Two groups collaborate on 'Traviata'

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Cleveland Plain Dealer
Donald Rosenberg

Plain Dealer Music Critic

"La Traviata" fever appears to have hit Cleveland.

Not long after Opera Cleveland announced a production of Verdi's immortal opera about the consumptive courtesan with a heart of gold for next summer at the Cleveland Play House, word arrived that the Cleveland Institute of Opera Theater would present Act I of "Traviata" in November, along with scenes from other beloved works.

But the first local "Traviata" out of the starting gate this season comes from the intimate Opera Circle, in collaboration with the Cleveland Women's Orchestra. They'll give performances Friday at the Alliance of Poles Auditorium and Sunday at Bohemian National Hall, both in Slavic Village.

Teaming Opera Circle with the Women's Orchestra was the brainstorm of Robert Cronquist, who has been music director of the orchestra for 16 years. Cronquist is also music director of the Lakeside Festival Orchestra, which featured soprano Dorota Sobieska, co-director of Opera Circle, in a program of Viennese music several years ago.

Their talks led to a production of "Traviata" in August with the Lakeside orchestra. Virtually the same cast will take part in this weekend's performances, which will have sets Cronquist used in previous productions. And the conductor himself is staging the work, though he says the task isn't too complicated.

"I did a lot of blocking and went over a lot of the motions with them," Cronquist said. "They're intelligent artists. They know how to do the roles. The Met used to do this all the time. We get the people into position, and they, of course, add their own little bits to it."

In addition to her job as impresario, Sobieska usually stages and sings in Opera Circle productions. With "Traviata," she's happy to let Cronquist direct and merely -- if that's the word -- sing the role of Violetta, the "strayed one" of the title.

The part is one of the most difficult in the operatic repertoire, famous for requiring three different vocal types for each act. In Act I, Violetta negotiates coloratura flourishes. Later, she becomes more lyrical and dramatic.

The Lakeside production was the Polish-born Sobieska's first experience in this taxing role. She had wanted to sing Violetta since her student days in Warsaw. But because Opera Circle devotes itself to small productions with reduced orchestras, Sobieska and her co-director and husband, Jacek Sobieski, put off "Traviata" until the circumstances were right.

"We were thinking of doing Traviata,' but to do it full-scale, you need a full orchestra, not a reduction," said Sobieska, who recently returned from Germany, where she sang two performances as the Queen of the Night in Mozart's "The Magic Flute."

Cronquist is using about 50 members of the Women's Orchestra -- the only extant ensemble of its kind in the United States -- for "Traviata." The orchestra, which played its first concert in November 1936 at Severance Hall, is a service ensemble that performs at senior venues, elsewhere around Cleveland and gives an annual Severance concert (the next is Sunday, May 6).

"Traviata" is a historic event for the orchestra.

"This is the first time I've done this with the women," Cronquist said. "We started last year in the pit doing a ballet production with Ohio Dance Theatre. We'll do a couple more this year. I thought it would be nice to add [opera] to their repertoire. It's two of our 11 concerts this year. We're pretty much at our maximum."

Cronquist is no stranger to opera. During his 22 years as music director of the Mansfield Symphony, he led annual productions featuring Metropolitan Opera stars, such as mezzo-soprano Blanche Thebom, baritones Robert Merrill and Frank Guarrera and bass Jerome Hines. He's also conducted opera -- including the middle-period Verdi triumvirate of "Traviata," "Rigoletto" and "Il Trovatore" -- at Lakeside.

Sobieska believes "Traviata" to be "the most Bellinian of all Verdi operas," she said, referring to the bel-canto opera composer Vicenzo Bellini. "It is the most deeply personal, and through that, universal in time and place. Even the overture has no pomposity, but rather a reminiscence -- a reflection of that personal face' everybody carries veiled, hidden to the public."

Opera Circle often imports singers for its productions, but this week's "Traviata" cast is entirely local. Singing alongside Sobieska will be Kent State University faculty member Timothy Culver as Alfredo and Ray Liddle as Germont. The opera's secondary roles will be taken by Amy Scheetz-Tatta, Nicole Boeke, Robert Davis, Jose Gotera, Peter Bush and Max Pivic.

