Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar: A Masterpiece of Modern Opera
On March 3, NYC new music hotspot The Kitchen packed the house for the final performance of the world-premiere production of Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt by Brooklyn-based composer, Missy Mazzoli and presented by Beth Morrison Projects. Song from the Uproar is a visually and aurally ravishing chamber opera for solo mezzo soprano, chorus, and instrumental ensemble based on the short and tragic life of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman who lost her family at the turn of the century, and at nineteen, ran away to Algeria. While there, she disguised herself as a man and joined a Sufi order, fell in love with an Algerian soldier, survived failed assassination AND suicide attempts, and ultimately perished in the desert during a flash flood at the age of twenty-seven. Ms. Mazzoli was inspired to compose an opera (previously a song cycle) on Eberhardt’s colorful, if not operatic, life after coming across her journals eight years ago. She teamed up with a fantastic production team that deftly combined music (both live and pre-recorded), movement, and intriguing original abstract video by filmmaker Stephen Taylor. The video depicted images of people, barren desert vistas, and flashes of light projected on three hanging curtains onstage as well as a large screen overhead, creating a captivating, multimedia spectacle in the intimate space.
Missy Mazzoli – Photo Stephen Taylor
On Saturday, February 25th, Roomful of Teeth gave an exciting concert on the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin Hall. But just who is this group with a fantastic name and what sets them apart from other vocal ensembles? In an interview with WBUR (Boston’s NPR news station), Caleb Burhans, a composer who has written for them, contends that, “Roomful of Teeth…can sing anything extremely well and in any style, and on top of that, imagine a choir that yodels and throat sings and does all these crazy things, and they do that equally as well as they do singing like Renaissance polyphony. They’re just a phenomenally talented group of singers….” Strong praise, it’s true, but given what these fantastic vocalists demonstrated in their February 25th performance, this vocal octet most certainly deserves those accolades and more.
[Laughs] Now, I am very comfortable calling myself a light lyric soprano, but it took a long time for me to feel comfortable with that. I actually started out as a mezzo… which is strange because I don’t think my timbre is that of a mezzo at all, but I always felt really comfortable singing low notes and in the middle of my range, but I wasn’t so comfortable with high notes, so I think that’s why my undergrad teacher called me a mezzo. And then I went to AIMS one summer right before my senior year, and they all said, “You are not a mezzo!” At the time I was singing Siebel, also Cherubino and they encouraged me to move up to “sopranoland.” [Giggles] I was kind of disappointed. I didn’t want to be a soprano because…well, there’s so many of them [laughs]. And, it seems that everyone is a light lyric soprano, but…that’s what I am. In art song rep, I sing whatever I want because I can sing low and in the middle with no problem. The funny thing is that I do end up singing a lot of mezzo rep because I like it.
On January19th, the Austrian Cultural Forum presented the first concert in a new lieder series led by virtuoso pianist, Thomas Bagwell. The focus of this series is–quite appropriately, given the venue–the founder of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his composition teacher turned brother-in-law, Alexander Zemlinsky. This first concert was dedicated to Schoenberg and Zemlinsky’s early songs only (all selections on the program were composed between 1889 and 1903). The fact that Zemlinsky’s lieder were not published until 1995 and that they are so infrequently programmed makes their performance an event in itself. Nevertheless, they were not the only novelty offered that evening. In his introduction to the first set of Schoenberg songs, Bagwell dubbed these early works, “some of the best songs that Brahms never wrote.” A joke perhaps, but few could argue with him. Even Schoenberg’s better known opus 2 and opus 3 songs (performed during the second half of the program), were a startling reminder of Schoenberg’s less-than-revolutionary compositional beginnings. It is difficult to imagine that these chromatic, (yet thoroughly tonal) gems of late 19th-Century song literature were penned by the same man famous for Ewartung, Moses und Aron, and Pierrot Lunaire among other atonal masterpieces. Anyone expecting the music to “sound like Schoenberg” was in for quite a surprise.
Holiday CDs come and go. Some fade out while others become lasting favorites. My prediction is that the 2011 Delos release, Ceremony of Carols, will be one of the latter. The disc marks an excellent recording debut by the aptly-named Etherea Vocal Ensemble, a group of young professionals formed in 2009 and led by artistic director, Derek Greten-Harrison.
Last Sunday evening, the innovative Manhattan-based choir Choral Chameleon presented an eclectic program titled “Tempus: Art of Time and Concord.”
“Tempus” was built around Stephen Chatman’s ethereal Time Pieces, a dynamic four-movement work on the theme of “time.” Time Pieces is a true choral gem filled with stylistic variation and beautiful tonalities, and one that I would recommend highly to advanced chamber ensembles. Surrounding these movements was varied fare from composers as diverse as Guerrero, Britten, and…Cyndi Lauper, in addition to other newly-composed pieces. The musical direction was handled confidently by Vince Peterson and the choir was overall quite polished. In particular, the sopranos as a group achieved a beautiful pure tone and their voices were balanced nicely with the others. Also, the choir should be commended for their excellent diction. The words were consistently crisp and intelligible. Percussionist Erika Johnson played with aplomb throughout the program. I found Time Pieces IV: Clocks and Sonnet 12 by Thomas Conroy especially impressive as they both included complex vocal percussion that was obviously well-rehearsed. Particularly exciting was Joseph Gregorio’s Look Back on Time With Kindly Eyes, a 12-part canon in which each singer is a soloist. The choir sang with great effect from the balcony, the voices moving around overhead. Cyndi Lauper’s hit song “Time After Time” (arranged for the choir by Erika Johnson) and soprano, Erika Lloyd’s own “Time Pops Bubbles” were upbeat tunes that had the audience nearly dancing in the aisles.