Author: Zach Carstensen

Maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the youth of the performers, maybe it’s the setting which leaves everything to the imagination, and surely it’s in part the lighting and stage direction, but Seattle Opera Young Artists’ production of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is enchanting, enthralling and very funny.

You wouldn’t think a classroom with serviceable table, chairs and a white board could possibly function as a backdrop for Shakespeare’s forest fantasy in ancient Greece. Or that a bunch of British boarding school kids in uniform (school colors navy and yellow) and their hormone-mad faculty could become the fairies and mortals. But it does and they do, while the workmen who gather to create an entertainment are the same as Shakespeare’s workmen, but their impact is more immediate thanks to the intimate space of the Theatre at Meydenbauer Center.

Britten’s music is quite spare much of the time, and changes style and mood according to which group is on stage, most notably at the very end when Duke Theseus (mellifluous bass Jeffrey Beruan, the headmaster) and his fiancee, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons (mezzo-soprano Margaret Gawrysiak, soon to be headmistress) arrive to suddenly lush, tonal harmonies.

With only nine Young Artists in the Seattle Opera program, another nine plus a children’s chorus have been brought in to fill out the cast, but these are all themselves young and many have been in other young artist programs or are past members of this one. Counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as a superb Oberon was in the Glimmerglass Opera program, and last month was a winner of this year’s Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Baritone Jeffrey Madison as an irrepressible Bottom the weaver is a past Met auditions district winner.

These two shone in the rewarding roles Britten and Shakespeare wrote for them. Soprano Megan Hart in this year’s Seattle Opera program made a convincing Tytania, encompassing with ease the the very high sustained singing Britten requires and at the same time including every late teenage gesture familiar in a senior high school girl.

It was harder to see the four lovers as faculty members, behaving as they did more like randy college types. To my mind these are the least interesting characters in Shakespeare’s play without a lot of individuality, but all four singers from the Seattle program gave them all they could.

The workmen, in contrast, were highly individual, and a delight as both actors and singers.

Seattle actor David S. Hogan with a punk hairstyle in the speaking role of the impish Puck moved with the speedy lightness of a dancer. However, he was hampered by being given differing British accents to speak in at different times, none of which truly sounded right particularly the one from northern England which, since it’s my own home base, I found excruciatingly wrong. However this may not bother others.

Given the plain setting and clothing reminiscent of Hogwarts, it was Peter Kazaras’ inspired stage direction and Connie Yun’s lighting which made this production magical.

Kazaras married the school with the fantastic seamlessly, and nothing seemed out of place. Every tiny move or expression in each character combined to make a whole as detailed as a Brueghel painting. Kudos here too to costume designer Heidi Ganser for the workmen’s ‘found” costumes for their show which were nothing short of hilarious.

Mention, too, should be made of the children’s chorus. Britten never wrote down to children, saying children rose to the occasion, as did these eight who acted and sang their roles like veterans.

Brian Garman, seemingly no older than the Young Artists, is now the program’s formal music director, and gave an unerring pace to the opera with an orchestra many of whose players came from the capable Auburn Symphony.

In short, this is a show not to be missed. Worth every penny of a not very big price for opera and a student rate barely more than a movie ticket.

Five more performances through April 5^th, at Meydenbauer Center Theater. Tickets $15-$35 at seattleopera.org.

Last night’s John Cage Marathon, night three of Cornish’s Drums Along the Pacific festival, was an ear opener.  The marathon surveyed pieces from through out the composer’s life.  Music for percussion, prepared piano, and unprepared piano dominated the programs.  Cage believed all sound, no matter how alien, how repulsive, can be music.

I will be writing about night two and three of the festival.  But, last night, The Gathering Note conducted its first live blogging event.  Perched in the balcony of the recital hall, I followed the festival from start to finish.  I hope we will have more live blogging events in the future.

You can read the replay below.

When Joshua and his troops blew down the walls of Jericho, they did it with an animal horn, maybe a ram’s horn or an ibex’s; but by the 16^th century in Italy that popular instrument had evolved into the cornetto, and was mostly made of fruitwood with a small cup-shaped mouthpiece and a standardized pitch. Octagonal-shaped with a diamond pattern in the resonating area, it was wrapped tightly with black leather or parchment to keep even a hint of air from leaking in through the long wood seams; and it still had great symbolic meaning as a ceremonial instrument.

The cornetto was used in the military, but it became the instrument in Renaissance art of the Last Judgement, played by skeletons in a dance of death, or on the way to the underworld. That diamond pattern, and the instrument’s gentle curve and black color reminded the viewer of a snake.

It still curves gently (there is a straight version, but the curved is the usual).

If you laid it flat you might say it is in the shape of a smile.

And a smile of sheer pleasure is what it will bring to your face when you hear it played by a master, as you can this weekend when Bruce Dickey plays it with Seattle Baroque Orchestra and violinist Monica Huggett in a program of Italian renaissance music.

