Knowlton Festival 2009: Operalia Winners Showcased in Bellini and Tchaikovsky

by Paul E. Robinson

One lesson to be learned from Thursday night’s concert is that great singers can make even the worst music sound important - lesser singers not so much. On this occasion, we heard some talented young singers struggling with the inanities of Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, second-rate music that should never have been inflicted on them. On the other hand, in the second half of the concert, excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin showed other Operalia winners to great advantage.

Murrali and Ensemble Undone by Bellini
As one of its missions, the Knowlton Festival celebrates the art of bel canto and features some of its finest practitioners. But as with everything else in life, there is good and not so good. To programme an hour of excerpts from I Capuleti e I Montecchi, conscript some promising young singers to perform it and force – remember, one has been bussed to the site from one’s car - a festival audience to sit through it, is cruel and unusual punishment. The music isn’t worth it. The singers chosen to present this repertoire showed little affinity for it, conductor Massimiliano Murrali didn’t do much with the score, and the Festival Orchestra seemed ill at ease with the whole undertaking.

At last night’s performance, we had the usual absence of surtitles or translations but were at least offered a brief synopsis of the story behind the opera by Kelly Rice, who also pointed out that in this telling of the Romeo and Juliet story, Romeo is a ‘trouser role’. Rather important I would suggest – particularly for those coming to the opera for the first time. – to be alerted to the fact that in this Bellini opera, as in some other operas such as Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, one of the leading male parts is sung by a woman. Even more important in an hour without surtitles or translations.

To assist the audience further, Mr. Rice pointed out that mezzo-soprano Kremena Dilcheva would be instantly recognizable as playing the role of Romeo because she would in fact be wearing “trousers.” For all we know, there may still be members of the audience waiting in the Chapiteau for this mysterious trouser-wearing female singer. No such person ever appeared on stage during the performance I saw. What we did get was a Romeo in a glamorous shimmering blue (for “boy”?) low-cut gown.

As for this evening’s Juliet - dare I mention that Sumi Jo gave us a wondrous performance of Juliet’s aria, “O, quante volte” at last year’s festival?

Nagano and Company Bring Onegin to Life
So much for the first half of the concert. After intermission, we had music of real quality – from Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin – and a conductor who knows his business and his music; Kent Nagano, no less, with an impressive cast of singers. Even the orchestra sounded a whole lot better.

The cast for the Tchaikovsky was headed by Ukrainian soprano Oksana Kramaryeva as Tatyana. I first heard her at Operalia in Québec City last September. At the time I was greatly impressed by the beauty of her voice and her command of phrasing, especially in an excerpt from Verdi’s Aïda. Last night, she was again impressive in the musical values of Tatyana’s great “Letter” aria. However, as we heard more of the opera, it seemed to me that she was underplaying the character. This is a deeply conflicted woman and her inner turmoil seldom bubbled to the surface in Kramaryeva’s performance. Baritone Christopher Magiera as Onegin also sang well and he was much more passionate. Tenor Dmitri Popov (photo: right) made an exceptionally heroic and ill-fated Lensky. Nagano kept it all flowing with total command of the score.

Cornucopia of Bel Canto Talent Presented at Festival
As Marco Genoni noted in his opening remarks, the Knowlton Festival celebrates three generations of singers. It features big stars like Sumi Jo, Ben Heppner and Thomas Hampson, but also artists at the early stages of their career who are creating excitement through their prowess at the Operalia competition created by Placido Domingo. Finally, there are the young singers from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. This is an admirable concept and one hopes it will be an ongoing feature of the Knowlton Festival. The process, however, can be risky if young singers are entrusted with roles beyond their capacity, on the same stage where the stars have performed.

Audiences expect to pay a pretty price to see and hear proven internationally acclaimed artists. Tickets to performances by rising stars and students, on the other hand, should surely cost less.

For the record, it was a beautiful summer’s evening in Knowlton. Perhaps summer has finally settled in after weeks of below average temperatures and frequent rain. More of the same is expected through the final weekend of the festival.

Coming Next: the final performance of La Sonnambula will be given tonight (Saturday), and Sunday at 11 am Kent Nagano will conduct the OSM in the concluding concert. The programme includes the Symphony No. 1 by Brahms and the final scene from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. June Anderson, Sumi Jo and Susan Platts are the featured soloists. After the concert, patrons are invited to picnic on the hillside near the Chapiteau. Sounds like a great way to end an exciting festival. For more information visit the festival website.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.

Group Photo (above) left to right: Oksana Kramaryeva, Dmitri Popov, Ekaterina Lekhina, Christoper Magiera, and accompanist Doug Han after recital earlier in the week.