"It's not that I'm against exchanges," said Sobieska. "We bring in people all the time. But there has to be a certain base that is our own thing, or we don't exist. What are we, a presenting organization?

"We have to have something that's distinctly ours. Cleveland is great."

Click here to view online article.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: drosenberg@plaind.com, 216-999-4269

Violinist Julia Holliday to give junior recital November 11

Event: Cleveland Institute of Music Junior Recital

Artist: Julia Holliday, Violin

Venue: Epworth-Euclid United Methodist Church

Location: Corner of Chester and 107th Street, Cleveland, OH

Date: Saturday, November 11, 2006

Time: 4:00 p.m.

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Program:

.....Mozart: Sonata DV 379

.....Bartok: Rhapsody No. 1

.....Fauré: Sonata in A Major

Be there!! If you can't, you can send her your good wishes: juls57@zoominternet.net
Way to go, Julia!!

Liz tells about her new job and her location

From Liz Rothenbusch, October 5, 2006

Hey Kathy

Thanks for putting all the photos together of Lakeside and of course the Blog. This is a great way to keep in touch during the year and it takes a diligent initiator like yourself to make it happen--THANKS SO MUCH!!

I moved to Fayetteville NC at the end of Aug. and I really love it! The weather here is SPECTACULAR right now (still 80's during the day low 70's at night --no humidity currently although Sept. had a lot). Anyways I'm teaching about 40 private students at the second largest church music academy in the USA plus 2 group classes--mostly Suzuki method. Also playing in the Fayetteville Symphony and soloing here and there...livin' my dreams here...great place to live 2 hrs from the Ocean 4 hrs from the mountains...

Anyways I'll be in Ohio occasionally still to play with the Cleve. Pops Orch. and of course Lakeside in Aug.

Talk to you soon, hope all is well for you!

Liz

Classic Put-Downs: Johannes Brahms

From Paul Jackson, 10/04/06

Subject: Slate Article: Classic Put-Downs

music box Classic Put-Downs Was Brahms a wiseass? By Jan Swafford Posted Monday, Oct. 2, 2006, at 5:18 PM ET

Among those celebrated for their eloquence in the art of music, especially instrumental music, it's worth noting how well they wielded the foreign art of language. It's not surprising that the prose efforts of some certified greats—see Beethoven's letters—were clunky in expression and uncertain in grammar. But a surprising number of composers have been in one way or another handy with words. One of those was the master ironist Johannes Brahms.

Cutting irony was a prime Brahmsian mode, and he wielded his wit with special gusto when skewering friends. He was master of the quick putdown. During a rehearsal of a quartet of his, the violist asked if he liked their tempos. "Yes," said Brahms. "Especially yours." When Max Bruch had played through his giant oratorio Odysseus for Brahms and turned eagerly for a response, Brahms observed only: "Hey, where do you get your music paper? First rate!"

It was not easy to be a fan of Brahms. He hated effusive praise from strangers. At parties mounted by friends, the guest of honor would preside in the middle of the fray, downing ham rolls and mugs of beer, and have at anyone foolish enough to approach him: "Did the gracious lady have all those beautiful feelings thanks to my poor quartets? And where did they lodge? Beneath the little blue shawl? Or maybe under the bird on her hat?"

Sometimes he went easy on his victims. When a lady gushed to him, "How do you write such divine adagios?" he only shrugged, "My publisher orders 'em that way." Once a singer asked which of his songs he might recommend. With straight face, he advised her to try his posthumous ones. "And which?" she asked politely. That was too good; he had to spread it around. "Ask Kalbeck," he told her. "He knows everything." So, she did go and ask his friend and future biographer Max Kalbeck to recommend some of Brahms's posthumous lieder, inspiring Kalbeck to collapse with laughter. When the lady appeared afterward in a huff, Brahms was, for him, kindly: "Dear lady, don't ask me such things. I'll usually just make some sort of a joke—and if a good one doesn't occur to me, then a bad one."

