O19 Festival Program

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Festival O19 3

F E S T I VA L CALENDAR September

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Th

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Sa

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19

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22

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24

25

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Academy of Music

The Love for Three Oranges

8 p.m.

Perelman Theater

7 p.m.

Semele

The Suzanne Roberts Theatre

Denis & Katya

7 p.m.

FringeArts

Let Me Die

Field Concert Hall

Curtis in Concert

2 p.m.

2 p.m.

8 p.m.

7 p.m.

7 p.m.

2 p.m.

2 p.m

2 p.m.

7 p.m. 7 p.m.

8 p.m.

7 p.m.

8 p.m. 8 p.m.

8 p.m. 8 p.m. 8 p.m. 8 p.m.

12 p.m. 12 p.m.

8 p.m. 7 p.m.

12 p.m. 12 p.m.

Festival Extras Opera on the Mall: La bohème Saturday, September 14 5:30 p.m. pre-show 7:00 p.m. broadcast Independence National Historical Park See page 90

Late Night Snacks September 7–29 9:30 & 11:30 p.m.

Pop-Up Cabaret Bar 1316 S. Percy Street See page 92

4 Opera Philadelphia

#O19

F E S T I VA L MAP N 20TH

ST

N BROAD

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FRINGEARTS

CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC

INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK

S 17TH

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ACADEMY OF MUSIC

LOCUST ST

S 20TH

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LOCUST ST

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THE SUZANNE ROBERTS THEATRE S 17TH

S 18TH

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POP-UP CABARET BAR

PERELMAN THEATER AT THE KIMMEL CENTER

The Love for Three Oranges September 20, 22, 27 & 29 | Academy of Music

Semele

September 19, 21, 24, 26 & 28 | Perelman Theater

Denis & Katya

September 18, 21–23, 25, 28 & 29 | The Suzanne Roberts Theatre

Let Me Die

September 21, 22, 25–28 | FringeArts

Curtis in Concert

September 21, 22, 28 & 29 | Curtis Institute of Music

Opera on the Mall: La bohème September 14 | Independence National Historical Park

Late Night Snacks

September 7–29 | Pop-up Cabaret Bar | 1316 S. Percy Street Principal support for Festival O19 has been provided by the William Penn Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation The Academy of Music and Perelman Theater are part of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Venue map photos by Jeff Fusco, Kat Kendon, B. Krist, and George Widman

Festival O19 5

Opera Philadelphia Design Manager Katie Kelley Editors Shannon Eblen Frank Luzi Contributing Writers Michael Bolton Julia Bumke Aubrey Nagle Leo Sarbanes Karen Slack Margaret Zhang Advertising Diane Homer Michel Manzo Printing CRW Graphics 6 Opera Philadelphia

CONTENTS

26 04 05 08 09 10 13 16 20 26 32

40

Festival Calendar

84

Board of Directors

90

Festival Support

92

20 Years with Corrado

96

Festival Map

Board Chairman

General Director

Opera’s Fascination with Death

E N I S & K A T YA D World Premiere

Aren’t You Performing, Too?

4 0 S E M E L E Company Premiere 46

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ne Affair, Endless O Interpretation

T H E L O V E F O R THREE ORANGES Company Premiere

Fruit Salad

L E T M E D I E World Premiere

98

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C URTIS IN CONCERT Recital Series

L A B O H È M E Opera on the Mall

L A T E N I G H T SNACKS Your Nightly O19 Nightcap

The Picture of Giving Leadership Giving

1 0 2 Patron Program 1 0 4 Membership

1 0 9 Legato Society

1 1 0 Corporate Council 1 1 1 Ospite Circle

1 1 4 Community Initiatives 1 2 0 The O19 Team

1 2 3 Spring at the Academy 1 2 4 O19 Happy Hours 1 2 5 Festival Shop 1 2 7 O20

Leave Something Behind Festival O19 7

of

BOARD DIRECTORS Officers

Members

Honorary Members

Past Chairs

Peter Leone Chairman of the Board Charles C. Freyer Vice Chair Caroline J. MacKenzie Kennedy Vice Chair Dr. Eugene E. Stark, Jr. Secretary Thomas Mahoney Treasurer David B. Devan* President Sandra K. Baldino Willo Carey Katherine Christiano Don Cooney Ady L. Djerassi, M.D. Carol S. Eicher Mikael Eliasen Allen R. Freedman Charles C. Freyer Alexander Hankin Frederick P. Huff Caroline J. MacKenzie Kennedy Beverly Lange, M.D. Peter Leone Thomas Mahoney Sarah Marshall Daniel K. Meyer, M.D. Immediate Past Chairman Agnes Mulroney Scott F. Richard Carolyn Horn Seidle Jonathan H. Sprogell Dr. Eugene E. Stark, Jr. Barbara Augusta Teichert Maria Trafton Donna Wechsler Kelley Wolfington Dennis Alter H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest † Stephen A. Madva, Esq. Chairman Emeritus Alan B. Miller Alice W. Strine, Esq. Charlotte Watts Daniel K. Meyer, M.D. Stephen A. Madva, Esq. James B. Straw C. Christopher Cannon Alan B. Miller Jack Mulroney † *Ex officio † Deceased List as of August 2019

8

Opera Philadelphia

from the BOARD CHAIRMAN D

ear Friends,

Welcome to Opera Philadelphia’s O19, our third annual in-depth exploration of the potential of opera. Hundreds of artists, technicians, and staff are gathered here to offer their ingenuity and effort to us as we celebrate the human voice in seven venues across the city.

This year we recognize Maestro Corrado Rovaris for twenty years of achievement, leadership, and fellowship at Opera Philadelphia. No one in our company is more beloved than this gracious, elegant man who works to elevate his fellow musicians rather than seek the spotlight. We honor our Jack Mulroney Music Director on September 21 with a Festival O19 Celebration featuring a recital by soprano Brenda Rae. In our Academy of Music season, he’ll conduct three of his favorite works: Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges in the festival, Verdi’s Requiem in January, and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly in the spring.

Opera Philadelphia’s artistic team does not construct our festivals thematically. But motifs emerge from the juxtaposition even of works as different as those in O19—as for instance the ways in which artists turn the stuff of tradition to contemporary and even subversive use. Handel reframed a Greek myth about hubris and seduction and slipped Semele into a performance series usually reserved for Lenten themes. In 1761, Carlo Gozzi (the author of the play on which Puccini’s Turandot is based) turned a fairy tale into a satire. The Love for Three Oranges, Prokofiev’s adaptation of Gozzi’s satire, includes parodies of Massenet, Verdi, and Wagner. Joseph Keckler’s Let Me Die constructs a mordant conversation between art and mortality from 400 years of deaths in opera.

Denis & Katya features SWAT teams and social media, but we—and perhaps the doomed teens at the center of the opera—cannot escape this meta-drama’s similarities and jarring contrasts to the sort of familiar tragedies Mr. Keckler’s performance includes.

All of this would not have been possible without our dauntless staff and their collaborators at the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Bearded Ladies, and co-producing opera companies in Wales, U.K., Montpelier, France, and Omaha, Nebraska.

Thank you to O19 production underwriters Barbara Augusta Teichert, Allen Black and Randy Apgar, Rich Worley and Leslie Miller, Gene and Jean Stark, Linda and David Glickstein; to FEDORA and to the National Endowment for the Arts. We’re particularly grateful to the William Penn Foundation, to the Wyncote Foundation, and recommenders Dan Meyer and Fred Haas. As we celebrate our Jack Mulroney Music Director, we offer our collective gratitude to and affection for our board member Agnes Mulroney, who embodies everything one might wish for in a colleague. Thanks, too, to all those generous individuals listed on a following page who have, by contributing to Opera Philadelphia, made Festival O possible.

If you are inspired or pleased or even provoked by what you see and hear during O19, I hope you will add your name to that list.

Thank you for your patronage of and enthusiasm for Opera Philadelphia.

Peter Leone Chairman Festival O19 9

CAPTIVATING LOVE Find your next adventure at

12 Opera Philadelphia

from the GENERAL DIRECTOR D

ear Friends,

It is hard to believe we have already arrived at our third annual fall festival, O19. It seems like only yesterday that we gathered to announce Festival O and here we are, with two years, 55 performances, and multiple world premieres under our belts, presenting another 12-day slate of talent and innovation being staged across seven Philadelphia venues.

Festival O is made possible by the incredible talent, energy, generosity, and spirit of discovery invested by Opera Philadelphia’s tirelessly supportive Board of Directors, dedicated and creative staff, boundlessly inventive artists, and generous donors. Each of the people credited in this book have a hand in crafting O19.

I am especially thrilled by the lineup curated by our incredible artistic team led by Jack Mulroney Music Director Corrado Rovaris and Vice President of Artistic Operations David Levy. The spirit of Festival O is evident across the artistic lineup, beginning with the company premiere of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, a staple of European opera houses that has not gotten its just celebration in the U.S., despite the fact that it premiered in Chicago nearly 100 years ago. This delightful comedy pairs nicely with Handel’s Semele at the Perelman Theater in a co-production with Opera Omaha from director James Darrah. After Anthony Roth Costanzo whetted our appetites for Handel in O18’s inventive Glass Handel, it’s thrilling to present our first production from the composer since a 1990 staging of Ariodante, and with a powerhouse cast including the company debut of Amanda Forsythe and Alex Rosen and the returns of Daniela Mack, Alek Shrader, Tim Mead, and Sarah Shafer.

These two new-to-us works are presented alongside two brand-new creations: Denis & Katya by composer Philip Venables, librettist/director Ted Huffman, and co-creator Ksenia Ravvina, which explores the dark side of our screen-obsessed world; and Let Me Die from vocalist/creator Joseph Keckler and director/dramaturge Elizabeth Gimbel, co presented as part of the 2019 Fringe Festival.

Your Festival O19 experience doesn’t end with these four productions. You’ll also get the chance to hear some of the amazing singers from the Curtis Institute of Music in weekend recitals; you can revisit the spring production of Puccini’s La bohème in an HD Opera on the Mall broadcast to kick off the festival on Sept. 14; you can talk opera and enjoy the Opera Philadelphia Ale by Flying Fish or a specialty cocktail like “A Crush on Three Oranges” at happy hours across the city; and you can catch opera singers including Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and many others sharing the stage and letting their hair down by rocking out in the new Late Night Snacks cabaret series.

We are happy that you are joining Philadelphia in this exploration of what opera can be to as many people as possible.

David B. Devan General Director & President

Festival O19 13

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Festival O19 15

Q & A

with

Corrado Rovaris

Opera Philadelphia pays tribute to Jack Mulroney Music Director Corrado Rovaris throughout the 2019–2020 season. Since making his house debut in 1999, the esteemed Italian conductor has

“presided over a striking evolution at Opera Philadelphia” (Opera News), playing a key part in establishing the company as “one of American opera’s success stories” (The New York Times). In this interview, the Maestro reflects on two decades in Philadelphia.

Photo by Sofia Negron

What do you remember about your first appearance at Opera Philadelphia, leading Figaro back in 1999?

treated me and my family, and I had a wonderful experience. It was also a surprise to see such a beautiful opera house, the Academy of Music.

I will never forget my first night in Philadelphia, 20 years ago. Because before, I was in Rome, having a wonderful dinner at night in the square, and then I arrived in Philadelphia, and at 9:30 p.m., it was impossible to get a meal in Center City. I thought, ‘Oh, this is really a little strange.’

Now it’s a completely different city.

You were already conducting at leading Italian opera houses and festivals when you were first offered the position of Music Director in Philadelphia. What led you to accept it?

After that first day, I started loving being here, and loving the people here. Everyone was so nice with me, and they treated me so well, despite my very bad English, and I will never forget that month, my first month, because of how people 16 Opera Philadelphia

I came to Philadelphia three times. And after the third production, Robert Driver, who was the General Director, came to see me in Venice, when I was conducting at La Fenice. Every day he was adding a piece to the conversation, trying to convince me to become the director in Philadelphia. And of course, the first time I said, ‘No, no, I can’t,’ because the first thing he said

is not just ‘I want you to become the director,’ but ‘I want you to move to Philadelphia.’ I was living in Milan, I had family – it was not easy to move with the family to Philadelphia, but … he wasn’t giving up. And finally, my wife told me, ‘You know, you were so happy when you were in Philadelphia – why don’t we move there?’

It didn’t happen that week, but I came two times to Philadelphia, and Jack Mulroney finally told me: “You are going to take care of my opera company, and I’m going to take care of your family, and that’s the deal.”

What differences do you notice, as a conductor and music director, between Italian and American opera houses?

There is a huge difference. The deep difference is that in Italy, the opera houses are funded, they get the money from the state, from the government. You’re just focused about the artistic product. But here it’s a private institution, and everything comes from the box office and the private donations. And so, for Europeans, when we come here, it’s a little strange to go to ask for money from people. But I learned very soon.

Because when you meet people that give you time, they give you money … they say ‘thank you,’ that was something that motivated me, and for these people I would do always 200% or more, because I am very grateful to these people. It was a little shocking to begin with, to learn to turn a profit, but once I got it, I really loved that part of my job.

Would you like to describe any favorite memories from your two decades with Opera Philadelphia?

I always thought that the Academy of Music is a wonderful opera house, but it was too big for introducing new repertoire. Because the moment you have to sell so many tickets, you have to go to standard repertoire or something really all big. The fact that after a few years we had the Perelman, at the Kimmel Center, allowed us to really pick a new road to think about new repertoire, to take a chance to build a new audience, and I think it was the biggest change we had during my time in Philadelphia.

Opera News says you’ve “presided over a striking evolution at Opera Philadelphia.” Are there any achievements and/or productions of which you’re especially proud?

When you are the guest, in an opera house, you take a picture. If you are the Music Director, you shoot a movie. So for me, when I think of these 15 years, it’s more a movie – I’m not able to take a picture from that movie, but I think of it as a journey, a proper journey, so for me, I see how we developed, day by day, the orchestra, the chorus, the way to approach repertoire, the way to approach any style we’re going to play, it’s a beautiful journey.

The fact that we were able to devote so much of our attention to new American opera, that is the most real achievement, I think, not just for me, but for this company, and I think I’m so proud of being part of this journey. It’s something that I think we did very well.

Have you experienced positive changes at the house in recent seasons, especially since the introduction of Festival O in 2017? Can you tell us about them?

Thanks to these new spaces, we were able to try new repertoire. If we think we can stay in our big opera house and wait for people to come, I think it’s done, that moment. We have to be part of the city, and the festival allows us to play in the same period, different music, different style, different location, and to be really present in the city, not just waiting for people to come to see us, but to be active in opera in the city. And that’s very simple, but a very important step to take.

We’re trying to say something new, fresh, without losing the connection with the repertoire of opera. I think we’re trying to build a link between the past, the present, and the future, and I hope we will really be able to represent that in the best way for Philadelphia and the opera.

This season, you’re conducting The Love for Three Oranges in the “O” festival and Verdi’s Requiem and Madame Butterfly in the spring.

I gather the Prokofiev and Verdi are both personal favorites. Do you want to say anything about them?

I was pushing for us to play The Love for Three Oranges because I think it’s the perfect showcase for our orchestra and chorus, and I wanted to reward them. It’s something from the standard repertoire, but not so often performed. It’s something for the standard repertoire people to come and see. We’re going to produce it with a wonderful cast and a wonderful production from Europe, it’s really remarkable.

Festival O19 17

Verdi’s Requiem, for my history and vision, it’s touching because I was chorus master at La Scala, and it was written for La Scala’s chorus, and so we were performing very often, that piece, in the church in Milan where it was performed the first time – San Marco in Milan. And so it’s in my heart. And the fact that we can perform here, with my chorus and my orchestra, it’s very moving, and it’s very rewarding for all the orchestra and chorus to work on something so important in the history of music.

What is your particular secret in making musicians happy to make music together?

I think that my job is a lot about music, but it’s even more about the psychological approach, and you never know if you’re doing the right thing. But in my heart, I always hope to find the balance between being very demanding, but at the same time to have that coming from the music point, not because of the ego of the conductor, but I’m trying to show that I’m very

“

“A REFINED, ELEGANT, AND KIND PERSON”

When describing Corrado Rovaris as a musician, one must first describe Corrado the person, because his persona is so entwined with his musicianship. Corrado is such a refined, elegant and kind person, always 100% impeccably prepared musically, always dressed to impress, and always respectful of every artist he is working with. When he enters a room, he has a huge smile on his face, which exudes a musical confidence that relaxes everyone around him in a work environment. From a singer’s point of view, he always has a way of making you feel like you are supported from the first note of the opera to the last: a true talent. Corrado is, in my opinion, one of the hardest working people in the classical music business, and it is proven by the quality of the musical productions Opera Philadelphia presents year after year.

S O N D R A R A DVA N OVS K Y, S O P R A N O

“

hard on myself, and we have to respect the music, because the music, a piece like the Verdi Requiem, is there forever. If you look at the history of music, we’re here for five minutes. Our mission is to serve that in the best way, and to be humble enough to understand that it’s not about us, but it’s about the music, and that’s my goal.”

It must be gratifying to have that long history with the company and see progress and feel appreciation of the musical community for the importance of the company and its growing role as a place for opera worldwide.

Yes, it’s important, so important. When we did Midsummer, to see people saying, ‘you know, I’m not really a Britten fan, but I loved it so much,’ that’s why we are here. It’s so rewarding. I was so happy to hear so many times these kinds of comments. We have to open new doors for people.

Maestro Corrado Rovaris’ engagement as the Jack Mulroney Music Director has been made possible by Mrs. John P. Mulroney.

