say the performance wasn’t worth every penny and more — it absolutely was — but a recognition that as the company experiments, there may be some adjustments necessary in the presentation and pricing to get people in the door the first few times.
As a final note on that score, I’d add that including some of the stage directions in the supertitles might help follow the action more closely, the minimal blocking and lack of scene changes rendered some of the plot elements confusing to those not intimately familiar with the plot.
But these are minor details only. A huge brava to Cornetti and Co. for bringing this company back from its pandemic-era brink with such style.