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Venerdì 20 e sabato 21 febbraio, al Teatro Politeama, all’interno del programma della stagione concertistica 2014-2015 dell’Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, si terranno due concerti che vedranno protagonista un direttore d’orchestra di fama internazionale, il sicilianoSalvatore Percacciolo. Durante i due concerti verranno eseguiti brani di tre compositori: Giovanni Bottesini e gli austriaci Christoph Willibald Gluck e Franz Joseph Haydn; quest’ultimo padre del “classicismo viennese” insieme a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart e Ludwig van Beethoven.
Salvatore Percacciolo
Dopo aver iniziato a soli 4 anni a suonare il pianoforte, il maestro Percacciolo, si è iscritto al conservatorio di Messina per proseguire gli studi in composizione al conservatorio di Palermo. Successivamente ha completato gli studi in direzione d’orchestra a Firenze con Piero Bellugi e a Helsinki con Jorma Panula. Inoltre, lo scorso anno, ha partecipato ad una selezione internazionale ed è stato scelto dal maestro Lorin Maazel per ricoprire il ruolo di conductor fellow al Castleton Festival in Virginia. Durante il festival, ha sostituito Maazel, venuto a mancare proprio in quel periodo, nel Don Giovanni di Mozart. Anche l’edizione del festival di quest’anno, sotto la direzione artistica della famiglia di Maazel, vedrà la presenza del maestro Percacciolo che dirigerà un concerto sinfonico e un dittico che comprende un’opera in prima assoluta mondiale di Derek Wang e “L’Heure espagnole” di Maurice Ravel.
“Nonostante le mie esibizioni in giro per il mondo- ha affermato il maestro Salvatore Percacciolo- da siciliano tornare a Palermo è sempre una grandissima emozione. L’Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, inoltre, mi fa ricordare quando studiavo al conservatorio qui a Palermo e ogni venerdì sera andavo ad assistere ai loro concerti. Negli ultimi anni, questa gloriosa istituzione, è stata investita da una forte crisi risultato di una politica italiana anti-culturale. A tal proposito faccio un appello a tutti i giovani siciliani, e non solo, per invitarli a riempire sempre più i teatri e le sale da concerto di questa meravigliosa terra e per iniziare una vera e propria rivoluzione culturale partendo dalla musica, linguaggio universale ricco di grandi emozioni, gioie e dolori espresse senza la necessità di utilizzare Google Translator.”
CASTLETON, Va. — The Senate is no longer a locus of oratory, and the House is a haven for demagogues. The president can’t get legislation enacted, so he plays small ball, tweaking a vast regulatory state. Is it any wonder that the Supreme Court is an object of fascination, with several of its justices now enjoying celebrity status? The high court may be divided, and its decisions sometimes unpopular, but it isn’t dysfunctional or impotent, and its opinions are at least grammatical and often inspiring.
“Scalia/Ginsburg,” an opera by Derrick Wang that premiered at the Castleton Festival on Saturday evening, celebrates the virtues of the court through an affectionate, comic look at the unofficial leaders of its conservative and liberal wings. A great deal of media attention has been paid to Wang’s confection since bits and pieces of it were performed at the court two years ago. The premiere of the finished work was highly anticipated and attended by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was warmly received by the crowd; Justice Antonin Scalia was in Rome and didn’t attend.
The one-act opera, paired on a double bill with Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole,” feels like what was once known as a pièce d’occasion, a work assembled for a festive event, and not necessarily intended to be a lasting contribution to the repertoire. Great composers often cannibalized music from these works for later duty in more finished, lasting compositions. Wang could do likewise, because there is much that is charming, clever and amusing in the score.
But it needs shaping and trimming. The opera, including the libretto, is woven together from operatic conventions, repurposed to give the composer (who is also the librettist) a chance to engage the two justices in musical and legal repartee, much of it drawn directly from their own writing or public comments. Drawing on the idea that the legal opinions are built on a long history of precedent, Wang has created a score that mixes direct quotation with musical pastiche, shifting from idea to idea with the manic frenzy of Carl Stalling’s old Looney Tunes scores. Printed versions of the libretto have detailed footnotes citing not just the source of the text but the musical allusions.