“

It was nearly 20 years ago that I met Corrado Rovaris in Milan, Italy. I was granted an audition at La Scala where Corrado and the artistic team were looking for a second-cast tenor for The Barber of Seville that next summer. Immediately after the audition, Corrado greeted me and I was given the contract on the spot. He believed in my talent and that opportunity opened so many other doors for me. That was so important for me and my career, but it was also the beginning of a close, lasting friendship that is strong today. I am forever indebted to Corrado, my dear colleague, and even more, my dear friend.

L AW R E N C E B ROW N L E E , T E N O R

“

I got to know Corrado five years ago on rather short notice when I jumped into a production of Don Pasquale at the Santa Fe Opera. What a blessing that production turned out to be, since it introduced me to one of the most special conductors I’ve ever worked with. David Devan has observed that when we perform together, I hardly look at Corrado, and yet we’re always together.

To find a conductor like that, one who shares your musical sensibilities, and has the sensitivity to know exactly what you need while performing, is an incredibly rare thing. He makes me a better singer, helping me grow, while also allowing me to be the artist that I am. To top it off, he’s one of the kindest men I’ve ever known! It is a joy and privilege to honor him at this upcoming recital.

BRENDA RAE, SOPRANO

As former General and Artistic Director, I had the distinct pleasure of first bringing Corrado to our company for his U.S. debut in 1999. I had the privilege of seeing his extraordinary musicianship firsthand, as well as the infectious joy he brought to all of those he worked with. Since then, Maestro Rovaris has helped to shape Opera Philadelphia into the groundbreaking company that we see today—one that continues to garner national and international attention. I am so proud to have been a part of its history.

ROBERT B. DRIVER, GENERAL & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, OPERA PHIL ADELPHIA ( 19 91 – 2 012 )

18 Opera Philadelphia

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Festival O19 125

c u r ta i n s

Why does opera have a historic fascination with death?

BY JULIA BUMKE

“Here we are again!” sings Elizabeth Cree as she hangs from a noose center stage at Philadelphia’s Perelman Theater, swinging ominously as she’s lifted into the rafters. Across the street at the Wilma Theater, teens bemoan “killin’ in Philadelphia” in We Shall Not Be Moved, surrounded by the ghosts of martyred activists who came before them. A year earlier in the Perelman, a religious woman named Bess McNeill dies after a brutal attack from a group of sailors in Breaking the Waves; and a few blocks away at the Prince Theater, a Congolese murderess can’t wash the blood off her hands in Macbeth.

Elizabeth was right, death shows up at every turn in opera: stories of stabbings, suicides, and tuberculosis have run through libretti since the beginning. Joseph Keckler had plenty of deaths to choose from as he crafted Let Me Die, his O19 world premiere, which juxtaposes a fraction of the genre’s many famous death scenes with original narrative and music.

Violetta (Lisette Oropesa), at death's door, is reunited with Alfredo (Alek Shrader) in La traviata. Photo by Kelly & Massa.

20 Opera Philadelphia

What is it about opera that invites so many onstage deaths—and what is it about opera audiences that keeps us coming back to experience them? We go to the opera knowing that its characters are about to break our hearts.

The art form sets up spoilers by default: we read synopses before the performances begin, or are hearing classic tales that have been retold many times over. By dispensing so efficiently with

Mimì (Vanessa Vasquez) is surrounded by friends on her deathbed in La bohème. Photo by Steven Pisano.

plot, operas are freed to focus on the emotional storytelling that gets them there, building to these deaths musically in myriad ways. Death can be a release, an indictment, a moment of catharsis, or a lonely act; sometimes, all at once.

In a 2015 blog post, opera singer Kristen Seikaly looked at 42 of the most-produced operas and found that nearly all operatic deaths fall into three categories: illness, murder, and suicide.

While illness is the least common cause of death in opera, making up 17% of operatic deaths, it is the dramatic focus of two of the most famous: La bohème and La traviata. In both works, the lead sopranos—Violetta in traviata and Mimì in bohème—suffer painfully gradual deaths. The audience knows exactly what’s going to happen to Mimì and Violetta, as do they, but the music teases us with glimmers of false hope.

In the traviata aria “Addio del passato,” Violetta knows she’s done for, but the aria’s shift from a minor to a major key, paired with large ascending melodic intervals, evoke a possible reprieve. Even in her death, there is a moment when Violetta appears to be reviving: her high notes soar and wail, only to come crashing down as she dies in Alfredo’s arms. In the orchestral interludes, Verdi tugs at the audience’s heartstrings with instrumental aches and sighs as Violetta’s health declines. Librettist Arrigo Boito, a later Verdi collaborator, wrote about his experience of these interludes at traviata’s premiere: “The prelude says this with sounds, with elevated, sad and frail sounds, almost disembodied, ethereal, sick with imminent death … that silence, quiet and painful, created by sounds! The soul of a dying woman tied to her body by the subtlest thread of breath!”

These potent musical representations of Violetta’s

Elizabeth (Daniela Mack) makes her confession in Elizabeth Cree. Photo by Steven Pisano.

declining health and emotional state makes traviata’s conclusion all the more heart-wrenching.

Forty-some years after the premiere of La traviata, Puccini expands on Verdi’s techniques of musical storytelling in La bohème. In Mimì’s final scene, there’s a moment where it appears that her tuberculosis is lifting, much like Violetta’s. Her aria builds to a tender climax reminiscent of earlier musical material, oozing with hope amidst hardship with every ascending contour and orchestral swell. But unlike Violetta’s dramatic demise, Mimì slips away quietly, as though merely asleep. Mimì’s voice on her last words is small and simple, marked Festival O19 21

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“pppp” in the score. We in the audience realize her death minutes before her lover does, but are powerless to intervene.

Martha (Marietta Simpson) passes away peacefully with Dany (Frederica von Stade) in Sky on Swings. Photo by Steven Pisano.

Violetta and Mimì’s gradual deaths encourage us as audience members to pity the dying and sympathize with those left to grieve.

Gender norms also come into play: Violetta and Mimì die pitifully by disease, rather than dying bravely in battle or spectacularly with murder.

Even if we approach these characters with twenty-firstcentury skepticism, the music of both operas can still overpower our analytical minds while we watch. The author Ann Patchett beautifully describes the experience of watching La bohème at a Metropolitan Opera simulcast in a Nashville movie theater. “The way I cried at the end of La bohème was expected,” she writes, “and when my friend Beverly in Texas called later that night to tell me how she had cried we both said, ‘Mimì! Mimì!’ over the phone and started to cry again.” Even though both women knew Mimì’s fate going into the performance, the devastating effect of her death on them wasn’t lessened. Their emotional investment as audience members was heightened by anticipation, and by being powerless observers as Mimì fights to avert her fate. Like Patchett and her friend, we filter the circumstances of the doomed love of traviata and bohème through our own lives, inserting ourselves into their heartbreak.

While Mimì and Violetta approach their powerless descent into disease with resignation and sorrow, the women at the heart of Lembit Beecher and Hannah Moscovitch’s contemporary opera Sky on Swings are mad as hell. Danny, the researcher at the heart of the story, knows exactly what Alzheimer's Disease is about to do to her body and mind: “Your facility is charming and I can’t wait to move in and lose my fucking mind and then die,” she spits at a patronizing nursing home aide. When her friend Martha hunts for matches in her once-familiar home, her repetitive rhythms on a single note whip up into a frenzy, cut by her raw recitative that “it makes no damn sense.” The musical settings make their anger radiate off the stage, engulfing us as audience members in the sheer unfairness of what these women are experiencing.

After living in this place of bitterness and fear, the kinship that Danny and Martha feel when they meet one another offers the audience a hard-earned respite. Unlike the women before them, they don’t have to experience this alone, and this commiseration blooms into a tender connection. Love gives them agency and unites them, even in Martha’s death. This makes Martha’s passing a release rather than a tragedy: “I love you. I’m home,” Danny sings as she sits with Martha’s body. Instead of imploring the audience for pity for the characters, Sky on Swings’ conclusion emphasizes Danny and Martha’s courageous living in the face of decline and death.

While death by illness can offer catharsis and release, murder in opera brings audiences morbid thrills and lonely chills. In Mozart’s Don Giovanni, murders are musically delicious, marked by jolting diminished chords and adrenaline-fueled tempi. In Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s Elizabeth Cree, a serial killer’s spree is tracked through a lurid vaudevillian lens, reveling in every spurt of blood. These thrilling and energetic musical gestures keep us on the edge of our seats, but they also keep the deaths themselves at arm’s length. Like any good ghost story or murder mystery, they take us on a hair-raising ride that distances us as audience members from violence’s very real consequences.

Breaking the Waves, by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, interrogates this thrill of watching operatic murder. Throughout the work, the orchestra churns like the sea that confines the protagonist Bess on the Isle of Skye.

Festival O19 23

After Bess’ husband Jan is paralyzed, he pressures her to sleep with other men and tell him about them, dooming her to life as a pariah. Through the orchestra’s murky depths, Bess’ voice— particularly as debuted by the soprano Kiera Duffy—cuts through with knife-like precision, teetering between love and obsession. Rather than enveloping audiences in a murderous mood, the orchestra leaves us feeling as isolated as Bess, accentuating her loneliness as she veers farther from her community’s idea of womanhood.

While the music during Bess’ murder and gang rape is jarring and graphic, jerking to and fro with asymmetrical rhythms, the moment of her death itself is hushed. In her final scene, Bess’ vocal lines pivot from piercing intensity to practically a whisper. Like in La bohème, her voice is quiet, but the effect is of stark musical isolation. She doesn’t get Violetta’s release of dying in her lover’s arms, or the brash musical jolts of Don Giovanni.

Instead, she’s marooned on a hospital bed, flatlining before her friend Dodo can hold her.

Her death offers audience members a different color of experiencing grief, one that is more jarring than cathartic. Through spine-tingling, dissonant sonorities, Mazzoli brings the audience right up to Bess’ bedside, making her experience of violence uncomfortably real.

The final type of operatic death—suicide—is present throughout Opera Philadelphia’s 20192020 season, showing up in Semele and Madame Butterfly. Suicide elicits perhaps the messiest and most complicated emotions of operatic death types. One of opera’s most famous suicidal protagonists, Werther from Jules Massenet’s opera of the same name, even has a social science term named after him. The “Werther Effect” refers to a spike in copycat suicides after a wellpublicized one.

If presenting suicide on stage can have negative social consequences, why present it at all—and why do we seek it out as audience members? The treatment of suicide in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin posits a two-fold answer to this question. Taking the audience from the present day to 800 years prior, the opera centers on an affair between Agnès, the wife of a wealthy landowner, and an illustrator called The Boy. When Agnès and The Boy begin their affair, it is done with the hope that they can control their own destinies, despite how their story has been foretold in the present day. But they cannot escape: Agnès’ husband murders The Boy, and forces Agnès to eat her lover’s heart.

24 Opera Philadelphia

Despite fate’s inexorable pull, Agnès ultimately has the power to create her own death. “Here, look, the man takes a knife but the woman’s quicker, and jumps,” illustrates The Boy, “See how her body has dropped from the balcony, how I pause her mid-fall at the exact centre of the page.” The music at this moment is not loud and climactic, but eerily still. Through it all, three angels watch from the sidelines. “In their face, in their eyes, see their cold fascination with the human disaster,” The Boy describes, “as they turn from the falling woman to where the white lines of the Saturday car park cover the heaped-up dead.”

By freezing the moment of Agnès' agency in time while the angels watch, Benjamin and Crimp bring our focus away from the action on stage to our own psyches. On the one hand, the way the angels watch Agnès' suicide indicts our own morbid fascination with watching juicy, dramatic deaths, challenging us to dissect our emotions in the moment. On the other, Agnès' drastic exercise of agency presents a provocative lesson for our contemporary lives, which are filled with choices to the point of emotional paralysis. Agnès does not die to give us a safe emotional hit of adrenaline or pity. Instead, her death offers a warning about how we observe and act outside of the theater.

In Opera Philadelphia’s 2019-2020 season, death and love remain tightly enmeshed, with death as desperate self-sacrifice (Madame Butterfly) and shockingly public performance (Denis & Katya).

The act of dying elicits evergreen fascination from artists of all kinds, but opera’s storytelling through music, text, staging, and design makes it an ideal medium for pondering the question of death.

Opera’s melodic contours connect the characters’ experiences onstage to us in the audience in a way that text or visual imagery can’t do on their own.

Stories of empathy and emptiness, of loneliness and longing, are far older than opera itself, but they become staunchly modern as we experience them anew from our seats.

Julia Mauro Bumke is a Philadelphia-based dramaturg who specializes in contemporary opera.

She served as the dramaturg on O17’s The Wake World, and designed supertitles for We Shall Not Be Moved, Sky on Swings, and Denis & Katya.

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE Gioachino Rossini

THE MAGIC FLUTE Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE Richard Wagner

RUSALKA Antonín Dvořák WORLD PREMIERE Watch the 2020 Season Preview santafeopera.org 505-986-5900

M. BUTTERFLY Music

Huang Ruo

Libretto

David Henry Hwang

Festival O19 25

26 Opera Philadelphia

WORLD PREMIERE

Denis & Katya September 18, 21–23, 25, 28 & 29 The Suzanne Roberts Theatre Music Philip Venables Libretto Ted Huffman

CAST

C R E AT I V E T E A M

Theo Hoffman*

Director / Ted Huffman*

Siena Licht Miller

Co-creator and Dramaturge /

Sep 18, 21 (matinee), 22, 25, 29

Ksenia Ravvina* Music Director / Emily Senturia*

Johnny Herford* Emily Edmonds* Sep 21 (evening), 23, 28

Scenic and Lighting Design / Andrew Lieberman Costume Design / Millie Hiibel* Sound Design / Rob Kaplowitz Video Design / Pierre Martin* Stage Manager / Brett Finley

Principal support has been provided by the William Penn Foundation, The Wyncote Foundation at the recommendation of Daniel K. Meyer, M.D., and Mrs. John P. Mulroney Major support has been provided by Gene and Jean Stark *Opera Philadelphia debut Co-commissioned and co-produced with Music Theatre Wales and Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier Winner of the FEDORA – GENERALI Prize for Opera 2019

Festival O19 27

Synopsis

Denis & Katya

WA R N I N G : C O N TA I N S S P O I L E R S On November 14, 2016, two teenagers in the Russian village of Strugi Krasnye began broadcasting video of themselves through Periscope, a live-streaming website. The pair, named Denis and Katya, explained to their viewers that they had run away, had hidden in a cabin for three days, fought violently with Katya’s relatives when confronted, and were now barricaded in the cabin and under threat by local police and Special Forces.

The Periscope audience grew throughout the day as they streamed more videos. Friends, relatives, classmates, and teachers from their hometown of Pskov joined the live-stream and wrote to them, as did strangers who happened upon it.

By the next day, the story of Denis and Katya facing off against Special Forces had reached news outlets around the world. Thousands more watched their videos. Conspiracy theories bloomed. Fan sites appeared. Denis and Katya became a brief internet sensation.

The opera’s six characters ( Journalist, Friend, Teacher, Teenager, Neighbor, Medic) are all played by two singers. They re-tell Denis and Katya’s story from six very different viewpoints.

The running time is approximately 70 minutes with no intermission.

MUSIC DANCE THEATRE T I C K E T S S TA R T AT $ 2 9 SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE 35% AnnenbergCenter.org // 215.898.3900 3680 Walnut Street 28 Opera Philadelphia

Composer’s Note

Denis & Katya

BY PHILIP VENABLES The last opera that Ted and I made, 4.48 Psychosis, didn’t have much narrative content to it. Instead, it was a rich emotional landscape – I wandered through fields of Sarah Kane’s haunting text, harvesting my own musical dramaturgy from it, without worrying much about narration, character, or chronology. It was a reverie rather than a story.

Therefore, we wanted to put storytelling at the heart of Denis & Katya. We asked ourselves, “In what different ways can opera tell stories?” With just two performers, we have tried to make a world of many characters. Our approach could be called a kind of fictionalised verbatim/ documentary/reconstruction/role-play theater – although I don’t think we’ve yet decided exactly how to describe it. Our inspirations were documentaries and crime-based reconstructions, where a series of interviews with people surrounding the event are rapidly intercut, along the chronology of events, to reconstruct the story from many partial viewpoints. We didn’t want to dramatize Denis and Katya themselves as characters – that felt insensitive to their very real tragedy.

We’ve made this piece in a very collaborative way, devising form and content together between Ted, Ksenia, Pierre, and me. Ted and Ksenia gathered text and conducted interviews with a journalist and a friend of Denis, and other material was fictionalized from secondary sources like TV talk shows, newspaper articles, etc. We’ve edited these ‘interviews’ in the same way that one might edit a TV documentary – quickly flicking from one talking head to the next to present a kaleidoscopic view of real-life events. This challenged me to create musical characterisations of each person that are strong and different enough that the abrupt cuts between interviews are clear. Nothing is through-composed, transitions are never organic. These cuts are indicated with a sound and a label for each character, to make the role-play form of the opera as clear as possible.

That spirit of role-play theater is important to us. There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between performer and character. Instead we’ve tried to give each character a different dramaturgical “mode,” rendered differently by the two

Composer Philip Venables. Photo by Dominic M. Mercier.

performers. The Journalist and the Friend (our main characters) are essentially solo sung roles, but with additional spoken text provided by the opposite performer. The Neighbor and the Teenager, both in Russian, are live translated for the audience by the other number. The Teacher and the Medic are played by both performers at once, in an effort to keep some distance or artificiality between character and stage representation.

We have marked out the roleplay “arena” with our four cellists at each corner of the stage. Many people have asked me, why four cellos? We really wanted Denis & Katya to be a small and tourable piece. Our original idea of string quartet I found a bit predictable, and I always have a fetish for groups of the same instrument. (My last opera had three baritone saxophones and three violas in amongst the 12-strong ensemble.) The cello spans the range of both singers, just about, and packs a punch, both aurally and visually, when four of them play together. With identical sound but spatially separated we have the possibilities of absolute unity and four individual soloists. There is no conductor – the piece is all made from the six performers on stage together, hopefully like a collective act of spontaneous music theater.