One of the charming, also telling, things about Brahms' wit was that he didn't spare himself. He had many friends but in company remained the eternal loner; he enjoyed acclaim but anguished over his inability to measure up to the giants of the past. At a dinner in his honor, the host introduced a bottle with, "I call this the Brahms of my wines!" "Well," said Brahms, "let's have a bottle of Bach then." He wrote a glum note to Clara Schumann reflecting on the neglect of the Mozart concertos: "The fact that the public in general does not understand and appreciate the best things is the reason people like me get famous."

Late in life, when Brahms had returned from one of his working vacations, Kalbeck asked him what he'd produced over the summer. Perhaps a new string quartet? "God forbid, nothing so grand as that!" Brahms exclaimed. "Once again I've just thrown together a bunch of polkas and waltzes." He was referring to the epically gloomy Fourth Symphony. That crack reveals two significant things about Brahms. One is that the pieces closest to his heart were the ones he was most apt to put down. And a Brahms joke often had a serious point buried in it: The Fourth Symphony is not a bunch of polkas and waltzes but a tragic work expressed largely in solemn and mournful dances.

Brahms' wounding irony, his obliqueness in all things, were part of the armor of a relentlessly private man. So was the famous beard. The whiskers he grew in his mid-40s changed his appearance so much that he became almost unrecognizable. To get some mileage from that, he took to introducing himself to acquaintances as "Kapellmeister Müller from Braunschweig," and seeing how long they took to catch on. His friend Gustav Nottebohm spent a whole evening conversing innocently with "Kapellmeister Müller."

Nottebohm, a Beethoven scholar, was also the victim of one of Brahms' most devious practical jokes. On a scrap of old music paper, Brahms jotted down a current pop tune in an expert imitation of Beethoven's handwriting, then bribed a street vendor to wrap the manuscript around a sausage and sell it to Nottebohm. Brahms was thrilled to see the old pedant unwrap the sausage, step under a streetlight to examine the paper with eyes popping, and with a furtive air slip it into his pocket, finishing the greasy sausage barehanded.

Perhaps the masterpiece of Brahmsian irony in prose is a letter he wrote to his friend and champion Eduard Hanslick, a famous Wagner-bashing critic. Brahms had perused Hanslick's Beauty in Music, a classic exposition of the doctrine of "pure music," of which Brahms was considered the great exponent. He wrote Clara Schumann of the book, "I found so much stupid stuff in it that I gave it up." Yet he later wrote Hanslick:

I must send you my sincere thanks for your book Beauty in Music, to which I owe many hours of enjoyment. ... Every page invites one to build further on what has been said. ... But for the person who understands his art in this manner, there are things to be done everywhere. ... I will wish we might soon be blessed with such excellent instruction on other subjects.

Hanslick proudly cited this letter in a memoir. Now, Brahms was a brutally honest man, with himself and others. He despised hypocrisy and lying. Was he being a hypocrite with Hanslick? Not as such, no. The letter is a marvelously subtle dismissal. "Every page invites one to build further," i.e. You don't go very far. He hopes for "excellent instruction on other subjects," i.e. Don't write this kind of thing anymore; you're not the man for it.

Is Brahms' irony reflected in his music? Perhaps not, though sunlight turns up in his generally dark-hued work more often than one might think. First hearing the ebullient opening of the G Major String Quintet, Kalbeck exclaimed, "Brahms in the Prater!" meaning the famous Vienna amusement park. "You've got it!" Brahms replied, adding roguishly, "And all the pretty girls there, eh?" But Haydn and Mozart had been the masters of irony in music, and Beethoven had his distinctive rough jokes, and Brahms did not try to challenge them.

On his deathbed, fading with cancer, bleary with morphine, Brahms did not lose his wit. When his housekeeper got him up for sessions at the washstand, he called it "bathing with police escort." Finally, he barked at her, "You want to give me my last bath? I'm not a baby!" In tears, she replied that she was just trying to save him trouble. Brahms relented and whispered, "You're a sensible woman. One can negotiate with you." Shortly after that last, gentle joke, he died.

~Jan Swafford is a composer and writer living in Massachusetts. He is the author of Johannes Brahms: A Biography and Charles Ives: A Life with Music.