Knowlton Festival 2009: "Bel Canto Greatest Hits" with Young Singers from the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome

by Paul E. Robinson

One of the unique features of the Knowlton Festival (Québec) is the collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (ANSC), one of Italy’s leading music schools. The president of ANSC, Bruno Cagli, is involved in planning for the Knowlton Festival, and every year he includes performances by some of his outstanding students in the festival programme. Monday night we heard six of them accompanied by the Festival Orchestra directed by Carlo Rizzari.

The concert was a sort of “Bel Canto Greatest Hits”, similar to the one presented last year by June Anderson and some ANSC students. Without a star of Anderson’s stature on the bill, however, it lost some of its audience appeal. With this in mind, the festival organizers might have considered reduced ticket prices. After all, an average price of $100 a seat is a lot to pay for a concert by students - however promising – whether they are from Rome or Montréal.

Maestro Rizzari also has a connection with the ANSC. He is the assistant conductor of its orchestra. One might assume that the ANSC orchestra is a ‘student orchestra’ but one would be wrong. The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Symphony Orchestra is one of the best orchestras in Italy. Its current music director is Antonio Pappano and conductors of the stature of Masur, Eschenbach, Temirkanov, Tilson Thomas and Nagano appear with it regularly. Bernstein was a frequent guest conductor and made several recordings with the orchestra.

Festival Orchestra, Rizzari & Sparkling Rossini Overtures
On this night, Rizzari was in charge of the Festival Orchestra, which had already distinguished itself in the previous night’s performance of La Sonnambula. Most of the musicians are Québec players, but the concertmaster is Riccardo Minasi, a well-known Italian soloist and early music specialist. Minasi teaches at the Conservatorio Bellini in Palermo and, earlier this year, took up a position as associate director of the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra. Presumably, the idea of engaging Minasi was to provide expertise in the area of bel canto style within the orchestra. So far the results have been impressive. Last night, the orchestra again gave us long singing lines and excellent precision, accompanied the singers with exceptional sensitivity and, on its own, contributed sparkling performances of two Rossini overtures.

Singers Delight Audience with Bel Canto “Hits”
With respect to the singers, I would say that they all displayed admirable training, but not much individuality – with one notable exception. And while this programme concentrated on bel canto repertoire, not one of the six seemed, in my opinion, outstandingly gifted in this idiom.

The notable exception was tenor Antonio Poli (photo: right). This young man has a voice of extraordinary natural beauty and he uses it with remarkable elegance and maturity. Poli and baritone Pedro Josè Quiralte Gómez sang beautifully in the famous duet from Bizet’s The Pearlfishers, and in the quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto, Poli really came into his element. His breath control and phrasing were outstanding and even in the loudest passages, there was never any sense of strain. I suspect that Poli will go on to a major career singing lyric roles in Mozart and early Verdi.

For the record, the other singers taking part were soprano Paola Leggeri, mezzo-soprano Anna Goryacheva and baritone Sergio Vitale. Their performances were certainly competent, but generally too studied to really come alive; for example, soprano Rosa Feola’s traversal of an aria from Rossini’s La Donna del Lago. Other interpretations were so restrained that I began to suspect the teachers at the ANSC of having actively discouraged any expression of passion or personality. It’s all very well to insist on the purity of bel canto style but in the final analysis, what makes music come alive is the combination of discipline and individuality. There was not much of the latter on display last night.

That said, it’s always a pleasure to hear young singers. This extraordinary collaboration between Knowlton and Rome is at the heart of the Knowlton Festival, and gives audiences an opportunity to hear voices trained at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, arguably the ultimate authority in bel canto style. Therein lies the excitement and the appeal of last night’s concert. What will we hear? Tomorrow’s stars? Possibly! The joy of discovery!

The audience that turned up last night numbered about 300 in a tent which has been filled to a capacity of 850 at previous events. If applause and standing ovations are a gauge of the success of a concert, the evening was definitely a success.

Getting to the Festival Site
If you’re planning to join the music-lovers who have already discovered the Knowlton Festival, be forewarned; you’ll have a bit of a challenge getting to the festival site. You’ll be parking your cars in a central location in Knowlton – a big field next to the Brome Lake Duck Farm – then walking across the field to the school busses lined up to transport you (5-7 minute ride) along narrow winding gravel roads to the Chapiteau (tent) a couple of miles away. There is no parking at the site itself. For the most part, the system works well, and the Knowlton volunteers greeting and directing traffic on site are cheerful and engaging. The weather thus far has not been too problematic.

This odyssey becomes more challenging, however, if the busses are not running smoothly and if the weather is not cooperative. Last night, it poured rain and I suspect that the prospect of getting soaked on the way to the concert deterred many people from attending.

Coming Next: Tuesday night the period music specialists ensemble, Les Violons du Roy, plays Handel, and Wednesday night pianist Stephen Kovacevich gives a recital of works by Bach, Schumann and Beethoven. For more information check the festival website.

Paul E. Robinson is the author of Herbert von Karajan: the Maestro as Superstar, and Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music, both available at Amazon.com.