Festival O19 29

Director’s Note

Denis & Katya

Composer Philip Venables, director/librettist Ted Huffman, mezzo Siena Licht Miller, co-creator and dramaturge Ksenia Ravvina, and baritone Johnny Herford. Photo by Dominic M. Mercier.

BY TED HUFFMAN I first read about Denis and Katya in late November 2016, more than a week after the events in Strugi Krasnye. An article appeared in my newsfeed – I remember the image of the two teenagers holding guns and the headline’s comparison to Romeo and Juliet. It was a “sponsored” article, the kind that makes you think, I shouldn’t open that. It’s just trash. And yet I clicked. I was curious.

This was six months after composer Philip Venables and I had premiered our first show together in London. Since then, we had been talking about different ideas for our next piece.

It didn't occur to me right away that this story could be the basis of an opera, but the details of it stayed with me. A month later, around Christmas, I sent Philip links to articles about the story. We both started to go down internet rabbit holes.

Fast-forward a year and a bit. Philip and I had mentioned the idea of an opera based on Denis and Katya to David Devan at Opera Philadelphia; in the spring of 2018, they offered us the chance to make a piece for the O19 festival. We jumped.

We knew that we didn’t want to dramatize Denis and Katya’s story in a traditional way – we didn’t want anyone to play them. We were interested in creating a kind of operatic docu-drama, based on verbatim text gathered from real sources.

Together with our co-creator, Ksenia Ravvina, 30 Opera Philadelphia

we reached out to people who had been involved with the story, and we traveled to Russia to meet some of them. We ended up using a lot of text from two sources who also became our two main characters: an investigative journalist who wrote about Denis and Katya for a leading newspaper and one of Denis’ best friends. We constructed other characters and texts from speaking with people in local cafes, watching TV interviews, reading newspaper articles and looking at online chat groups about the story. All the verbatim text has been re-constructed and fictionalized for the purposes of making a piece of music theater.

The story of Denis and Katya contains many inherently fascinating angles that caught the international media’s attention. In the end, we don’t know exactly what happened to them in the cabin. We know that they wanted an audience. The mystery around what happened next opens up an important possibility for exploration, and therefore for theater. How do we, individually and collectively, speak about things we do not or cannot know for certain?

This seems to me one of the crucial questions we face now, living so much of our lives on the internet, a place where fact and fiction are often indistinguishable, and where we are assaulted by stories at every turn.

Denis & Katya is, for me, a story about a story. It is about the stories we tell, why we tell them, why we are drawn to listen, and how those stories might change us.

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C H A U TA U Q U A I N S T I T U T I O N • C H A U TA U Q U A , N Y • O P E R A . C H Q . O R G

Aren’t you performing, too?

BY AUBREY NAGLE

A teenage couple declares their love, clashes with their families and, unwilling to be parted, run away together. By the end of the dramatic tale, they’re both dead.

No, not Shakespeare. This story is a much more modern performance.

In 2016, two Russian 15-year-olds named Denis Muravyov and Katya Vlasova ran away from home after fighting with their parents, according to news reports. The couple holed up in a cottage owned by Katya’s stepfather, who kept weapons at the house, for several days. Their parents unsuccessfully tried to coax them out, resulting in angry altercations that ended with Denis shooting Katya’s mother in the hip with an air pistol. Special forces arrived and the teens used the guns they found inside to engage in a standoff with police, firing at them from the windows.

Eventually the police stormed inside to find the two, reportedly shot to death.

The thoroughly modern twist to this tragedy is that it all unfolded in real time online. The couple posted photos of guns to Instagram from their hideout and livestreamed the shootout via Periscope. It’s said that dozens of their friends watched as they whiled away their final hours, narrated the events as they happened and wondered how the standoff would end. They filmed 32 Opera Philadelphia

themselves playing with weapons, bottles of liquor in the background, and posted what read like farewell messages on a Russian social media platform. They even answered questions sent in by viewers watching live.

You must wonder, what did the audience think they were watching? Did they see it as the Shakespearean tragedy that it was? Did some suspect it was all an act, put on just for the camera?

Could it have been both?

We know what performers look like: singers, actors, dancers, TV stars, athletes.

They get on stage or screen or on the field and they create and do things that the rest of us, the watchers, cannot or will not. They entertain and inform; they bring us together for brief moments of wonderment or consideration. And then the performance ends. Throughout, the audience remains passive, defined.

This notion of performance, of doers versus observers, is outdated. Interactive experiences, the breaking of the fourth wall – artists have been dismantling traditional definitions of “performance” for centuries.

Yet a stronger force has managed to turn everyday life into one giant interactive performance more efficiently than even the most dynamic artists ever could. That force is likely sitting in your pocket or your purse right now, ideally on silent.

Social media and the rapid proliferation of it via the smartphone have turned us all into performers, and in under a decade, no less. By allowing us to peer into the lives of others on a near constant basis, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and their ilk have taught us all to look at our own lives through a screen, too.

Carefully curating our own identities and images through our newsfeeds and profile pictures is an inherently performative act. No matter what you post, whether it’s happy, fun times with loved ones, selfies when you’re looking your best, goofy, self-deprecating jokes, or broadcasts of your political leanings, you’re building an online version of yourself for others to consume. That information tells a story about you, and it’s not an objective one – not because we’re all consciously trying to deceive others, but because we can’t share literally every aspect of our lives. We must pick and choose, and often we pick what makes us look content or successful or attractive to others.

Just like a painted portrait is different than who you see in the mirror, your online self is distinct from your “true” self.

It’s a character that you perform for the audience of your friends and family.

Facebook has 2.38 billion performers.

Instagram has another 1 billion.

WhatsApp has 1.5 billion. Thanks to the work of those performers and their many posted performances, Facebook, which owns all three apps, made $22 billion in profit in 2018.

Not only do we mold our online selves into who we wish to be for these massive

audiences, but we sometimes mold our offline experiences to fit the stage.

We watch live concerts through a lens to take a blurry, far away video that we will never watch again. We take on silly stunts and practical jokes or stage elaborate “gender reveal” parties and viral marriage proposals. We search online for vacation destinations that photograph well.

Why? To entertain our audiences, of course.

They don’t buy tickets or patronize us, but they do leave us their reviews with every click and swipe. That’s why every app has a “like” button but no “dislike” button. If users felt “disliked” when they performed, if they were thrown tomatoes instead of roses, they might not come back. And that’s bad for the bottom line in Silicon Valley. So, instead, they’ve made theater geeks of us all, begging for an encore and soaking up every show we can like a festival goer with an all-access pass.

It’s impossible to ignore the context of the pervasive performative impulse social media elicits from its users (read: all of us) when considering the tragic deaths of Denis and Katya, just as it’s impossible to predict what their lives would have been like without access to devices from which to broadcast them to the prying eyes of the internet. Were they paying attention to the comments or how many people were watching the videos filled with guns and farewells and declarations that they had no other options? Would they have had other options if they had not immortalized their actions with live footage, producing evidence and Festival O19 33

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countless witnesses to their crime? They said they feared prison time if they surrendered.

Why did they hit record in the first place? Because they knew an eager audience was waiting?

Recreating their story for the stage requires many layers – it’s a performance of a performance. There is the literal one, of the singers on stage performing as people who sat in the audience of Denis and Katya’s tragedy, those who witnessed it in real time.

Then there are the words of the composer and librettist woven throughout, shown as text messages they exchanged as they became an audience to the aftermath of the teens’ deaths. Their texts are a performance, too, chosen to show what they want to reveal about their conversations, nothing more and nothing less.

Then, of course, at the heart of the narrative is the ultimate performance of Denis and Katya, now playing again and again for new audiences.

And those audiences – you – are performing, too. Whether you post about your attendance on social media or vocally abstain from such low-brow

34 Opera Philadelphia

pursuits as social media – even if the idea of the internet doesn’t cross your mind at all today, you’re performing. You perform yourself for the date you came with, to the friends you run into. And you perform the role of the watchful audience member.

Comparing Denis & Katya’s story to that of Romeo and Juliet is almost too easy, not just because its content is that of two young star-crossed lovers doomed to death, but because it too is a tragic performance.

After all, as the Bard said, All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; So, we are all players, performers.

The question is: who are you performing for?

Aubrey Nagle is a writer, editor, and media literacy advocate working in Philadelphia.

She is a Project Editor at Resolve Philadelphia.

Composer & Librettist Bios

Philip Venables

composer

Philip Venables’ music is often concerned with violence, politics and speech within concert music and opera. The Guardian has described him as “one of the finest composers around.”

Venables was born in Chester in 1979 and lives between London and Berlin. He studied at Cambridge University and then at the Royal Academy of Music, which elected him Associate (ARAM) in 2016 for his significant contribution to composition. He was awarded an AHRC grant for Ph.D research into speech, violence, and music at the Royal Academy of Music from 2012-2013, and was a Soundhub Associate with the LSO at St Luke’s in the same season. He completed his doctorate at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama with Julian Philips and James Weeks. He is a director of the agency Bright Ivy Ltd. He collaborates extensively in cross-media work, including with artist Douglas Gordon on Bound to Hurt, with drag/performance artist David Hoyle on Illusions, The Gender Agenda, and sound installation Canal Street and with violinist Pekka Kuusisto on Venables plays Bartók. His debut album Below the Belt was released on NMC in 2018 and praised by BBC Music Magazine.

Venables made his Royal Opera debut in 2016 with 4.48 Psychosis (dir. Huffman) based on the text by Sarah Kane, the first ever permitted adaptation of her work. The opera was critically acclaimed at its premiere and again at its 2018 revival and won the 2016 UK Theatre Award for Opera, the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Large-scale Composition, the 2017 British Composer Award for Stage Work, and was nominated for an Olivier Award and Sky Arts South Bank Award.

He was a MacDowell Fellow with director Ted Huffman in 2017.

Denis & Katya

Ted Huffman

librettist / director Underwritten by Ira Brind and Stacey Spector Based in London, Ted Huffman is a multi-award winning director of opera and music theater.

His production of 4.48 Psychosis (Venables/Kane) for the Royal Opera House won the UK Theatre Award for Best Opera Production as well as best production nominations for an Olivier Award, RPS Award, and South Bank Sky Arts Award. His production of Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno for the Royal Theater Copenhagen and Malmö Opera recently received a Reumert Prize nomination for Best Opera and will play next year at the Opéra national de Montpellier.

Other awards include the WhatsOnStage Award and an RPS Award nomination for The Lighthouse (Maxwell-Davies) in the Linbury Theatre and a Best Director nomination in the Opernwelt Jahrbuch for El Cimarrón (Henze).

During the 2019-2020 season, Ted will direct the world premiere of The Girl With a Pearl Earring (Opernhaus Zürich), A Midsummer Night,s Dream (Deutsche Oper Berlin), Les mamelles de Tirésias (Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia), 4.48 Psychosis (Opéra national du Rhin), and Madama Butterfly (Opera Philadelphia, Opéra national de Montpellier), plus a new staging (to be announced) for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

His past work includes Madama Butterfly (Opernhaus Zürich), Rinaldo (Oper Frankfurt), Salome (Oper Köln), Arthur Lavandier’s Le premier meurtre (Opéra de Lille), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opéra national de Montpellier), Luke Styles’ Macbeth (Glyndebourne), Ana Sokolovic’s Svádba (Festival Aix-en-Provence, Opéra Angers-Nantes, Les Théâtres de la ville de Luxembourg, Festival Ljubljana), Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (La Monnaie, Festival d’Aixen-Provence, Dutch National Opera, Juilliard Opera, Aldeburgh Festival), and Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (Central City Opera, Juilliard Opera, Greenwich Music Festival).

Ted studied Humanities at Yale University and apprenticed at San Francisco’s Merola Opera Program. He was a MacDowell Fellow in 2017.

Festival O19 35

Artist Bios

Denis & Katya

Emily Edmonds mezzo-soprano

Sydney, Australia Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: L’enfant, L’enfant et les sortilèges, Komische Oper Berlin; Varvara, Káťa Kabanová , ROH; Semira, Artaserse, Pinchgut Opera NEXT: Dorabella, Così fan tutte, Classic Opera Company

Johnny Herford baritone

London, United Kingdom Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Traveller, Curlew River, Opéra de Dijon; Josef K, The Trial, ROH/Music Theatre Wales; Various Roles, The Golden Dragon, Tongyeong International Music, South Korea NEXT: Denis & Katya, Music Theatre Wales

Millie Hiibel costume design

Winnemucca, Nevada Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Costume Designer, The Magic Flute, Opera Maine; Costume Designer, Saint Joan, Delaware Theatre Company; Costume Designer, Double Exposure, Opera Philadelphia NEXT: Costume Designer, The Flying Dutchman, Opera Maine

Theo Hoffman

baritone Underwritten by Ellen Steiner New York, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT : Count Almaviva, The Marriage of Figaro, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; Paul, Les Enfants Terribles, Opera Omaha ONE Festival; Mr. Kallenbach, Satyagraha, Los Angeles Opera NEXT : Papageno, The Magic Flute, Los Angeles Opera

Rob Kaplowitz

sound design Andover, Massachusetts 2018 Ne Quittez Pas; 2017 We Shall Not Be Moved RECENT: Composer, Minors, Lantern Theater Co.; Sound Curator, The Blue Hour, Prague Quadrennial; Sound Designer, Fourteen, National Constitution Center NEXT: Sound Designer, Gloria, A Life, ART Boston

36 Opera Philadelphia

Artist Bios

Denis & Katya

Andrew Lieberman scenic and lighting design Decatur, Illinois 2018 Sky on Swings; 2015 Don Carlo RECENT: Set Design, Sky on Swings, Opera Philadelphia; Set and Lighting Design, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Royal Danish Opera; Set and Lighting Design, Het Hout, International Theater Amsterdam NEXT: Set Design, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Opernhaus Zürich Pierre Martin video design

Lille, France Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Video Design, Falling Man, Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam; Video Design, Die Walküre, London Philharmonic Orchestra; Video Design, Joueurs, Mao II, Les Noms, Festival d’Avignon NEXT: Video Design, Siegfriede, London Philharmonic Orchestra

Siena Licht Miller mezzo-soprano Underwritten by Carol and Howard Lidz Portland, Oregon 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 The Magic Flute RECENT: Hermia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opera Philadelphia; Zweite Dame, The Magic Flute, Opera Philadelphia; Kitty Oppenheimer, Doctor Atomic, Curtis Opera Theatre NEXT: Alto Soloist, Beethoven Missa solemnis, Charlotte Symphony Ksenia Ravvina co-creator and dramaturge

Saint Petersburg, Russia Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Director, Adolescence, Ruhrtriennale; Director, Makulatur, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm; Director, Elements, 180°, Festival and Laboratory for Innovative Art, Sofia, Bulgaria NEXT: Director, Techno-Oper in 3 Akten, Atelierfrankfurt

Emily Senturia music director San Francisco, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Conductor, Ariadne auf Naxos, Wolf Trap Opera; Conductor, La traviata, Hawaii Opera Theatre; Conductor, The Barber of Seville, Washington National Opera NEXT: Conductor, Fellow Travelers, Boston Lyric Opera

Festival O19 37

Artistic & Production Team

Orchestra

Denis & Katya

Production Supervisor Cynthia Hennon Marino

The Denis & Katya Orchestra is underwritten by Andrew J. Martin-Weber

Associate Lighting Designer Christopher Frey

CELLO 1 Branson Yeast

Head Carpenter Paul Hewitt

CELLO 2 Rose Bart

Principal Pianist Emily Senturia*

CELLO 3 Jean Kim

Assistant Orchestra Librarian Nathan Lofton

CELLO 4 Jennie Lorenzo

Assistant Stage Manager Samantha Dugan* English Diction Coach Lynn Baker Russian Diction Coach Ghenady Meirson* Costume Coordinator Gina Colacci* Supertitles Author Julia Bumke Supertitles Operator Kevin Laskey* *Opera Philadelphia debut

EMERGING VOICES:

Art Song & Social Connection January 13 – 24, 2020 Six concerts exploring the role of art song as a powerful vehicle for social exchange. pcmsconcerts.org/emerging-voices 38 Opera Philadelphia

A NEW

CYCLE

APRIL - MAY 2020 S I R AN D REW DAV I S

CONDUCTOR

S I R DAVI D POU NTNE Y

C HRI ST I NE GO ERKE

DIRECTOR

“Full of entertaining touches and striking imagery.”

– THE NEW YORK TIMES

B U RKHARD FRIT Z

“Nothing short of a triumph on all fronts.”

– CHICAGO TRIBUNE

ERI C O WENS

S AMUEL YO UN

TANJA ARI ANE B AUMG ART NER

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LYRICOPERA .ORG/RING 312.827.5600 ST EP HEN MI LLI NG PHOTO: CORY WEAVER

Festival O19 39

40 Opera Philadelphia

C O M PA N Y P R E M I E R E

Semele

September 19, 21, 24, 26 & 28 Perelman Theater Music George Frideric Handel Libretto derived from a drama by English playwright William Congreve

CAST

C R E AT I V E T E A M

Semele / Amanda Forsythe*

Conductor / Gary Thor Wedow

Juno/Ino / Daniela Mack

Chorus Master / Elizabeth Braden

Jupiter / Alek Shrader Athamas / Tim Mead

Cadmus/Somnus / Alex Rosen* Iris / Sarah Shafer

Principal Dancer / Lindsey Matheis*

Director / James Darrah Choreographer /

Gustavo Ramirez Sansano*

Scenic and Lighting Design /

Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock*

Costume Design / Sarah Schuessler* Projection Design / Adam Larsen Wig and Make-Up Design / David Zimmerman

Stage Manager / Brandon Ehrenreich

Aurora Productions in the Perelman Theater are underwritten, in part, by the Wyncote Foundation at the recommendation of Frederick R. Haas, and by Mr. Allen D. Black and Mr. R. Randolph Apgar Additional underwriting support provided by Barbara Augusta Teichert This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts *Opera Philadelphia debut Co-production of Opera Philadelphia and Opera Omaha

Festival O19 41

Director’s Note

Semele

A conversation between director James Darrah & costume designer Sarah Schuessler Director James Darrah and designer Sarah Schuessler have collaborated more than fifteen times on a wide range of projects, from musicals to operas, and even a music video in the Mojave desert for Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers, and a now legendary new production of Peter Grimes with the San Francisco Symphony. They first collaborated on Semele in Seattle in 2014 and re-designed elements for a new production premiere with Opera Omaha in 2016.