Towards the end of its heyday, 16^th-18^th century Italy, a 1635 account describes the cornetto sound as “like a ray of sunshine in the shadows of the cathedral.” As Dickey puts it, less poetically but more practically, it sounds something like the brass family because of its mouthpiece shape, but sweeter and softer; like a boy soprano combined with a soft trumpet, plus the volume range and flexibility of the voice.

The cornetto was immensely versatile, says Dickey, “but profoundly connected with vocal music. The same things that are difficult to sing are difficult to play on cornetto. It has no problems with agility, with the horizontal, highly ornamented vocal line” that flourished in late 16^th to early 17^th century Italy.

But though the cornetto lasted in use and was written for for several more centuries heading north from Italy (even in the 1800s in Norway: Dickey comments that there must have been at least one seriously good player there judging by the music written for it in 1840), it went into sudden decline in Italy in mid-17^th century and never recovered.

What happened?

Three things combined to oust it from its position of eminence.

Firstly, musical performance changed. Until then, it had always been vocal and largely sacred with instruments copying and supporting the vocal line, a practice at which the cornetto excelled. But by the time of Monteverdi, more and more music just for instruments was appearing.

Secondly, the violin had been invented around a century earlier, and in the 1600s was coming to the fore. Violinists and composers began to experiment to see, with the new instrumental style, what that instrument could do, and soon discovered that it could leap around all over the tonal range, something very difficult for the cornetto.

Thirdly, the coup de grace perhaps, plague hit Italy hard around the 1630s, and the cornetto players were decimated. It was said that all the cornettists in Venice died of it, and perhaps, says Dickey, there were more violinists than cornettist by then, so some of them survived. After that, there was a drop in music specified “for cornetto.”

“It became old-fashioned,” says Dickey, “a publisher wouldn‘t put cornetto on the title page, because the music wouldn’t sell as well as if specified for violin.”

However, there is a wealth of Italian Renaissance music for both cornetto and violin, and Seattle Baroque’s performances this weekend will be somewhat a mirror of what went on in the1600s there, an “Any thing you can do I can do better” duel between the instruments. We don’t hear as much of the instrumental music from the Renaissance in period performance today. Dickey thinks fewer people know the repertoire and are not inclined to take the risk. But with Monica Huggett and Dickey, two of the prime exponents of their instruments worldwide, frequent colleagues over the years and extremely knowledgeable about that repertoire, performing the brilliant adventurous music of the era, there’s little risk a listener wouldn’t find these concerts fascinating.

Seattle Baroque Orchestra: Stile Fantastico: Virtuoso Violin & Cornetto, Nordstrom Recital Hall, Saturday, March 28 at 8:00 p.m., Sunday, March 29, at 3:00 p.m. Directed by Monica Huggett. Tickets $10-$35 at 206-322-3118 or seattlebaroque.org

If there is one event this year every classical music lover should make an attempt to hear, it is Cornish College’s four-day festival: Drums Along the Pacific. Over the course of four days various musicians, including the Seattle Chamber Players, Stewart Dempster, Stephen Drury, and Gamelan Pacifica will play music by former Cornish faculty members Lou Harrison and John Cage, and Henry Cowell who mentored both Cage and Harrison. This may be the only chance you will ever get to hear this much John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Henry Cowell music live –ever.

The Early Music Guild is bringing the Tallis Scholars to Town Hall on Sunday. This group of early music specialists will be exploring Spanish High Baroque. There are few groups with the authority and expertise of the Tallis Scholars. I am sure Seattle’s eager early music community will be out in force for this concert.

The Seattle Opera Young Artists kick off a run of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream starting Friday. Benjamin Britten’s operas are performed too infrequently around these parts. These performances should be welcome news for anyone who loves 20^th Century opera.

Last Saturday’s Camerata Northwest recital at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford showed the depth of classical music in Seattle. Camerata Northwest was started by John Scanlon, a violist from Tacoma, for the purpose of bringing high-quality chamber music to audiences at a reasonable price. The Camerata joins a multitude of other organizations who are doing basically the same thing in and around Seattle.

The recital – a French impressionistic and romantic affair, done in reverse chronological order – was competing with an unusually nice spring day. Instead of preparing flower gardens, walking around Green Lake, or doing some early spring cleaning, a respectable crowd made their way to the recital.

The recital began with Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello. The sonata is reminiscent of Ravel’s String Quartet with its cyclical structure. Ravel’s writing for the instruments is both spartan and dense. The vacillation between these two extremes balances out the two parts. For Saturday’s performance, Heather Blackburn, cello, and Shin-young Kwon, violin, played. Below is a very short clip from the potent second movement

Following the sonata, Charles Noble, a violist with the Oregon Symphony joined pianist, Cary Lewis for Vieuxtemps’s Elegie

for Viola and Piano. The Elegie can also be played on a cello, but the viola’s middle range seemed well suited for the ruminating quality of the piece.  I would like to hear the piece played on a cello sometime.