So we get bits from Bizet’s “Carmen,” Verdi’s “La traviata,” Puccini’s “La bohème,” plus a Christmas carol, the lament from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a lot of Mozart and Mozart-like music.
The virtue of this style is its flexibility in transporting text, and Wang’s opera is text-heavy. Recitative and arioso passages allow the singers to barrel through words at a tremendous clip.
The libretto reads better on the page than it functions on stage, though opera lovers will enjoy the challenge of identifying its myriad references.
Lawyers and court watchers will play a similar game with the text. Some of the allusions are clever to the point that probably only those with a fetish for the court will get them: In the final trio, Justice Ginsburg sings music from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” an opera whose main character, the dignified Marschallin, she particularly admires.
Ginsburg, sung with animation, clarity and a light, flexible soprano voice by Ellen Wieser, is clearly the sympathetic heroine of the work. Scalia, created by tenor John Overholt, is her comic foil, though not an unsympathetic character. Overholt has a natural comic’s gift and finessed a likable curmudgeon from material that might have yielded caricature. Presiding over the proceedings, which are loosely structured as a series of trials meant to test Scalia’s character (perhaps in the fashion of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”), is The Commentator, sung by bass-baritone Adam Cioffari, who has a suitably commanding voice.
How to salvage a musical theater piece from all this material?
First, cut. An aria near the end, which recalls the marriage of Ginsburg to her late husband, Martin Ginsburg (who died in 2010), is a touching tribute to love, support, fidelity and his fine cooking, but it is one of several set pieces that are simply tacked on to an already overlong drama.
Second, refine. Pastiche and quotation are woven into the concept of the work, but they need better framing. More original material, and closer attention to the orchestration — to create a distinctive sonic palette to unify the work — might help.
Third, recast. Many of the showpieces in the score take the singers’ voices into uncomfortable places, where they lose focus and power; critical lines of text from both Overholt and Wieser were sometimes lost in muffled lower passages.
But fundamentally, the composer faces a critical choice: Is this meant to entertain and engage audiences, or is it a conceptual stunt aimed primarily at court watchers, lawyers and Washington insiders? To his credit, Wang hasn’t used opera as a cheap comic vehicle for lawyer jokes, but he hasn’t yet decided if he really wants to write a serviceable work for the opera house.
“Scalia/Ginsburg” was preceded by Ravel’s one-act slapstick comedy of sex and sexual allusion, “L’heure espagnole,” a sophisticated trifle that premiered in 1911 at the Opera-Comique in Paris.
In Ravel’s hands, the comic concept — that a clockmaker’s lusty wife needs her mechanism regulated — is applied lightly throughout in a work that mixes sumptuous orchestration and harmonic color with burlesque antics.
Mezzo-soprano Kate Allen, as Concepción, was the most accomplished of the five singers who fill out the ensemble cast. Allen’s mezzo is gorgeous, with a slight vibrato and a good deal of power throughout its range. But her performance felt constrained, cautiously sung and not quite in the manic spirit of Ravel’s bedroom farce. Concepción is one of the most delightfully transgressive female characters in all of opera; Allen should be having more fun with this.
Tenors Tyler Nelson and Cris Frisco sang Gonzalve and Torquemada respectively, and both with voices comfortable with the light, quavery, nuanced style of French song. Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson was a fine comic presence as the pompous Don Iñigo Gomez and baritone Ben Bloomfield was charismatic as the good-natured, long-suffering, finally rewarded Ramiro.
Maria Tucci directed both shows, with a deft and sympathetic hand, and Salvatore Percacciolo conducted, drawing out the best of Ravel’s prismatic orchestration and keeping everything tight and orderly in the motley of Wang’s crazy-quilt score.
The double bill of Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole” and Derrick Wang’s “Scalia/Ginsburg” will be repeated July 17 and 19 at the Castleton Festival.
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg married a same-sex couple in May, she proudly proclaimed that she did so “by the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United States.” A month later, when the court acknowledged that same-sex marriage was indeed a constitutional right, Justice Antonin Scalia angrily dissented. A constitutional literalist, he called the 5-4 decision “a judicial putsch” that “threatened American democracy.”
After this historic head-to-head, the two justices headed off to a Washington party, where Scalia, a frustrated opera singer, reportedly belted with great gusto Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,'” much to Ginsburg’s delight.