Schuessler makes her Opera Philadelphia debut designing Semele now specifically for O19 and Darrah sat down with her to discuss their multi-year process.

James Darrah: I don’t think there are many

pieces I’ve visited three full times in this kind of unique evolving production. So many productions are often boxed up and put back on stage exactly “as they were” and I love that here we have the opportunity to really examine all of our choices and make the piece again in 2019. We’ve also been given some flexibility to rethink elements of design. Can you describe how your own choices may have evolved over the past five years of living with these characters and this piece?

Sarah Schuessler: I think in general I always

set out to create a world of costumes for this that are not grounded in any one time period, so that the piece can have many lives over the years.

I personally always try not to make anything too trendy, largely so that it can feel beautiful and timeless. But in wanting something to feel beautiful, functional and somewhat fashionably relevant, there are choices we made in the first iteration that now feel “of a time.” I wouldn’t necessarily say the first production feels dated, but certainly like I was watching a lot of Game of Thrones while designing. Here we are focused on the singers inhabiting these roles and also how to best still tell this story. I’ve changed a few colors, a few silhouettes. Iris and Jupiter changed between the first two productions pretty drastically.

42 Opera Philadelphia

JD: Can you describe the two realms in the opera of the mortal vs. the immortal? What fabrics and colors do you use and why?

SS: I wanted to make the mortal world

feel cult-like and severe, even more than previous iterations. This is essential to make it immediately clear to the audience that Semele’s life is one full of rules and strictures—she’s in an arranged marriage. The chorus men and women are clad head to toe in black: highnecked, long-sleeved, and grounded in leather boots. Skin is almost forbidden. We used silk dupioni to make the men's robes, which has a handwoven, irregularly nubby texture. In contrast then, the gods are boundless and light—their colors are inspired by pale crystals actually. Their skin shows through loosely knit tops, they don't wear shoes, and the women's dresses wrap, for easy on and off (immortal lives are sexy). Our principal gods are clothed in slinky silks—Juno in particular is always dressed to kill. Her first look is also a wrap, as if magically swirled in silk. She moves on to a plunging traveling look, where she's both cloaked for cover, but still needs to be able to flash an asset to her advantage.

And finally she moves to her most formal look, swathed again in silk but this time armored in a gold leather corset.

JD: Where do you like to start a design process—what's your first step?

SS: I wish this were a sexier or more intellectual

answer, but the truth is, I spend a lot of initial time looking at Pinterest. I have a robust, ongoing collection of theatrical inspiration, and when I start a project, I love to pore through my saved images and see what pulls me in.

Sometimes it’s photographs or paintings—that's where I usually find a color palette. Then I dive into fashion photos. I like to assemble a world through these images, and then assign more specifics as I get to know the performers who

will be inhabiting the roles. I think about the action of a character, and what they’ll have to do during the show. This informs the kind of silhouettes that vary among characters. I find these Pinterest boards provide a good jumping off point to talk with the director and other designers about where we’re collectively headed to put together an entire show. I can see everything together.

JD: What do you think your biggest inspirations and influences are as a designer today?

SS: I actually think I'll never get over Alexander McQueen’s exhibit and accompanying book, Savage Beauty. It’s incredibly theatrical work, and sometimes I deliberately don’t show inspiration photos from it to directors, because it can be too much to promise! But I find a lot of inspiration in the textures and shapes he created. They’re beautiful, scary, and animalistic.

JD: What was your inspiration for Juno and Jupiter’s final costumes?

SS: I wanted to show that Juno and Jupiter were gilded in all respects of the word.

JD: Because they are gods at the height of their power!

SS: Exactly. They manipulate and meddle

in human lives, and come out unharmed and unchanged on the other side. Among the wreckage they’ve created, they walk out pristine and sparkling, in coordinated “military” finery.

Synopsis

PA R T O N E Cadmus and his devout followers have created a temple to Juno, the queen of the gods, in order to bless the arranged marriage of his daughter Semele to Athamus. A sacred fire develops on the altar and the chorus proclaims that the omens for the marriage appear favorable. Semele arrives for the ceremony after many attempts to delay the marriage due her new love of Jupiter, the king of the gods. She pleads to Jupiter to intervene and his responding thunder interrupts the ceremony. The symbolic flames on the altar of Juno are extinguished as Cadmus prays for their return. Sensing a war between the immortal spouses, the chorus flees from the temple, but Athamus and Semele’s sister Ino remain.

Ino and Athamus each reveal surprising truths. Both are startled when Cadmus interrupts with the shocking news that Jupiter has abducted Semele. The trio languishes while Semele transcends to the realm of the gods.

Juno, angered at her husband’s adultery, has ordered her messenger Iris to discover where Semele has been taken. Iris reports that Jupiter has built his new mortal lover an elaborate palace guarded by fierce dragons that never sleep. The enraged Juno swears vengeance, and hurries to visit Somnus, the god of sleep, to demand his aid.

Semele wakes and immediately calls out for Jupiter. He arrives in human form, reassures her of his fidelity, and reminds her of her fragile mortality. Semele professes devotion to him, but reveals her discontent that she has not yet been made immortal. Sensing Semele’s dangerous ambition, Jupiter promises to summon her sister Ino from the earth to keep her company. As a gift, Jupiter transforms the palace into a beautiful garden to comfort and distract her…

INTERMISSION

PA R T T W O Ino, enraptured, describes the extraordinary journey to the immortal realm. The sisters are 44 Opera Philadelphia

Semele

joyfully reunited, but Semele is once again distracted by the pursuit of pleasure, immortality and love.

Somnus is disturbed from his deep sleep by the arrival of Juno and Iris. He wakes but refuses to help Juno. She barters, offering his favorite nymph in return for his aid and he relents. Juno orders Somnus to give Jupiter an erotic dream that will make him desperate for Semele. Juno then receives Somnus’ potent power in order to lull any being to sleep on command. She uses this new power to manipulate Ino, whom Juno puppets in order to convince Semele that she has been made as beautiful as a god.

Trusting her sister, Semele sees her glorified reflection and becomes narcissistically obsessed.

Juno, still disguised as Ino, advises that if Semele wishes to become truly immortal, she must refuse Jupiter until he promises to grant any wish she desires. The disguised Juno suggests that Semele demand Jupiter to appear to her only in his true form. Semele eagerly accepts this advice. Juno departs when she senses the approach of her husband.

Jupiter is alarmed when Semele rejects him. He rashly swears an irrevocable vow to grant her whatever she desires, and she demands that he visit her in his true form. He reacts with horror, knowing that his non-human form will instantly kill her. Semele refuses to listen, assuming that Jupiter’s protestations are only to resist granting her immortality. Left alone, Jupiter tries to find a way to save Semele’s life, but is forced to accept his loss. Juno, victorious, re-joins her husband.

Semele sees Jupiter approach as a fiery cloud of lightning and thunder, laments her folly, and is consumed by flames.

Ino, safely returned to earth, announces the tragic news that Semele has perished. Athamus offers Ino unexpected comfort. Jupiter descends with the pleased Juno and announces a decree from Apollo that from Semele’s ashes the unborn child of Semele and Jupiter has risen. Named Bacchus, God of Wine, he will bring a reckless delight to all the earth...

The running time is approximately 3 hours including one 20-minute intermission.

Photo by Kent Sievers

Festival O19 45

Semele

One Affair, Endless Interpretation: Darrah Revisits Semele a Third Time

BY MARGARET ZHANG

Although most renowned for his oratorio Messiah, Handel composed so fruitfully when he was alive that even the most devoted Handelian will have new pieces of work to explore for a lifetime. And for Los Angeles-based artist James Darrah, whose work pairs intimate character studies with otherworldly senses of time and place, there are endless ways in which the composer’s work can be interpreted.

Handel’s works take inspiration from myth, romance, and history, praised by Winton Dean in Handel and Opera Seria as “far more complex and subtly organized … than [they] look … ” It is no wonder that his works are so versatile; after all, Handel captures the full range of the human experience. Amidst these grandiose creations is Semele, a musical drama in three parts. The piece is derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and follows mortal Semele as she—in love with Jupiter, king of the gods—delays her marital engagement with a prince. Her passionate affair with Jupiter persists until Jupiter’s jealous wife Juno schemes for Semele’s downfall.

Although Darrah has spent a lot of time working with Handel operas, Semele is special to him in that the piece itself doesn’t ever really feel finished. In fact, this is his third time delving into this musical drama.

“It continues to yield new discoveries,” said Darrah, “showing us possibilities that we hadn’t even 46 Opera Philadelphia

thought to explore the first time around.” For that reason, this upcoming production will not be just a recreation of his 2016 performance; rather, it will, in many aspects, feel like a new show.

To Darrah, for whom the score is always the basis of inspiration, Semele’s music is so full of life that it inherently calls for movement. In the 2016 production with Opera Omaha, he incorporated a dancer into the production as Ino. “Ino’s character is the most silent,” explained Darrah. “She doesn’t seem to have much agency, and she can’t express what she truly wants.” Thus, Darrah and his team wanted to experiment with portraying the dancer as some extension of Ino’s character, whose passiveness allowed movement to manifest in a significant way.

While a dancer will still be present for the 2019 production, the dancer will no longer be portraying only Ino. Dance will seep through and be used to evoke emotional currents in the entire production, not just to assign traits to specific characters.

Darrah also combines the elements of dance and movement with costume and scenic design in order to differentiate, from a logistical standpoint, between the earthly realm and the godly, Olympian world, within a singular setting on stage. At the same time, Darrah also recognizes how similar in nature the worlds really are—after all, gods in stressful situations tend to exhibit

“It continues to yield new discoveries” Photo by Kent Sievers

their most human traits: their jealousy, their rage, their lust.

Mortal beings are characterized by their untethered longings and heavy emotional currents, and yet, the gods often act in ways that directly resemble those human traits. Above all, this juxtaposition is what Darrah wants to dissect during O19. Despite the clear parallels between gods and mortals, there lies a fundamental difference: gods don’t experience the downfall that humans do when they make mistakes. There are privileges that gods take for granted, such as the immortality Semele becomes so obsessed with, that negate any suffering that a mortal committing the same act would experience.

“I want to experiment with this collision of human desire and larger-than-life, immortal beings,” said Darrah.

Darrah evokes those tensions and emotional currents in the production through not just dance, but also music as a whole, specifically Semele’s Baroque elements. Semele, like other Baroque operas, takes inspiration from when drama and academia flourished in Ancient Greece and emulates how emotion in Ancient Greek drama manifested through song. Following Baroque tradition, then, Semele utilizes a Baroque orchestra, which includes a harpsichord and lute, as well as Baroque bows and Baroque style gut strings, which possess a lower pitch than traditional strings.

Darrah loves that the chorus is used to convey multiple roles, including gods, goddesses, and mortals. Handel operas usually have a singular chorus, but Semele utilizes a body of skilled vocalists, almost like a Greek chorus, who change and evolve throughout the piece. Darrah’s 2019 rendition revitalizes many of these Baroque elements that make Semele such a classic.

Of course, there is much more to Handel’s vocal lines than technical skill. Esteemed mezzosoprano Marilyn Horne was quoted in a San Francisco Opera program as saying that to do a role total justice, one must not only master it technically but also observe what a character is doing and take it on as if it were themselves in those situations. And because each individual has had such a diverse array of experiences, every performance is unique.

With this production of Semele, Darrah is taking advantage of just that. “A piece is richer the longer you live with it,” he said, “and we have a great cast in Philadelphia that’ll bring innovative elements.”

Margaret Zhang is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She studies English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Festival O19 47

Artist Bios

Semele

Elizabeth Braden chorus master

Easton, Pennsylvania 2019 La bohème; 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 Lucia di Lammermoor (partial listing) RECENT: Chorus Master, La bohème, Opera Philadelphia; Chorus Master, Sweeney Todd, Curtis Opera Theater; Conductor, The Wake World, Opera Philadelphia NEXT: Chorus Master, Requiem, Opera Philadelphia

James Darrah director Underwritten by Mrs. Sheila Kessler Los Angeles, California 2018 Ne Quittez Pas; 2016 Breaking the Waves RECENT: Director, The Brightness of Light, Tanglewood, Boston Symphony Orchestra; Director, Les Enfants Terribles, Opera Omaha; Director, Prism, Los Angeles Opera NEXT: Director and Choreographer, Giustino, Theater an der Wien Amanda Forsythe soprano / semele

Underwritten by Carolyn Horn Seidle Boston, Massachussets Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Pamina, Die Zauberflöte, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma; Amour, Orphée et Eurydice, The Royal Opera House Covent Garden; Angelica, Orlando Generoso, Boston Early Music Festival NEXT: Marzelline, Fidelio, The Royal Opera House Covent Garden

Adam Larsen

projection design Asheville, North Carolina 2019 Glass Handel; 2016 Breaking the Waves RECENT: Projection Designer, Prisoner of the State, New York Philharmonic; Creative Director, Bluebeard’s Castle, Houston Symphony; Resident Designer, Soundbox, San Francisco Symphony NEXT: Projection Designer, Frankenstein, Alberta Ballet

Daniela Mack mezzo-soprano / juno / ino Underwritten by Ady L. Djerassi, M.D. and Robert Golub, M.D. Buenos Aires, Argentina 2018 Carmen; 2017 Elizabeth Cree RECENT: Carmen, Carmen, Opera Philadelphia; Rosina, The Barber of Seville, Royal Opera House Covent Garden; Isabella, L’italiana in Algeri, Santa Fe Opera NEXT: Varvara, Kát'a Kabanová, The Metropolitan Opera Lindsey Matheis principal dancer / associate choreographer Brooklyn, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Dancer, BODYTRAFFIC; Lady MacBeth & Lady MacDuff, Sleep No More, Punchdrunk; Dancer, Les Enfants Terribles, Opera Omaha NEXT: Dancer, The Capulets and the Montagues, Opera Omaha 48 Opera Philadelphia

Artist Bios

Semele

Tim Mead

countertenor / athamus London, United Kingdom 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream RECENT: Goffredo, Rinaldo, Glyndebourne Opera Festival; Endimione, La Calisto, Teatro Real Madrid; Hamor, Jephtha, BBC Proms NEXT: Apollo, Death in Venice, Royal Opera House Covent Garden

Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock*

scenic and lighting design Los Angeles, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Scenic and Lighting Design, Alcina, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe; Scenic and Costume Design, Boris Godunov, San Francisco Symphony; Scenic and Lighting Design, Iphigénie en Tauride, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos

Alex Rosen

bass / cadmus / somnus Underwritten by Ms. Joan DeJean La Cañada, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Thésée, Hippolyte et Aricie, The Juilliard School; Seneca, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cincinatti Opera; Farasmane, Radamisto, Opera Lafayette NEXT: Caronte, L'Orfeo, Nederlandse Reisopera

Gustavo Ramirez Sansano choreographer Alicante, Spain Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Choreographer, Les Enfants Terribles, Opera Omaha; Choreographer, CARMEN.maquia, Luzerner Theater; Choreorgapher, 18 + 1, Augsburg Theater NEXT: Choreographer, Spartacus, BalletMet Sarah Schuessler costume design

Belleville, Illinois Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Key Costumer, Vida, Starz Network; Costume Designer, Das klagende Lied, San Francisco Symphony; Key Costumer, Last Man on Earth, Fox Network NEXT: Key Costumer, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, Freeform Network

Sarah Shafer soprano / iris State College, Pennsylvania 2016 The Elixir of Love; 2015 Don Carlo; 2014 Ainadamar RECENT: Susanna, Le nozze di Figaro, San Diego Opera; Azema, Semiramide, The Metropolitan Opera; Poppea, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cincinnati Opera NEXT: Cupid, Venus and Adonis, Opera Lafayette Festival O19 49

Artist Bios

Semele

Alek Shrader tenor / jupiter Underwritten by Ady L. Djerassi, M.D. and Robert Golub, M.D. Euclid, Ohio 2015 La traviata RECENT: Tony, West Side Story, Edinburgh International Festival; Candide, Candide, The Philadelphia Orchestra; Tito, La clemenza di Tito, Ópera de Oviedo NEXT: Almaviva, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Minnesota Opera Gary Thor Wedow conductor LaPorte, Indiana 2017 War Stories RECENT: Conductor, Don Pasquale, Pittsburgh Opera; Conductor, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Cincinatti Opera; Conductor, Die Fledermaus, Utah Opera NEXT: Conductor, La Cenerentola, Seattle Opera David Zimmerman wig and make-up design

Mt. Pleasant, Texas 2019 La boheme; 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 Lucia di Lammermoor (partial listing) RECENT: Wig and Make-up Designer, The 13th Child, Santa Fe Opera; Wig and Make-up Designer, La traviata, Minnesota Opera; Wig and Make-up Designer, Eugene Onegin, Washington National Opera NEXT: Wig and Make-up Designer, Edward Tulane, Minnesota Opera

We applaud the careers of our notable Voice Auditions winners: Eric Owens, 1994 Karen Slack, 2001* Meredith Arwady, 2002 Angela Meade, 2007 Jonathan Beyer, 2009 Sarah Shafer, 2014* Chrystal E. Williams, 2014 Alexandra Nowakowski, 2019 *019 Artists Astral is an early career incubator that fosters ingenuity in rising-star classical musicians in instrumental and voice disciplines.