After a short intermission, all four musicians came out to play Saint Saens’s rarely heard Quartet for Piano and Strings in E Major. Scanlon called the Elegie a pallet cleanser.  I have to disagree.  Saint Saens’s unabashably, old-fashioned quartet was the real cleanser.  The quartet was fun to hear, easy on the ears, and a delieriously great way to close a recital on the first tolerable spring day of 2009.

During intermission, Scanlon urged the audience to spread the word about the Camerata Northwest. The recession has taken a toll on ticket sales and contributions. Organizations like Scanlon’s, make Seattle’s music scene vibrant and diverse.  I hope the recession ends soon; we need more organizations like Scanlon’s, not fewer.

Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is all about faeries and spells, lovers running all over the place, a bunch of uncouth workmen and a couple of titled aristocrats.

Benjamin Britten incorporated them all into his opera of the same name, with music which delineates clearly who belongs to which category.

Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, which presents the opera at Meydenbauer Center beginning this Friday, is playing the opera in an English boarding school.

I am in the useful position of having spent five formative years in an English boaarding school and to have spent a whole year there studying, you guessed it, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” I have been quite unable to see the connection.

So it was with extreme curiosity that I met with the program’s artistic director, Peter Kazaras, stage director and and prime mover for this unusual setting for the opera, to ask him why?

He led me back to the first time he saw it, a production at the Metropolitan Opera which left him cold. But then he saw the opera in a student production a couple of years ago at UCLA. “A young cast, a 550-seat theater, I was completely captivated.”

He found a recording of it with the Northern Sinfonia conducted by the late Richard Hickox. “It was very theatrical, very immediate,” says Kazaras, who listens with headphones, not a score, and lets his imagination run wild. “I could see moonlight streaming in through a window…students making magic…” Kind of Hogwartsian. He called set designer Donald Eastman, who had similar visions.

“Magic comes from within,” says Kazaras. “The dream presupposes there are periods which are not dream. Dreams are the time in which wonder, amazement, miracles, the irrational can reign. You never think in a dream that this doesn’t make sense.”

This Young Artists’ production of Midsummer Night’s Dream is just that, a dream.

It all fell together, particularly when Kazaras discovered the program’s music director, Brian Garman, loved the opera and had conducted it.

The Duke of Athens, Theseus, is the headmaster; his consort-to-be, Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, a visiting faculty member, but Kazaras describes her as being like the headmistress visiting Hogwarts from France, the formidable Madame Maxime.

The lovers are faculty members; faery king and queen, Oberon and Tytania, head boy and girl, to whom the younger students (the faeries) are in thrall. The workmen are the school handymen. Bottom the weaver in Shakespeare is here Bottom the weaver of tales, maybe the school janitor?

Correct accents have been a major concern for Kazaras. All except the workmen and Puck speak pure Oxford English, otherwise known as the King’s (Queen’s) English or Received Pronunciation in theater language. The others speak varying different English dialects except for one whose accent is faintly French. They have been intensively tutored by Lynn Baker, English diction coach and assistant conductor at New York City Opera.

“If it’s set in a school, what does that give us?” asks Kazaras rhetorically. “In a nutshell, affordability.” The Young Artists Program operates on a shoestring, as far as possible the funding going towards the training of the young singers in all the aspects of an operatic career.

For the set, Kazaras says, “We originally designed a box: cheapest, quickest, paint it white, save thousands of dollars.” This morphed into two walls with doors and windows and a back black scrim, still cheap.

“Putting it in a school helped with the costume and make-up budget, too,’he says., “but this threw a heavy burden on Connie Yun,” the lighting designer.

It’s Yun who creates the magic, moonlight and all.

I’m still not sure how Shakespeare’s creation fits into a school, but thanks to Kazaras’ compelling enthusiasm, I’m ready to be convinced. Besides, the music is one of Britten’s most imaginative, inspired scores.

Opening Friday March 27 for six performances through April 5^th, at Meydenbauer Center Theater. Tickets $15-$35 at seattleopera.org.

70 years ago, John Cage and Lou Harrison staged a series of percussion recitals dubbed Drums Along the Pacific.  The Cornish College of the Arts is reviving the concept with a series of four concerts this weekend.  Thursday: Henry Cowell; Friday: Lou Harrison; Saturday: John Cage; and Sunday

: Gamelan music.  In addition to concerts, Cornish is also sponsoring a series of lectures and educational events.  You can get event details here.

In a first for The Gathering Note

, I will be live blogging the John Cage Marathon.  You can read my instant reactions and peruse additional content here.  Be sure to book mark the page, or just go to the Live Blog page at www.gatheringnote.com.

Think you might forget?  Enter your e-mail address in the upcoming live event widget on the front page and you’ll receive a reminder e-mail.

I hope you will make it to Poncho Hall for some or all of the Drums Along the Pacific festivities.  If you can’t, tune into The Gathering Note’s first live blog.