That Ruth and Nino can be SCOTUS chums appears to bewilder Washington to no end. Then again, the justices share two things unexpected in our present political discourse.
However much Ginsburg and Scalia may argue over interpretation, they operate on the principle that devotion to constitutional rights, not self-interest, serves society. Equally exotic in government, where art patronage has become anathema, the justices are opera buffs. Presumably, they argue about that too. This time, Ginsburg is said to be the stickler for literal convention, while Scalia has claimed he is more open-minded about modern approaches to staging.
A commonplace in opera, of course, is that by penetrating psyches, music exposes the deeper bonds and inherent inner conflicts that cause enemies to become friends or friends, enemies. So it makes sense that the justices should now have their own buddy opera. Derrick Wang’s “Scalia/Ginsburg” had its premiere Saturday at the Castleton Festival, begun by conductor Lorin Maazel on his Virginia farm 70 miles west of Washington, D.C. The affectionate, hour-long one-act comic opera shared a double bill with Ravel’s “L’heure Espagnole,” and it was streamed live, which is how I viewed it.
Two other things these justices share — a sense of humor and an attraction to the limelight — proved useful to Wang. An ambitious young composer who holds law and music degrees, he wrote a funny, sentimental rhymed libretto with hundreds of footnotes citing legal and operatic precedents and showed it to Scalia and Ginsburg. They’ve attended Washington National Opera together for more than two decades and have even performed together onstage with the company as supernumeraries. Wang’s was operatic bait they could hardly resist.
The Supreme Court may not really be one big happy family, but Wang’s most significant accomplishment in “Scalia/Ginsburg” is his compassion for both characters. However much the justices may like each other, the vast majority of us who care about the issues and the country have use for only one of them.
Saturday’s crowd at Castleton was clearly in the Ginsburg camp, applauding whenever the soprano portraying her made a biting point. Ginsburg was, moreover, in the audience, whereas Scalia was in Rome (I hope at the opera). And yet, even from a quite primitive stream with wretched sound and many computer glitches, you could sense from the laughter and the applause a kind of astonished sympathy for Scalia, whose surface bluster was revealed to be compensation for human vulnerability.
But “Scalia/Ginsberg” is a lost opportunity for using opera as a means to gain profound understanding. The score is a jokey pastiche of famous bits from popular operas with little original music. Wang has an impressive facility for unlikely transitions, but after a while that began to seem too artificial, as though getting along simply meant superficial inoffensiveness instead of thinking something through and coming up with something new.
The opera opens with Scalia carrying on in a clever Handelian rage aria, whereupon he is commanded by the Commentator to investigate why the justice is so unrelenting in his dissenting. As in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Scalia is made to undergo three trials. But Ginsburg forces her way in, feistily contradicting all Scalia says but in total defense of her friend’s right to say it. She insists on going through the trials with him.
One opera after another is referenced (as Wang points out in pedantic detail in his footnotes — the libretto was published in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts). The justices discover how much they really care for each other. With nods to “West Side Story,” they sing together: “We are different. We are one.” They pass their trials and are afforded the ability each night after court adjourns to remove their robes and become alter-ego opera stars.
It is all sweet and touching. Soprano Ellen Wieser and tenor John Overholt are convincing both as flexible, comic opera singers and justices with inner lives, although there isn’t much Adam Cioffari could be expected to do given the thankless role of the Commentator and the ridiculous heavenly costume. Actress Maria Tucci’s straightforward production didn’t do much to remove “Scalia/Ginsburg” from seeming more like a revue or a situation comedy than an opera. Maybe if Scalia had been on hand, he could have dissented on the side of operatic adventure.
Salvatore Percacciolo, a young Italian protégé of the late Maazel, conducted a lively performance.
The sweetness and caring and considered devotion to ideals are in such short supply in Washington these days that in the end “Scalia/Ginsburg” feels like a gift. Earlier in the day, Ginsburg presented a program (also streamed) called “Law in Opera,” in which she used her dry wit to introduce opera scenes that revolved around judicial issues and were sung by talented young singers. She concluded by praising the Supreme Court for not demonstrating “the animosity that currently moves the other branches of our government.”
Could we please make it a constitutional requirement that no one can be sworn into office in the White House or Congress without having first seen “Scalia/Ginsburg”?
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