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Semele

SOPRANO

VIOLIN 1

Abigail Chapman Jessica Matthews Jorie Moss Aimee Pilgermayer Julie Snyder

VIOLIN 2

ALTO Marissa Chalker Patricia Conrad Lauren Cook Ellen Grace Peters Kaitlyn Tierney

Dayna Hepler, Concertmaster Igor Szwec, Assistant Concertmaster Meichen Liao Barnes Charles Parker Diane Barnett Emma Kummrow, Principal Karen Banos Paul Reiser Luigi Mazzocchi

VIOLA

Jonathan Kim, Principal Carol Briselli, Assistant Principal Julia DeGaetani

CELLO

Vivian Barton Dozor, Principal Brooke Beazley

BASS

Miles B. Davis, Principal

OBOE

Geoffrey Deemer, Principal Nick Masterson

BASSOON

Norman Spielberg, Principal Emeline Chong

FRENCH HORN

John David Smith, Principal Karen Schubert

TRUMPET

Brian Kuszyk, Principal Steven Heitzer

T I M PA N I

Martha Hitchins, Principal

HARPSICHORD/ORGAN Adam J. Pearl

THEORBO

William Simms

52 Opera Philadelphia

TENOR

Corey Don Bonar Steven Humes Daniel Taylor Cory O’Niell Walker BASS Jean Bernard Cerin Jeff Chapman Mark Housseini Cody Müller Tim Stopper Jackson Williams

Artistic & Production Team

Semele

Assistant Director Gregory Boyle

Wardrobe Supervisor Julia Poiesz

Associate Choreographer Lindsey Matheis*

Cutters/Drapers Mark Mariani, Kara Morasco, Althea Unrath

Assistant Lighting Designer Andrea Rumble-Moore

First Hands Patrick Mulhall, Morgan Porter, Joy Rampulla

Production Supervisor Derek Hachkowski

Stitchers Members of IATSE Local 799

Props Supervision Avista Custom Theatrical Services

Costume Coordinator Kate Edelson

Principal Pianist Michael Lewis*

Wig and Make-up Staff Chloe Griffith*, Mannie Jacobo

Secondary Pianist Annie Brooks

Head Carpenter Jay Wojnarowski

Assistant Chorus Master Robert Whalen*

Head Props Max Durkin

Assistant Orchestra Librarian Nathan Lofton

Head Electrician Travis Johnson

Supertitles Author James Darrah

Assistant Electrician Uel Bergey

Supertitles Operator Jack Schmieg

Flyman Jay Madara

Assistant Stage Managers Tracy Hofmann, Kara Zotigh*

Dancers Justin Campbell, Sydney Donovan, Jesse Jones, Daniel Mayo*

English Diction Coach Lynn Baker

*Opera Philadelphia debut

Festival O19 53

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Bellini

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56 Opera Philadelphia

C O M PA N Y P R E M I E R E

The Love for Three Oranges September 20, 22, 27 & 29 Academy of Music

Music Sergei Prokofiev Libretto Sergei Prokofiev and Vera Janacopoulos

Based on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s adaptation of the play by Carlo Gozzi English translation by David Lloyd-Jones

CAST The King of Clubs / Scott Conner* The Prince / Jonathan Johnson* Truffaldino / Barry Banks* Fata Morgana / Wendy Bryn Harmer* Princess Clarissa / Alissa Anderson* Leander / Zachary Altman Chelio / Brent Michael Smith Ninetta / Tiffany Townsend* The Cook / Zachary James Smeraldina / Amanda Lynn Bottoms* Pantaloon / Will Liverman Linetta / Katherine Pracht Nicoletta / Kendra Broom* Farfarello / Ben Wager Herald / Frank Mitchell Master of Ceremonies / Corey Don Bonar

C R E AT I V E T E A M Conductor / Corrado Rovaris Director / Alessandro Talevi* Chorus Master / Elizabeth Braden Scenic Design / Justin Arienti* Costume Design / Manuel Pedretti* Lighting Design / Giuseppe Calabrò* Action Design / Ran Arthur Braun* Wig and Make-Up Design / David Zimmerman Stage Manager / Michael Janney

The Academy Series is underwritten, in part, by Judy and Peter Leone Additional underwriting support provided by Barbara Augusta Teichert and by Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation *Opera Philadelphia debut Production of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino By arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., publisher and copyright owner

Synopsis

PROLOGUE Four groups of impatient theatre fans argue over the kind of show they want to see – tragedy, comedy, romance, or farce. A fifth group of spectators, the Eccentrics, interrupts them to announce the performance of the main event: “The Love for Three Oranges.”

ACT ONE The Prince has hypochondria. A chorus of doctors tells the beleaguered King of Clubs about his son’s imaginary sickness, which includes a deep depression that keeps him from laughing. The King asks his jester Truffaldino to organize a party to cheer up the Prince. In the underworld, the evil witch Fata Morgana beats the noble magician Chelio three times in a card game, robbing him of his powers to protect the King. Meanwhile, the King’s niece Clarissa and the scheming prime minister Leander conspire to kill the Prince and take over the throne. Fata Morgana’s servant Smeraldina joins their plot

58 Opera Philadelphia

The Love for Three Oranges

and explains that with Fata Morgana around at Truffaldino’s party, the Prince will never laugh, thereby prolonging his sickness.

ACT TWO Truffaldino drags the Prince to the party, but he refuses to laugh at the bizarre performances.

When Truffaldino notices Fata Morgana there and tries to throw her out, she stumbles and falls on the ground. Suddenly, the Prince starts to laugh at her mishap, and soon everybody is cracking up. Fata Morgana is so furious that she curses the Prince, making him fall obsessively in love with three oranges. The King begs him to stay and look after the kingdom, but the Prince instead sets out with Truffaldino on a quest to find his beloved fruit.

ACT THREE A demon named Farfarello blows the Prince and Truffaldino all the way to the hiding place of the oranges: the castle of Creonta, a giant

Synopsis

sorceress and cook. At the castle, the Prince and Truffaldino distract Creonta with a ribbon from Chelio and steal the three oranges. As the two wander back through the desert, the Prince falls asleep and a thirsty Truffaldino opens two of the now-humongous oranges, disobeying Chelio’s directions not to open them unless there is water nearby. Inside each one is a princess who dies of thirst right away; Truffaldino runs off in terror.

The Prince wakes up and finds the princess Ninetta inside the third orange, and they profess their love for each other. The Eccentrics in the audience prevent another tragedy by sending over a bucket of water to the Prince, and he saves Ninetta from her own deadly thirst. The second the Prince leaves to get Ninetta new clothes from the royal castle, however, Smeraldina attacks Ninetta and turns her into a rat. When the Prince returns to introduce his love to the court, he is horrified to find Smeraldina in her place, but the King insists that the Prince honor his word and marry her.

The Love for Three Oranges

ACT FOUR Chelio confronts Fata Morgana about her schemes, and the Eccentrics break the fourth wall again to trap her, clearing Chelio a path to save the day. The Prince’s impending marriage to Smeraldina is upended when Ninetta, now a giant rat, appears on the Princess’ throne.

Luckily, Chelio swoops in and returns Ninetta to her human form. The King, suddenly understanding the plot against him, sentences Smeraldina, Clarissa, and Leander to death – but out of nowhere, Fata Morgana appears and helps the traitors escape. After a collective shrug, the royal court celebrates the newly reunited Prince and Princess.

The running time is approximately 2 hours and 6 minutes including one 20-minute intermission.

Photo by Michele Borzoni

Festival O19 59

Director’s Note

The Love for Three Oranges

B Y A L E S S A N D R O TA L E V I

There are certain operas in the repertoire that could be called “director’s operas”; The Love for Three Oranges is one of them. This is not to imply that its musical aspect is lacking in any way; it is simply that the surreal nature of the plot and the dramaturgy allow for directors to give full expression to creative fantasy in a way that they are not able to with operas of a more realist nature like La bohème or Le nozze di Figaro.

This same freedom, however, also presents the director with a challenge: In an opera where fantasy is the key element, the creative options are so many as to seem overwhelming. Where does one start? Is the opera simply a piece of absurdist nonsense, to be enjoyed as a fleeting divertissement, or does it contain deeper themes which deserve to be highlighted and explored?

The danger of the first approach, in my opinion, is visual excess, in which the production ends up being less than the sum of its parts because of the overloading of gratuitous effects and tricks.

Beneath the fantastical plot and its seemingly random and absurd juxtapositions, lies what is known as a “quest” myth: similar legends include those of Apollo, Perseus, and Siegfried, involving a young man embarking on a ‘rite of passage’ involving many dangers, with the goal of defeating evil (usually in the form of a monster), and often,

of obtaining love. The hero undergoes a process of self-realization and self-awareness through hardship and sacrifice. The innate message of the myth is that only through contact with new, often seemingly dangerous forces, can an individual experience personal growth or maturation.

In choosing a ‘setting’ for this production, I was drawn to the fact that Prokofiev himself composed this opera at a critical juncture in his life. The world must have seemed a very turbulent and uncertain place. Imperial Russia had collapsed, and the newly industrialized and mechanised Europe was still engaged in a World War, the horrors of which were unsurpassed in their magnitude. Within this maelstrom of instability, revolutionary artistic ideas were pollinating. Prokofiev drafted his libretto (based on a translation by Meyerhold of Gozzi’s original) just after leaving Russia for the United States. America must have seemed like a land of great promise and potential, a place for growth, and like many of his famous Russian contemporaries (including Meyerhold) he was fascinated and disturbed by its great new contribution to the world of music: Jazz.

In my production I have therefore alluded to Prokofiev’s personal experiences and his outlook on the world in 1918, drawing parallels between

Director’s Note

The Love for Three Oranges

certain characters in the opera and those that existed in the real world (Emperor FranzJosef, Russian Prime Minister Kerensky, the Suffragettes). The juxtaposition of “serious” ideas and characters from the contemporary world with those from the world of commedia dell’arte and circus helps to emphasise the satirical nature of the opera. In line with the deeper readings of myths, the crucial role of Fata Morgana I have sought to convey as a catalyst of personal development, rather than as simply malevolent.

The melancholic Prince, unable to find joy in a patriarchal European environment, is seeking for something new without even knowing it; the tired delights of his culture and tradition are dead to him. Only through contact with this Morgana, who I have bestowed with allusions to the future, the New World, America, and Jazz (and its spiritual links with the music and cultures of Africa) is the Prince able to grow into full self-realization. There are obvious parallels, too, between Prokofiev’s destiny and the state of Europe in general, both artistically and otherwise; exhausted by the First World War, the countries of Europe knew they had to turn outwards, to America and the New World, for spiritual and material rejuvenation.

Photos by Michele Borzoni

Festival O19 61

Fruit Salad: The Mosaic Modernism of The Love for Three Oranges

BY LEO SARBANES

It is more than surprising that Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, long a staple in European opera houses, has been largely neglected in the United States. Not only did Prokofiev compose the work in America after fleeing the Russian Revolution, but Three Oranges occupies a special status as the first opera by a foreign composer to be commissioned by an American company.

The whirlwind path to its 1921 Chicago premiere became the subject of widespread fascination, and the first performances made a tremendous splash, delighting audiences and shocking critics.

Furthermore, Three Oranges as a mosaic of cultural influences mirrors the American Project, as operas like George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene (1946) would later explore. In fact, when asked of what nationality the opera was, Prokofiev aptly described it as “written in French on an Italian subject by a Russian composer for an American theatre.” More broadly, it is this eclectic spirit, reflected in Prokofiev’s storytelling and music, which makes The Love for Three Oranges a profoundly modern breakthrough in the history of opera.

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Sergei Prokofiev in New York, 1918

An amalgamation of traditional Italian fairy tales, the convoluted story of a hypochondriac prince’s quest for three oranges was concocted by 18th century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, who triumphantly mocked the emerging realist theatre movement by proving that pure silliness still won the day. Russian playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold, who gave his adaptation to Prokofiev as a possible subject for an opera before the composer departed for America, added to the madness with fourth-wall-breaking “spectators” who react to the action on stage.

Prokofiev, however, went a step further, seizing upon these spectators to emphasize the mixedbag nature of the drama. Before the “real” opera

even begins, diehard fans of four different kinds of theatre – tragedy, comedy, romance, and farce – storm the stage to demand their preferred genre.

Their battle is broken up by a fifth group, the Eccentrics, who introduce the tale and simply insist it be seen through to its end. But as the opera progresses, the different factions of this captive audience get excited about different moments: the dark conspiracy to overthrow the Prince, Truffaldino's hilarious party plans, the nonsense of the Prince’s orange obsession, the passionate romance of the Prince and Princess.

Ultimately, despite the comedic veil of parody and pantomime cast over the entire opera, the spectators’ reactions reveal that Three Oranges is truly unclassifiable.

Yet this multifaceted character would barely translate if not for Prokofiev’s extraordinarily vivid score. The wide-ranging musical commentary, while often sparsely orchestrated for the clarity of the text, breathes life into the unpredictable twists in the drama. For the comedy fans, Prokofiev’s inventive musical jokes are sure to entertain, ranging from a curtainraising “trumpeter” honking out a crass fanfare on a bass trombone, to the Prince’s “singing” of groans, shivers, and, most memorably, an overwhelming fit of laughter. On the other hand, the wicked plot against the crown is reinforced by the underworld’s menacing, Beethovenian “fate” motif, building to Fata Morgana’s truly terrifying, ritualistic curse. And in perhaps the most drastic shift of the opera, the emerging love between the Prince and Princess Ninetta is accompanied by a shockingly delicate, gorgeous, and almost impressionistic canopy of sound.

Such stylistic range, though perhaps taken to new heights in this opera, is hardly unusual for Prokofiev, whose music is timeless precisely because it captures everything we feel. Nevertheless, it gives new meaning to the onstage audience. As a trailblazing modernist composer, Prokofiev was deeply frustrated by critics’ attempts to pigeonhole his musical language – for example, by demanding of him a more consistent, conventional lyricism. For Three Oranges, he cunningly pre-empted such attacks, as well as the inevitable backlash to writing an absurd, comedy-filled opera in a time of worldwide upheaval, by mirroring his critics in

The Love for Three Oranges

the single-minded histrionics of the spectators.

Moved by a mischievous impulse strikingly similar to Gozzi’s, Prokofiev reserves his greatest trick for late in the action. Throughout the play, the Eccentrics mostly play the role of a Greek chorus, while scolding the other interrupting spectators for their attempts to influence the course of events. In Act III, however, with the death of two princesses from thirst and the imminent doom of the third, the story makes a beeline for certain tragedy. It is here that the Eccentrics do the unthinkable: they actually deliver a bucket of water onto the stage to save Ninetta, and when this isn’t enough to stop Fata Morgana’s schemes, they trap the witch, allowing Chelio to come to the rescue. Rather than cave to any one dramatic form, by deploying these characters to break the fourth wall from the outside in, Prokofiev seems to thumb his nose at the whole institution of theatre.

An added bonus of this surreal stylistic hybrid is that it allows directors to continue revitalizing Three Oranges with their own interpretations.

Alessandro Talevi’s production for Festival O19 brings the opera’s kaleidoscopic essence full circle by connecting the Prince’s quest with Prokofiev’s personal journey from Europe to the United States. Colliding Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte characters with figures and themes of Prokofiev’s time, Talevi calls to mind the opera’s cross-cultural origins, within a broader narrative reflecting Europe’s post-WWI turn to America as a land of opportunity and rebirth.

The Prince's obsession may not be so random after all. Oranges are themselves a hybrid creation bred to stay fresh for long periods of time. Little surprise, then, that the eclectic drama and music of The Love for Three Oranges make the opera feel fresh more than 100 years on – and, in the context of Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O19, highlight why opera continues to matter in the 21st century.

Leo Sarbanes is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in music.

Festival O19 63

Akhnaten PHILIP GL ASS

MET PREMIERE Don’t miss Philip Glass’s mesmerizing masterpiece Akhnaten starring countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Nov 8–Dec 7, including two matinee performances.

Tickets start at $25

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212.362.6000 Peter Gelb

Yannick Nézet-Séguin

GENER AL MANAGER

JEANET TE LERMAN-NEUBAUER MUSIC DIRECTOR

Artist Bios

The Love for Three Oranges

Zachary Altman bass-baritone / leander

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream RECENT: Starveling, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opera Philadelphia; Henry Kissinger, Nixon in China, Royal Danish Opera; Leporello, Don Giovanni, Virginia Opera NEXT: Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Malmö Opera

Alissa Anderson contralto / princess clarissa

Underwritten by Dianne and Don Cooney San Antonio, Texas Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Maddalena, Rigoletto, San Diego Opera; Witch, Into the Woods, Utah Festival Opera; Frugola and La Principessa, Il tabarro/Suor Angelica, Opera Delaware NEXT: Madame de la Haltière, Cendrillon, Opera Birmingham

Justin Arienti scenic design

Milan, Italy Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Set Designer, La muette de Portici, Kiel Opera House; Set Designer, Andrea Chénier, Teatro Comunale di Modena; Set and Costume Designer, Lucia di Lammermoor, Auditorio de Tenerife NEXT: Set and Costume Designer, Lucia di Lammermoor, Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires)

Barry Banks tenor / truffaldino Underwritten by Mr. Peter A. Benoliel and Ms. Willo Carey Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Roberto Devereux, Roberto Devereux, Welsh National Opera; Adolfo Pirelli, Sweeney Todd, Opernhaus Zürich; Duke of Mantua, Rigoletto, Portland Opera NEXT: Astrologer, The Golden Cockerel, Dallas Opera Corey Don Bonar

tenor / the master of ceremonies Churubusco, Indiana Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Ferrando, Così fan tutte, Temple University Opera Theater; Ernesto, Don Pasquale, Opera Libera; Aeneas, Dido and Aeneas, Temple University Opera Theater

Amanda Lynn Bottoms

mezzo-soprano / smeraldina Underwritten by Nancy and Al Hirsig Cheektowaga, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Paquette, Candide, The Philadelphia Orchestra; Frasquita, Carmen, Buffalo Philharmonic; Frances, The Flood, Opera Columbus NEXT: Zweite Dame, Die Zauberflöte, Washington National Opera Festival O19 65

Artist Bios

The Love for Three Oranges

Elizabeth Braden chorus master Easton, Pennsylvania 2019 La bohème; 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 Lucia di Lammermoor (partial listing) RECENT: Chorus Master, La bohème, Opera Philadelphia; Chorus Master, Sweeney Todd, Curtis Opera Theatre; Conductor, The Wake World, Opera Philadelphia NEXT: Chorus Master, Requiem, Opera Philadelphia Ran Arthur Braun action design

Poznań, Poland Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Action Designer, La fanciulla del West, NCPA Beijing; Action Designer, Les Troyens, Paris Opéra; Action Designer, Don Quixote, Bregenz NEXT: Stunt and Action Design for Klangwolke Festival 2019

Kendra Broom mezzo-soprano / nicoletta Underwritten by Dr. Elida Rouby Bay Area, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Mélisande, Pelléas et Mélisande, West Edge Opera; Speaker, Pierrot Lunaire, Curtis 20/21; Adelma, Busoni’s Turandot, Bard Summerscape NEXT: Kate Pinkerton, Madame Butterfly, Opera Philadelphia Giuseppe Calabrò lighting design

Rome, Italy Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Lighting Designer, La donna serpente, Teatro Regio di Torino; Lighting Designer, A Russian Blueprint, VDNKh Moscow; Lighting Designer, Más cerca de las estrellas, Alcadía de Bogotá NEXT: Lighting Designer, Moires, Triennale Milano

Scott Conner bass / the king of clubs

Underwritten by Scott F. Richard and Mamie Duff Kansas City, Kansas Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Escamillo, Carmen, San Diego Opera; Jupiter/Vulcano, La finta pazza, Opera de Dijon; Mustafà, L’italiana in Algeri, Santa Fe Opera NEXT: Basilio, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Santa Fe Opera

Wendy Bryn Harmer soprano / fata morgana

Roseville, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Freia/Ortlinde/Third Norn, Der Ring des Nibelungen, The Metropolitan Opera; Leonore, Fidelio, Boston Baroque; First Lady, The Magic Flute, The Metropolitan Opera NEXT: Rosalinde, Die Fledermaus, Seiji Ozawa Music Academy Opera Project 66 Opera Philadelphia

2019–2020 season Otello

Verdi’s epic retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy traces the collapse of a hero.

The Magic Flute

Mozart’s comedy traverses a mythical world in search of love and truth.

Don Giovanni

A notorious lover meets his punishment in Mozart’s celebrated tragicomedy.

Samson and Delilah

Seduction and deceit tangle in Saint-Saëns’s sensual grand opera.

Blue

Blue

A family struggles when their teenager is shot by police in Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s D.C. premiere.

Porgy and Bess

Gershwin’s quintessential American masterpiece melds jazz, folk, and gospel styles.

American Opera Initiative Catch several original short operas in their world premiere.

And more!

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Groups call (202) 416-8400.

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Support for WNO and Blue is provided by Jacqueline Badger Mars.

Generous support for WNO Italian Opera is provided by Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello.

David M. Rubenstein is the Presenting Underwriter of WNO.

Additional support for WNO’s artistic programming is provided by Clarice Smith.

WNO acknowledges the longstanding generosity ofLife Chairman Mrs. Eugene B. Casey.

Additional support for Otello is provided byThe Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts and The Dr. M. Lee Pearce Foundation, Inc.

WNO’s Presenting Sponsor

Festival O19 67

Artist Bios

The Love for Three Oranges

Zachary James bass / the cook

Spring Hill, Florida 2016 Breaking the Waves RECENT: Doctor, Wozzeck, Des Moines Metro Opera; Four Villains, The Tales of Hoffmann, Nashville Opera; Frank Maurrant, Street Scene, Virginia Opera NEXT: The Scribe, Akhnaten, The Metropolitan Opera

Jonathan Johnson tenor / the prince Underwritten, in part, by William Lake Leonard, Esq. Macon, Georgia Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Candide, Candide, Des Moines Metro Opera; Hervey, Anna Bolena, Canadian Opera Company; Lensky, Eugene Onegin, Lyric Opera of Kansas City NEXT: Beppe, Pagliacci, Opera Colorado Will Liverman baritone / pantaloon Underwritten by Dr. and Mrs. Andrew Wechsler Chicago, Illinois 2019 La bohème; 2015 Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD RECENT: Schaunard, La bohème, Santa Fe Opera; Malcom Fleet, Marnie, The Metropolitan Opera; Papageno, The Magic Flute, Central City Opera NEXT: Horemhab, Akhnaten, The Metropolitan Opera Frank Mitchell

bass / the herald Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2018 Sky on Swings RECENT: Jesus, St. Matthew Passion, Choristers of Upper Dublin; Soloist, Brahms Requiem, Choristers of Upper Dublin; Elder, Sky on Swings, Opera Philadelphia NEXT: Soloist, Mozart Requiem, Choristers of Upper Dublin

Manuel Pedretti

costume design Bologna, Italy Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Costume Designer, Die Zauberflöte, Teatro Verdi (Padova); Costume Designer, Baccanali, Festival della Valle D’Itria; Costume Designer, Idomeneo, Teatro La Fenice di Venezia NEXT: Costume Designer, The Love for Three Oranges, San Carlo Theater (Naples)

Katherine Pracht

mezzo-soprano / linetta Davenport, Iowa 2015 La traviata; 2013 Die Zauberflöte RECENT: Kate Julian, Owen Wingrave, Little Opera Theater of New York; Ottavia, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Florentine Opera; Countess Charlotte Malcom, A Little Night Music, Madison Opera NEXT: Soloist, Voices of Light (Einhorn), National Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorale

68 Opera Philadelphia

Artist Bios

The Love for Three Oranges

Corrado Rovaris conductor Underwritten by Mrs. John P. Mulroney Bergamo, Italy 2019 La bohème; 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 Lucia di Lammermoor (partial listing) RECENT: Conductor, Orchestra & Choir of the Festival de Lanaudière; Conductor, Artosphere Festival Orchestra; Conductor, La clemenza di Tito, Oviedo Opera NEXT: Conductor, Don Pasquale, Seville Opera Brent Michael Smith bass / chelio

Underwritten by Charlotte and Bob Watts Owosso, Michigan 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream RECENT: Lakey, Ariadne auf Naxos, Santa Fe Opera; Ariodates, Xerxes, The Glimmerglass Festival; Ashby, La fanciulla del West, Michigan Opera Theatre NEXT: Figaro, Le nozze di Figaro, Academy of Vocal Arts

Alessandro Talevi director

Turin, Italy Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Director, Roberto Devereux, Welsh National Opera; Director, Tosca, Opera di Roma; Director, Die Zauberflöte, Central City Opera NEXT: Director, The Turn of the Screw, Opera North (UK)

Tiffany Townsend soprano / ninetta Underwritten by Judith Durkin Freyer and Charles C. Freyer Jackson, Mississippi Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Tatyana, Eugene Onegin, Curtis Opera Theatre; Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, Curtis Opera Theatre; Brenda, Empty the House, Curtis Opera Theatre NEXT: Young Artist, LA Opera Ben Wager bass-baritone / farfarello Underwritten by Charlotte and Bob Watts Havertown, Pennsylvania 2013 Powder Her Face; 2009 The Rape of Lucretia RECENT: Calchas, La belle Hélène, Odyssey Opera; Commentator, Scalia/Ginsburg, OperaDelaware; Zuniga, Carmen, Dallas Opera NEXT: Blitch, Susannah, Annapolis Opera David Zimmerman wig and make-up designer

Mt. Pleasant, Texas 2019 La bohème; 2019 A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 2018 Lucia di Lammermoor (partial listing) RECENT: Wig and Make-up Designer, The 13th Child, Santa Fe Opera; Wig and Make-up Designer, La traviata, Minnesota Opera; Wig and Make-up Designer, Eugene Onegin, Washington National Opera NEXT: Wig and Make-up Designer, Edward Tulane, Minnesota Opera

Festival O19 69

Orchestra & Chorus

The Opera Philadelphia Orchestra is underwritten by Alice and Walter Strine, Esqs.

Maestro Corrado Rovaris’ engagement as the Jack Mulroney Music Director has been made possible by Mrs. John P. Mulroney

VIOLIN 1

Dayna Hepler, Concertmaster Igor Szwec, Assistant Concertmaster Meichen Liao Barnes Donna Grantham Elizabeth Kaderabek Tess Varley Natasha Colkett Gared Crawford Guillaume Combet Samantha Crawford Jennifer Lee

VIOLIN 2

Emma Kummrow, Principal Karen Banos Paul Reiser Heather Messe Luigi Mazzocchi Yu-Hui Tamae Lee Seula Lee Andrea Levine Catherine Kei Fukuda

VIOLA

Jonathan Kim, Principal Carol Briselli, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Jaffe Ruth Frazier Yoshihiko Nakano Joseph Kauffman Kathleen Foster

CELLO

Branson Yeast, Principal Vivian Barton Dozor Jennie Lorenzo Brooke Beazley David Moulton Elizabeth Thompson

70 Opera Philadelphia

The Love for Three Oranges

BASS

Miles B. Davis, Principal Anne Peterson Stephen Groat Daniel McDougall

FLUTE

David Cramer, Principal Eileen Grycky Kimberley Trolier

OBOE

Geoffrey Deemer, Principal Nick Masterson Evan Ocheret

CLARINET

T I M PA N I

Martha Hitchins, Principal

PERCUSSION

Ralph Sorrentino, Principal Bradley Loudis Christopher Hanning Brent Behrenshausen William Wozniak

BANDA: TRUMPET

Steven Heitzer Frank Ferraro Andrew Kissling

TROMBONE

Sarah Han, Principal Allison Herz Doris Hall-Gulati

Phil McClelland Matthew Gould

BASSOON

HARP

Erik HÖltje, Principal Emeline Chong Darryl Hartshorne

FRENCH HORN

John David Smith, Principal Angela Cordell Bilger Karen Schubert Ryan Stewart Lyndsie Wilson Todd Williams

TRUMPET

Brian Kuszyk, Principal Darin Kelly Amy Cherry

TROMBONE

Bradley Ward, Principal Edward Cascarella Jonathan Schubert

TUBA

Paul Erion, Principal

HARP

Sophie Bruno Labiner, Principal Rong Tan

Mindy Cutcher

PERCUSSION Zachary Chrystal

ECCENTRICS

Matthew Adam Fleisher James Osby Gwathney, Jr. Christopher Hodson Christopher Hoster Nathaniel McEwen Kristoffer Mihalka John David Miles Robert Phillips Scott Purcell George Ross Somerville

Chorus

The Love for Three Oranges

SOPRANO

Erin Alcorn Natalie Dewey NoĂŤl Graves-Williams Julie-Ann Green Valerie Haber Evan Kardon Jessica Mary Murphy Christine Nass Evelyn Santiago Amy Spencer

ALTO

Marissa Chalker Patricia Conrad Annalise Dzwonczyk Eve Hyzer Lauren Kelly Carole Latimer Megan McFadden Meghan McGinty Paula Rivera-Dantagnan Rebecca Roy

TENOR

Corey Don Bonar Daveed Buzaglo Sang B. Cho Matthew Coules Stephen Dagrosa A. Edward Maddison Fernando Mancillas Christopher Paul Sierra Daniel Taylor Steven Williamson

BASS

Gregory Cantwell Jeff Chapman Lucas DeJesus Chris Hodges Matthew Maisano Mark Malachesky Frank Mitchell Jack Schmieg Anthony Sharp Jackson Williams

Festival O19 71

Artistic & Production Team

The Love for Three Oranges

Costumes, Wigs, and Make-up are underwritten

by Sarah and Brad Marshall

Wardrobe Supervisor Bridget Reilly Beauchamp

Assistant Director Seth Hoff

Cutters/Drapers Julie Watson

Super Captain Bobb Hawkey

First Hands Susie Benitez

Assistant Costume Designer Andrea Grazia*

Stitchers Members of IATSE Local 799

Assistant Lighting Designer Sasha Anistratova

Wigs and Make-up Staff Chloee Griffith*, Mannie Jacobo

Principal Pianist Grant Loehnig

Head Carpenter Chris Hanes

Secondary Pianist Annie Brooks

Head Props Paul Lodes

Assistant Chorus Master Robert Whalen*

Head Electrician Terry Smith

Assistant Orchestra Librarian Nathan Lofton

Head Fly Stephen Wolff

Supertitles Author Chadwick Creative Arts

Assistant Electrician Ali Blair Barwick

Supertitles Operator Tony Solitro

Supernumeraries Nathaniel Betts* Joseph Colasante* Bobb Hawkey Kristerpher Henderson Jonathan Lopes* Aubrey McKinney* William Robinson* Timothy Sheridan

English Diction Coach Lynn Baker Assistant Stage Managers Jennifer Shaw, Savannah Valigura* Costume Coordinator Hanna Hamilton Props Supervision Avista Custom Theatrical Services

72 Opera Philadelphia

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200 South Broad Street Festival O19 73

74 Opera Philadelphia

WORLD PREMIERE

Let Me Die September 21, 22, 25–28 FringeArts

CAST

C R E AT I V E T E A M

Countertenor / Darius Elmore*

Creator / Joseph Keckler*

Mezzo-soprano / Natalie Levin*

Director / Elizabeth Gimbel*

Dancer/Actor / Saori Tsukada*

Arranger / Matthew Dean Marsh*

Soprano / Veronica Chapman-Smith

Lighting Design / Evelyn Swift Shuker*

Piano / William Kim*

Costume Design / Diego Montoya*

Violin / Lavinia Pavlish*

Sound Design / Isaac Levine* Video Design / Lianne Arnold* Stage Manager / Andrea Martinez

Principal support provided by the William Penn Foundation Major production support provided by Linda and David Glickstein *Opera Philadelphia debut Presented in partnership with FringeArts as part of the 2019 Fringe Festival Let Me Die is a project of Creative Capital and was developed in part during a Roman J. Witt Artist Residency at The University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, with a work-in-progress preview at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Let Me Die was also developed in part during a residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY and, in part, with assistance from the Orchard Project (www.orchardproject.com, Ari Edelson, Artistic Director) and by Camp Fringe 2017 at FringeArts, Philadelphia. The project also benefited from residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Creator’s Note

Let Me Die

BY JOSEPH KECKLER

“Are there deaths in Kashchey the Deathless?”

I asked madly, like someone talking in his sleep. “And how many?”

“It’s complicated,” replied my collaborator Matthew, holding an excerpt of Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act in his hand. “Kashchey the deathless dies. His daughter is transformed into a weeping willow.”

“At least two, good—we’re short on immortals,” I nodded. “Hmmm, another consumptive sure would round things out.”

Sheet music surrounded us, scattered like the shed feathers of a huge traumatized bird. For weeks Matthew and I had rifled through 400-page scores, scavenging only death sequences we might weave into our morbid collage. In the face of the mess, Matthew insisted we make a spreadsheet that catalogued each extracted scene, specifying its originating opera, composer, language, the unfortunate character to whom the demise belonged, and of course an autopsy report: stabbed, self-immolated, poisoned, wasted, starved, drowned, buried alive, crushed in temple collapse, supernatural, and (rarely) natural causes. We rated and remarked upon each moment’s sonic beauty.

I was inspired to do this show for the following reasons: 1. Death is the beating heart of tragic opera.

2. Death hovers around conversations about the form itself. “Opera is alive and well,” and so on.

3. Copyright law allows us to do whatever we want in the present with material of a distant enough past, designated “public domain.” I wanted to celebrate this freedom.

4. I usually write all my own material and imagined (wrongly) it would be faster and easier to feast on the corpuses of dead geniuses.

5. These death scenes illuminate a paradox: depicting bodily failure, they’re often the most athletic vocal displays.

6. When I started singing a voice teacher handed me an aria called “Lasciatemi morire” or “Let Me Die,” a fragment of a lost opera. Is learning to sing learning to die? What if only the deaths in operas survived?

At the time of writing this, I don’t know what the cumulative effect of the collage will be. And moment to moment, will the deaths be deadened? Or made newly alive? Will the spectacle seem absurd, and how freshly so? Climax upon climax, how do you sustain a work that is constantly ending? Will it tip into ecstasy, catharsis, trouble, or exhaustion? We might treat it like a sporting event where each loss is a win.

What do you want the audience to walk away with? I have been asked. How about nothing? I think. I’m certain you’re carrying enough and I’d rather you leave something behind.

76 Opera Philadelphia

The running time is approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.

2020 Festival Monteverdi’s

April 25 & April 30 | 7:30 pm April 29 & May 2 | 2 pm Offenbach’s

the tales of April 26 & May 3 | 2 pm May 1 | 7:30 pm Conceived by Dean Anthony; Music & Words by Michael Ching

April 17, April 28, April 29 & May 2 | 8 pm

TICKETS: 302-442-7807 | operaDE.org This organization is supported, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. The Division promotes Delaware arts events on www.DelawareScene.com.

Festival O19 77

FIND YOUR NEW FAVORITE FILM! Visit Filmadelphia.org for more on our new releases, classic cinema, festival programming and special events. @PhillyFilmSoc @phillyfilmsociety Facebook.com/PhilaFilmSociety 78 Opera Philadelphia

Creator Bio

Let Me Die

Photo by Michael Sharkey

Joseph Keckler

creator

Hailed by The New York Times as a “major vocal talent … whose range shatters the conventional boundaries … with a trickster’s dark humor,” singer and writer Joseph Keckler performs internationally, most often with his own compositions about daily life, which spiral out into the sublime and the ridiculous.

Recent concerts and performances of his work have taken place at such diverse venues as Lincoln Center, Centre Pompidou, Miami Art Basel, PEN American Center, Third Man Records, Composers Now at Opera America, Fusebox in conjunction with The Long Center, and the inaugural Adult Swim Festival. Beth Morrison commissioned his recent theater piece Train With No Midnight, which premiered at the 2019 Prototype Festival to critical acclaim.

appeared in Literary Hub, VICE, Somesuch Stories and Hyperallergic, among other publications.

Keckler has received residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell and has been an artist in residence with Times Square and The Baryshnikov Arts Center. His work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, a NYFA Fellowship, a Franklin Furnace, and once received a Village Voice Award for “Best Downtown Performance Artist” in New York. He is currently working on a TV special, new recordings and videos, and will make his UK debut with an appearance at Fierce Festival and run of concerts at Soho Theatre.

Keckler’s music has been featured on BBC America and WNYC Soundcheck. As an actor, Keckler has appeared in film, as Chaliapin in Dave Malloy’s Preludes, which ran at Lincoln Center Theater in 2015, at BAM and other venues.

Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, a collection of Keckler’s writing, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2017. His essays and stories have also Festival O19 79

0

Photo: Karli Cadel

July 11 - August 25 Cooperstown, NY Tickets start at $26 www.glimmerglass.org (607) 547-2255

THE SOUND OF MUSIC RINALDO Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II

July 11 - August 25

George Frideric Handel/Giacomo Rossi

July 12 - August 18

DIE FEEN (THE FAIRIES)

DON GIOVANNI

Richard Wagner

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart/Lorenzo Da Ponte

July 16 - August 21

July 17 - August 24

GET YOUR TICKETS TODAY! wilmatheater.org

THERE

by etel adnan Co-Created by Blanka Zizka + Rosa Barba with the Wilma HotHouse original music, Music Direction, and Sound Design by Alex Dowling

9.11.19 - 9.22.19 There has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Co-presented with FringeArts as part of the 2019 Fringe Festival.

DANCE NATION

By Clare Barron Directed by Margot Bordelon

10.22.19 - 11.10.19

80 Opera Philadelphia

Artist Bios

Let Me Die

Lianne Arnold video design

Los Angeles, CA Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Projection Designer, Train With No Midnight, Prototype Festival / Beth Morrison Projects / HERE Arts; Projection Designer, Lil Buck & Jon Boogz' Love Heals All Wounds, Royce Hall CAP UCLA & US Tour; Co-Creator & Projection Designer, Words on the Street, Baruch NEXT: Projection Designer, Jazz Singer, Abrons Art Center

Veronica Chapman-Smith soprano

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2018 Sky on Swings; 2018 Carmen; 2017 The Wake World (partial listing) RECENT: Soloist, Gender Equality, Art of The Heel; Veronica, Contradict This, The Bearded Ladies; Elder #1, Sky On Swings, Opera Philadelphia

Darius Elmore countertenor

Los Angeles, California Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Boy Soprano, Cabaret, Ithaca College Main Stage; Countertenor, Apprentice Singer, Lisa Hopkins Seegmiller NEXT: Miles, The Turn of the Screw, On Site Opera

Elizabeth Gimbel

director / dramaturge Brooklyn, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Director, Train With No Midnight, Prototype Festival; Director and Dramaturg, Human Jukebox, La MaMa ETC, Dublin Fringe; Director, Cat Lady, Dixon Place NEXT: Director, Train With No Midnight, Beth Morrison Projects

William Kim pianist Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Pianist, Philharmonic Orchestra of the University of Alicante at Perugia Italy; Pianist, Recital, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts; Pianist, Chamber Ensemble, Mokowsky Hall at the Manhattan School of Music NEXT: Student, Manhattan School of Music Natalie Levin mezzo-soprano

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Carmen, Carmen, One World Symphony NYC; La Contessa di Ceprano, Rigoletto, Santa Fe Opera; Rebecca Nurse, The Crucible, Central City Opera NEXT: An ongoing series of local workshops that include astrology, yoga, mysticism, opera, and glitter Festival O19 81

Artist Bios

Let Me Die

Isaac Levine sound design

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Sound Producer, Strangers From The Internet, Joseph Keckler; Puppeteer/Writer/Sound Producer, A Frog’s Guide To Being Human, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh; Project Organizer/Sound Interaction Designer, Pisces Pool, Electric Forest NEXT: Album Sound Producer, Terminal Leisure, Electric Blanket

Matthew Dean Marsh arranger

Detroit, Michigan Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Co-Composer/Music Director, We’re Only Alive for A Short Amount of Time, The Public Theater; Music Director, Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce, Royce Hall (UCLA); Composer, Romeo & Juliet, Lincoln Center Education

Lavinia Pavlish violin Cleveland, Ohio Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Trio performance with organist Jared Lamenzo and cellist Valeriya Sholokhova to open a lecture by Martin Scorsese, St. Patrick’s Cathedral; Violinist, Riverside Symphony at Alice Tully Hall; Violinist, YouTube Brandcast, Radio City Music Hall NEXT: Concertmaster, Charlie Rosen’s 8-bit Big Band, Berklee Performing Arts Center Evelyn Swift Shuker lighting design

Williamstown, Massachusetts Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Playwright, Mother of Abominations, Solow Fest; Lighting Designer, Publik/Private, Alma’s Engine; Playwright, I’m Not Myself Today, Plant Me Here NEXT: Lighting Designer, Cassandra, Swarthmore College

Saori Tsukada dancer / actor

New York, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Creator/Performer, Club Diamond, Public Theater; Performer/ Deviser, Superterranean, Philadelphia Fringe Festival; Performer/ Deviser, Sleep, Brooklyn Academy of Music NEXT: Performer, Nosebleed, Japan Society

82 Opera Philadelphia

Artistic & Production Team

FringeArts Technical Director Georgia Schlessman* FringeArts Master Electrician Evelyn Swift Shuker* Head Audio Engineer Eddie Smith* Production Manager Peter Smith* Mask Fabrication Tim Belknap* Russian Translators Katya Bezborodko*, Andrew Freeburg*

Let Me Die

Special thanks to Dan Barfield, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Landon Baumgard, Chrisstina Hamilton, Holly Hughes, Colleen Keegan, Eric Jensen, Olivia Laing, Sina Najafi & Simon Critchley, Megan Nielson, Vicki Patraka, Marc Robinson, Erika Rundle, Georgiana Pickett, Ariana Reines, Eleanor Wallace, and Nick Williams.

Everyone at Creative Capital, MacDowell, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Orchard Project, University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, and Yaddo.

Apologies to anyone momentarily forgotten.

Research Assistant Tanner Petch* *Opera Philadelphia debut

Festival O19 83

SEPTEMBER 21, 22, 28 & 29

12:00 P.M.

CURTIS in Concert

FIELD CONCERT HALL

CO-PRESENTED WITH THE CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC

Curtis in Concert S A T U R D AY S , S E P T E M B E R 2 1 & 2 8 , 2 0 1 9 The running time is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission

Sophia Hunt, soprano Rachel Sterrenberg, soprano Grant Loehnig, piano Wild Nights

THE HEART OF A WOMAN

“I baci” Barbara “Wild Nights” “Hop & Toe Dance” “Sounds like Pearls” “Laue Sommernacht” “Ansturm” “Nous nous aimerons tant” “Caramuru”

Strozzi / Anonymous Lori Laitman / Emily Dickinson Jennifer Higdon Brittney Boykin / Maya Angelou Alma Mahler / Otto Julius Bierbaum Alma Mahler / Richard Dehmel Lili Boulanger / Francis Jammes Chiquinha Gonzaga / Furtado Coelho

Against Still Life “The Boy from…”

“The Strong House” “Against Still Life” “Habitation” “Amor” “Hai-luli” “The Heart of a Woman” “Am Strande” “Ihr Bildnis”

Mary Rodgers / Stephen Sondheim Lori Laitman / Sara Teasdale Lori Laitman / Margaret Atwood Tania León / Margaret Atwood Chiquinha Gonzaga / João de Deus Falcão Pauline Viardot-Garcia / Xavier de Maistre Florence Price / Georgia Douglas Johnson Clara Schumann / Robert Burns Clara Schumann / Heinrich Heine

From the Ashes “The Empty Song” “Bind Me – I Still Can Sing” “Forget About the Boy” “From the Ashes” “Ein Hochzeitsbitter”

Libby Larsen / Liz Lochhead Libby Larsen / Emily Dickinson Jeanine Tesori / Dick Scanlan Melissa Dunphy / Nikita Gill Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel / August von Platen Festival O19 85

Curtis in Concert S U N D AY S , S E P T E M B E R 2 2 & 2 9 , 2 0 1 9 The running time is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission

Karen Slack, soprano Martin Luther Clark, tenor David Lofton, piano “Kaddish”

Maurice Ravel / Traditional Hebrew Prayer

“Lord, Thou Knowest” from Scenes from the Life of a Martyr “Justice” “Decisions” “Love” from Songs of Love and Justice “Worth While” “The Jungle Flower” “Among the Fuchsias” “Till I Wake” from Five Songs of Laurence Hope

Dr. Smith Moore Adolphus C. Hailstork / Martin Luther King, Jr.

Harry Thacker Burleigh / Laurence Hope

“Lord, I just can’t keep from cryin’”

arr. Margaret Bonds / Traditional African-American Spiritual

“Ride On, Jesus”

arr. Robert Nathaniel Dett / Traditional African-American Spiritual

“Vogliatemi bene” (Love Duet) from Madame Butterfly

86 Opera Philadelphia

Giacomo Puccini / Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa

Artist Bios

Curtis in Concert

Martin Luther Clark tenor

Marshall, Texas Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: King Charles VII, The Maid of Orleans, Russian Opera Workshop; Count Vaudémont, Iolanta, Russian Opera Workshop; Don Ottavio, Don Giovanni, Curtis Opera Theatre NEXT: Man 2, BLUE, Washington National Opera

Sophia Hunt soprano

Brooklyn, New York Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Donna Elvira, Don Giovanni, Curtis Opera Theatre; Faith, Empty the House, Curtis Opera Theatre; Mrs. Anderssen, A Little Night Music, Aspen Opera Center NEXT: Soloist, Alleluia-Magnificat, Orquestra Filarmônica de Minas Gerais

Grant Loehnig pianist

Jefferson City, Missouri 2018 Fridays at Field RECENT: Head of Music Staff, Opera Philadelphia; Master Opera Coach, Curtis Institute of Music; Head of Music Staff, Wolf Trap Opera NEXT: Assistant Conductor, Das Rheingold, Lyric Opera of Chicago

David Lofton

pianist Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Opera Philadelphia debut RECENT: Conductor, La traviata, Mozart & Friends Opera Company; Conductor, Harlem Boys Choir, Carnegie Hall; Conductor, La bohème, Opera Delaware NEXT: Conductor, Make a Joyful Noise, Neumann University

Karen Slack soprano

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 2007 Porgy and Bess; 2003 Ariadne auf Naxos; 2002 La Périchole (partial listing) RECENT: Billie, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Opera Theatre of St. Louis; Tosca, Tosca, Opera Birmingham; Eternal Mother, Healing Tones, Philadelphia Orchestra NEXT: Serena (cover), Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera

Rachel Sterrenberg

soprano Atlanta, Georgia 2017 The Magic Flute; 2015 Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD; 2015 La traviata RECENT: Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, Orquesta Juvenil Universitaria Eduardo Mata; Donna Anna, Don Giovanni, Curtis Opera Theatre; Chan, Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD, The Atlanta Opera NEXT: Pamina, Die Zauberflöte, Opéra de Montréal Festival O19 87

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2020 ExperienceOpera.org (314) 961-0644

A MONUMENTAL MOMENT. On November 16, the Penn Museum will debut two brand new exhibitions— the new Africa Gallery and Mexico and Central America Galleries—joining a worldclass collection of art and artifacts spanning the globe.

Explore our collection today.

For tickets and information, visit www.penn.museum

3260 South Street, Philadelphia

90 Opera Philadelphia

OPERA ON THE MALL

La bohème Saturday, September 14, 2019 Independence National Historical Park 5:30 p.m. Pre-show | 7:00 p.m. Broadcast Music Giacomo Puccini Libretto Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa CAST

C R E AT I V E T E A M

Rodolfo / Evan LeRoy Johnson

Conductor / Corrado Rovaris

Mimí / Vanessa Vasquez*

Director / Davide Livermore

Marcello / Troy Cook

Revival Director / Alessandra Premoli*

Musetta / Ashley Marie Robillard

Set, Costume, and Lighting Design /

Schaunard / Will Liverman

Davide Livermore

Colline / Peixin Chen

Lighting Design / Drew Billiau

Benoit/Alcindoro / Kevin Burdette

Original Costume Design / Palau de les Arts

Parpignol / Toffer Mihalka

Audiovisual / D-Wok

Customs House Officer / Jackson Williams

Assistant Director / Gregory Boyle

Sergeant / Matthew Fleisher

Chorus Master / Elizabeth Braden

Prune Man / George Somerville

Stage Manager / Lisa Anderson

Children’s Chorus /

Broadcast Director / Gary Corrigan*

Philadelphia Girls & Boys Choirs

Broadcast Assistant Director / Gregory Boyle

Opera on the Mall: La bohème is presented through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and PNC Arts Alive. Major support for Opera on the Mall has been received by the Mazzotti/Kelly Fund-BBH of The Philadelphia Foundation. Additional support provided by Ms. Robin Angly and Mr. Miles Smith. PECO and Xfinity are sponsors of Opera on the Mall. The National Park Service, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Independence Visitor Center, Visit Philadelphia, and City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy are event partners.

WHYY and Metro are media partners. *Opera Philadelphia debut Festival O19 91

92 Opera Philadelphia

F E S T I VA L E X T R A

Late Night Snacks September 7–29, 2019 Pop-Up Cabaret Bar | 1316 South Percy Street Join the Bearded Ladies and a roster of deliciously dangerous and provocatively pleasurable performers at Late Night Snacks, an after-hours cabaret in a refitted East Passyunk industrial space. Stop by for a quick cocktail or stay for the show, featuring different performers every night from opera singers to drag queens, cabaret stars to art clowns, and everything in between. Part performance installation, part fever dream, part neighborhood jawn, Late Night Snacks is your nightly O19 nightcap.

Presented in partnership with FringeArts, with Community Support from Vox Populi, Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation, Hidden City, and the Mayor's Office of LGBT Affairs Bearded Ladies Honorary Producers Linda and David Glickstein

PA R T I A L S C H E D U L E

Schedules change on Drag Queen Time. For updates, visit operaphila.org/snacks.

Sept. 14-15 Sept. 14 Sept. 20 Sept. 20 Sept. 21 Sept. 24 Sept. 25

9:30 p.m.

11:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

11:30 p.m.

11:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

9:30 p.m.

Stephanie Blythe is Blythely Oratonio, with Be Steadwell A Night at the Opera Chorus with Blythely Oratonio Ashley Marie Robillard with Pilar Salt and Darlinda Just Darlinda Anthony Roth Costanzo with Jeannie Brooks Martha Graham Cracker with Dane Terry and Jasmine Rice Labeija Cast members from The Love for Three Oranges Will Liverman with Dottie Riot and Messapotamia Lefae

PERFORMERS

Justin Vivian Bond, Raja Feather Kelly, Adrienne Truscott, Jenn Kidwell, Cookie Diorio, Daniel de Jesús, Cherdonna Shinatra, Eric Jaffe, Jess Conda, Anthony Martinez Briggs, John Jarboe, and more.

S N A C K C U R AT O R S

Raja Feather Kelly, Adrienne Truscott, Jenn Kidwell, Anthony Martinez Briggs, Danny Orednorff (Executive Director, Vox Populi), Evan Thornburg (Deputy Director, Mayor's Office of LGBT Affairs), John Jarboe (Artistic Director, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret), Sally Ollove (Associate Artistic Director, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret), David Levy (Vice President of Artistic Operations, Opera Philadelphia), Katy Dammers (Artistic Producer, FringeArts), Zach Blackwood (Artistic Producer, FringeArts) Space designed by Machine Dazzle

Photos by Johanna Austin, Ben MacMaster, and Steven Pisano Festival O19 93

OPERA’S GREATEST LOVE STORIES

Mimì & Rodolfo Aida & Radamès Tristan & Isolde &

CRW

Print, Finish, Mail...with less drama

CRW Graphics | 9100 Pennsauken Highway | Pennsauken, NJ 08110 | Phone 856 662 9111 | crwgraphics.com 94 Opera Philadelphia

Yamaha exclusively trusts Cunningham Piano Company with Opera Philadelphia and all Yamaha Artist Activity in the Delaware Valley.

198 Allendale Road, King of Prussia (800) 394-1117 www.cunninghampiano.com Festival O19 95

The

PICT URE of

GIVIN G

96 Opera Philadelphia

To

S TAG E its groundbreaking

F E S T I VA L & SEASONAL LINEUP along with community and educational programs

OPERA PHILADELPHIA relies on annual donations from generous patrons like you.

What can you

GIVE T O D AY that will make all the difference tomorrow?

Without you, the picture of giving remains incomplete. Curtains remain closed, arias are

unsung, and potential is unrealized. But your generosity kindles a passion for opera so powerful, it reverberates down Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts, through every city block.

With YOU the show WILL go on.

PICTUREOPERA.ORG

Festival O19 97

C O R P O R AT E C O U N C I L

The Corporate Council generously supports Opera Philadelphia’s artistic and educational programming through contributions and in-kind donations.

SEASON SPONSORS

Preferred Hotel

Official Piano Service Provider

Brand Communications Partner

Season Media Partner

Official Sponsor, Patron Program

Season Media Partner

Festival Media Partner

Official Piano

C O R P O R AT E C O U N C I L S P O N S O R S Affairs To Be Remembered Ballard Spahr LLP Center City Film and Video CRW Graphics

Glenmede Trust Company PECO PNC Tech Impact

Termini Bros. Bakery Universal Health Services Xfinity

E I T C A P P R O V E D The Opera is a recognized Educational Improvement Organization, eligible for EITC

For more information about sponsorship opportunities, EITC contributions, or to join Opera Philadelphia’s Corporate Council, contact Vanyah Harrigan, Manager of Institutional Giving, at 215.893.5932 or harrigan@operaphila.org.

110 Opera Philadelphia

Ospite Circle

A New National Council ospite | AW-spih-tay verb, noun Italian word conveying two meanings, either “host” or “guest”

Since its launch in 2017, Festival O and our historic and vibrant city have welcomed opera enthusiasts from across the country and around the globe. We are proud of our part in nurturing a community among opera lovers.

To support the Festival O audience as it continues to grow—and return—Opera Philadelphia has created a new national council, the Ospite Circle, to welcome our out-of-town guests to connect through shared experiences and curated events during Festival O.

Learn more at operaphila.org/ospite.

To learn more, contact Eva James Toia, Director of Major Gifts, at 215.893.5906 or etoia@operaphila.org Festival O19 111

$70 one hour of fight choreography | $125 a student’s

| $500 moving and tuning for one piano | $500 3 ho

score | $1,800 set transportation | $2,500 opera s

four voices to workshop one new opera | $5,000 a co

dress | $5,000 a 10-week opera residency for pro

I M A G I N E

W H A T

Y O U

$10,000 four weeks of rehearsal space | $10,000

OperaPhila app development | $25,000 a season’s w

| $40,000 a behind-the-scenes creative team | $50

$80,000 a contemporary libretto | $150,000 a world

and music fees at the Academy of Music | $1,00 112 Opera Philadelphia

s seat at a dress rehearsal | $250 one school bus rental

ours of diction coaching | $1,500 a groundbreaking

study guides | $5,000 one artist’s housing | $5,000

onductor for T-VOCE | $5,000 a leading lady’s custom

omising artists | $7,500 translated supertitles |

R

G I F T

C O U L D

F U N D

0 assessment of in-school programs | $15,000 My

worth of wigs and makeup | $30,000 stage lighting

0,000 an opera star | $75,000 a guest conductor |

d-renowned composer | $300,000 chorus, orchestra,

00,000 new production in the Perelman Theater Festival O19 113

Giving VOiCE to the youth of Philadelphia

BY MICHAEL BOLTON

V I C E P R E S I D E N T O F C O M M U N I T Y I N I T I AT I V E S

Every Saturday morning, 32 weeks out of the year, a group of young singers gathers in Center City to participate in the Teen Voices of the City Ensemble, or T-VOCE, a free, regional choral program that builds community and strengthen teens’ self-identity through music.

program. The creation of T-VOCE in March 2015 was partly in response to this crisis. A small but determined group of teens gathered for the threemonth pilot program, culminating in a sold-out performance in the 900seat Zellerbach Theater at Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

The acronym T-VOCE comes from the Italian word voce meaning voice.

T-VOCE celebrates singing and music, but also celebrates and empowers the voice of Philadelphia youth.

T-VOCE would provide a music education opportunity, free of any participation barriers: no fees, no dues, no auditions. Yes, singing abilities would be assessed, but even if you couldn’t carry a tune, a place would be found for you in T-VOCE.

The initiative came out of the Opera’s high school arts immersion program, Hip H’opera, a collaboration with one of Philadelphia’s premiere black arts institutes, Art Sanctuary, that used the power of art and creation to build selfawareness and self-worth.

The 2013 city school district’s budget crisis resulted in the layoff of more than 2,000 employees, including many music teachers. South Philadelphia High School, which boasts Marian Anderson, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, and Mario Lanza among its alumni, suddenly had no music

114 Opera Philadelphia

T-VOCE was a safe space where members could be themselves away from their peers’ frequently judgmental eyes, a place where they were accepted, celebrated, welcomed and valued, regardless of their skin color, religious beliefs, sexuality, or gender identity.

“We started to see community being developed around the art,” said Valerie Gay, former Executive Director of Art Sanctuary. “On top of that, students from completely different backgrounds were also breaking down their own

… students from completely different b a c kg r o u n d s we r e a l s o b r e a k i n g d ow n t h e i r ow n p r e j u d i c e s a n d m i s c o n c e p t i o n s a b o u t e a c h o t h e r.

prejudices and misconceptions about each other. They got to know their classmates in very honest ways, not how they were perceived to be.”

Since the early days of T-VOCE, the family of collaborators expanded to include Singing City, Philadelphia's premier avocational chorus, and Play On, Philly!, the El Sistemabased youth orchestral education and social initiative, which provided unique educational and performance opportunities.

In September 2018, Rosemary Schneider joined T-VOCE as its conductor. With 15 years’ experience as a high school choral director, she had a wealth of experience working with young voices at a crucial time of development. She nourished and inspired the singers, giving them a newfound confidence, which led to the best-prepared and most-varied repertoire the ensemble had yet performed.

“For many of them,” Schneider said of T-VOCE, “this may be their first formal choral experience. It was extremely refreshing and rewarding as a teacher to see their pure love of music and to watch them grow over the course of our first season together.”

As it enters its 2019-2020 season, T-VOCE will return for a full season of concerts including working with Dr. J. Donald Dumpson and Dr. Rollo Dilworth on the Kimmel Center’s A Soulful Christmas, and Singing City’s December and February concerts. The singers will also participate in POP’s

Identity Power and Music class and collaborate with its instrumentalists.

Esperanza Academy Charter School’s multi-award-winning dance ensemble under the direction of Tania Y Ramos Otón, will join as a full-fledged partner, joining the combined ensembles from T-VOCE and Play On, Philly! for a season-ending celebration at the new Teatro Esperanza in Spring 2020.

Still, a new opportunity for T-VOCE is on the horizon: private voice lessons!

Offered in partnership with ArtSmart, a program founded by tenor Michael Fabiano, baritone John Viscardi, and percussionist Brian Levor, to offer free voice lessons to students in need and with limited access to music programs, select T-VOCE students will receive weekly private voice lessons and the opportunity to earn $1,500 in scholarship money.

It’s an exciting year for T-VOCE. Please join us in celebrating these talented young singers and come hear what they have to say.

To learn more about T-VOCE and all of Opera Philadelphia’s youth education initiatives, visit www.operaphila.org/learn.

Festival O19 115

Community “The best part … was finally meeting a bunch of teens that were themselves. Being a bit of an outcast in school, I could never fit in. Finding T-VOCE was a big break from the monotony. I met so many amazing teens like me. And the teachers/staff? MAN, they were awesome. T-VOCE is like my second family. I love being there!”

AARON D.

“I learned what I wanted to do with my life, I learned the career I wanted to go for, I learned the majors I was going to look at because of this program.

Before this program I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, I was just reaching and grabbing for anything. It’s really changed my look on life.”

R H AV E N D .

“Finding my worth. I never thought I’d be good enough for anything.

But being in the program has helped me realize that I can do so many great things with my life and that I have purpose.”

TRINITY A.

“They have given me a lot of opportunities to help out but to also to learn. There is opportunity to be a mentor for the other people in my section, but also to get a lot of advice and information from Ms. Rosemary and Ms. Veronica.”

GENEVIEVE G.

“My greatest accomplishment was during the make-up session with Fre when I realized more that I have the confidence to do anything I put my mind to.”

CHLOE H.

116 Opera Philadelphia

Initiatives

“I’ve definitely learned a lot of new and useful skills in both (T-VOCE and Backstage Pass) and I think I know a lot more about theater and my range of opportunities now. I think I’m also a lot more excited about the future now that I know I can learn new skills, and it really helps to work with adults who actually cared about what I was doing and who I was."

AARON B.

“My favorite moment was just being able to be in a good, accepting environment, and be able to do what I love. I’ve gained knowledge in technical theater, good friends, and a growing love for theater. It changed me, it gave me purpose.”

TRINITY A.

“T-VOCE is another place where I can just be me and just go wild. I can have fun and talk to my friends, I can joke around, and I can beatbox with them too. I have finally found what I want to do with my life. Because of them I am able to find my confidence and to keep pursuing the one thing I want to do, and that’s sing.”

AARON D.

“I feel that the best part is the unity. I feel like every year we get better and better. I feel like we come together better, learning about each other and learning from each other more.”

S Y N A E F.

“I loved the opportunity to work with other choirs and to sing with them.

Meeting new people, developing new friendships. I loved the support and love that T-VOCE gave, not only to ourselves, but for other as well.”

ASIS C.

“T-VOCE feels like family to me.

Everyone in unique and it is cool to see everyone’s individual traits blend together to create a really unique experience that you really can’t find anywhere and in any other choirs.”

AJANIE H. Festival O19 117

Denyce Graves as Carmen at the Academy of Music in 1992.

Photo by Trudy Lee Cohen.

I will never forget the impact watching Opera Philadelphia’s Sounds of Learning dress rehearsal had on my life many years ago.

I caught the opera bug in the ninth grade and would listen to any recording I could get my hands on, but for the first time I truly believed it was possible to actually have a career in music by having the opportunity to see someone who looked like me up on the big stage. American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves singing the role of Carmen at the Academy of Music made it real.

It is imperative that performing arts organizations continue on the path of diversifying their stages as well as supporting arts education in the communities they serve. I am an example of how the power of music and the gift of the arts changes lives! – Karen Slack, soprano, C U R T I S I N C O N C E R T

Support Sounds of Learning and other Community Initiatives programs so Opera Philadelphia can continue to inspire the next generation. operaphila.org/learn 118 Opera Philadelphia

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Festival O19 119

F E S T I VA L S TA F F LEADERSHIP David B. Devan / General Director & President Corrado Rovaris / Jack Mulroney Music Director Michael Bolton / Vice President of Community Initiatives David Levy / Vice President of Artistic Operations Frank Luzi / Vice President of Marketing & Communications Jeremiah Marks / Chief Financial Officer Rachel McCausland / Vice President of Development Ken Smith / Chief of Staff Lawrence Brownlee / Artistic Advisor Mikael Eliasen / Artistic Advisor

MUSIC Michael Eberhard / Artistic Administrator Sarah Williams / New Works Administrator Elizabeth Braden / Chorus Master & Music Administrator J. Robert Loy / Director of Orchestra Personnel & Librarian Grant Loehnig / Head of Music Staff Robert Whalen / Assistant Chorus Master Nathan Lofton / Assistant Orchestra Personnel Manager & Librarian Justin Giles / Festival Company Manager

PRODUCTION John Toia / Director of Production Drew Billiau / Director of Design & Technology Stephen Dickerson / Technical Director Millie Hiibel / Costume Director Meggie Scache Eltz / Production Manager Lisa Anderson / Production Stage Manager Katie Holloway / Assistant Costume Director Bridget A. Cook / Artistic Operations Coordinator Rachel Merryman / Festival Production Coordinator Christie Kelly / Lead Festival Driver/Runner Scene Shop Crew: Lafeese Wilson / Apprentice Paul Lodes, Chris Hanes / Carpenters Erica Harney / Scenic Artist Aaron Dukes, Cassadanya Kissling, Michele Leach-Saccucci, Lafeese Wilson / Production Festival Interns

C O M M U N I T Y I N I T I AT I V E S Veronica Chapman-Smith / Manager of Out of School Time Initiatives

120 Opera Philadelphia

M A R K E T I N G , C O M M U N I C AT I O N S , & G U E S T S E R V I C E S Michael Knight / Director of Guest Services Karina Kacala / Director of Advertising & Promotions Shannon Eblen / Communications Manager Steven Humes / Manager of Audience Development Katie Kelley / Design Manager Ali Haegele / Graphic Designer Siddhartha Misra / Lead Guest Services Associate Catherine Perez / VIP Services Coordinator Marissa Chalker, Emily Dombrovskaya, John Hyatt, Hannah Moloshok, Marina Silva, Daniel Solon, Emily Wanamaker, Abby Weissman / Festival Guest Services Associates Isabela PaĹşdzierski / Marketing & Communications Intern Karma Agency / Brand Communications Partner 21c Media Group / National Media Representatives

DEVELOPMENT Rebecca Ackerman / Director of Individual Giving & Advancement Services Derren Mangum / Director of Institutional Giving Adele Mustardo / Director of Events Eva James Toia / Director of Major Gifts Aisha Wiley / Director of Research Rachel Mancini / Leadership Giving Administrator Vanyah Harrigan / Manager of Institutional Giving EboniJoi McNeill / Development Services Coordinator

FINANCE Brian Ramos / Controller Bethany Sellers / Director of HR & Operations Shante Thompson / Accounting Assistant

COUNSEL Ballard Spahr, LLP / General Counsel

OPERA PHILADELPHIA THANKS THE FOLLOWING LABOR O R G A N I Z AT I O N S W H O S E M E M B E R S , A R T I S T S , C R A F T S M E N , A N D C R A F T S W O M E N G R E AT L Y C O N T R I B U T E T O O U R P E R F O R M A N C E S :

American Federation of Musicians / Local 77 American Guild of Musical Artists / The American Guild of Musical Artists, the union of professional singers, dancers and production personnel in opera, ballet and concert, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, represents the Artists and Staging Staff for the purposes of collective bargaining.

International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees / Local 8 Theatrical Wardrobe Union / Local 799, I.A.T.S.E. Make-up Artists and Hair Stylists Union / Local Local 799, I.A.T.S.E. United Scenic Artists / Local 829, I.A.T.S.E. Box Office and Front of House Employees Union / Local B29, I.A.T.S.E. Highway Truck Drivers and Helpers / Local 107, Teamsters

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17th Anniversary Season 2019–2020 THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED in collaboration with Singing City October 5&6, 2019 THE ART OF SONG Daron Hagen, World Premiere November 4, 2019

Orchestral Gardeners High Baroque Splendor by Handel and Telemann Oct 18 | 8 PM Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Oct 19 | 8 PM Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral

“22 deeply gifted musicians, sans conductor, playing with snap, joy and vibrancy.”

– Broad Street Review

TUTTI FIOR Happy Hour/Mini Concert & Art Show December 10&11, 2019 THE ENCHANTED FLUTE Songs for Flute and Voice March 1, 2020 THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PLANTS A Lieder Recital April 4&5, 2020 SPEAK LOW: SONGS OF KURT WEILL Happy Hour/Mini Concert May 12&13, 2020

Visit www.lyricfest for full concert listing ARTISTIC DIRECTORS SUZANNE DUPLANTIS • LAURA WARD • MARIA

For tickets and information:

ALEIDA • MISOON GHIM • JARED BYBEE • JEFFREY BRILLHART •

tempestadimare.org 215-755-8776

REESE • STEVEN EDDY • MICHAEL BROFMAN • IRINI KYRIAKIDOU

JUSTINE ARONSON • GILDA LYONS • ELISA SUTHERLAND • JAMES • ELIZABETH DE TREJO • RAY FURUTA • MAEVE HÖGLUND • KRISTINA BACHRACH • KATHRYN LEEMHUIS • ANDREW FUCHS • RANDALL SCARLATA • JOSEPH GAINES • DARON HAGEN

Plan Your Spring Return to the Academy of Music A New Kind of Eulogy

Verdi’s Requiem January 31 & February 2, 2020

Special Concert Performances featuring soloists Leah Crocetto, Daniela Mack, Evan LeRoy Johnson, and In-Sung Sim

A New Kind of Classic

Madame Butterfly April 24–May 3, 2020

Puccini’s masterpiece starring Eri Nakamura, Bryan Hymel, Anthony Clark Evans, and Kristen Choi

For personalized assistance curating your Opera Philadelphia experience, contact Guest Services at 215.732.8400 or visit operaphila.org.

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Intermission is calling!

Tr y the O p e r a Ph i la delp h i a Al e b y F l y i n g F i s h at ever y Festi v a l O ven u e an d at ha p p y ho u r s all arou nd the c i t y. F i n d an o f f ic ial h a p py h o u r s c hed u le at o per aphi la . or g/O PA.

S t op by t h e brewe r y t o s e e wh ere t he go o d s tuf f is made!

TOURS AND TASTINGS Wed–Fri, 3–9 p.m.

Sat–Sun, 12–6 p.m.

9 0 0 K E N N E DY B LV D .

SOMERDALE, NJ 856-504-3442 F LY I N G F I S H . C O M

124 Opera Philadelphia

Mozart's

Le nozze di Figaro The Marriage of Figaro with the AVA Opera Orchestra Conductor: Christofer Macatsoris Stage Director: David Gately

Young Professionals Performance

November 9, 2019

Le nozze di Figaro - November 14, 2019

Gala Season Opening Celebration!Â

November 12, 16 and 19, 2019 Academy of Vocal Arts

November 21, 2019

Haverford School’s Centennial Hall

all performances at 7:30 PM

AVA's 2003 production of

ACADEMY OF VOCAL ARTS

85TH ANNIVERSARY 126 Opera Philadelphia SEASON

The Academy of Vocal Arts invites Philadelphia's Young Professionals (ages 40 and under) to an exclusive, one-night only performance at a special price! The evening includes an intermission reception and a "meet the cast" party!

Le nozze di Figaro

Visit AVA

1920 Spruce Street Philadelphia, PA 19103 www.avaopera.org 215-735-1685 info@avaopera.org

128 Opera Philadelphia