It was Boston’s Sarah Caldwell, after all, who did the first American staging of Serge Prokofiev’s titanic “War and Peace” (which Zambello staged in Seattle last year). It was Caldwell who staged America’s first encounter with Hector Berlioz’s “The Trojans” (which Zambello will stage for the Los Angeles Music Center Opera this coming Saturday). After that, Zambello flies off to Geneva to stage yet another Berlioz opera, “Benvenuto Cellini.” Caldwell had put that opera on once, too.

Zambello arrived, and the resemblance was further confirmed. No, she hasn’t even come close to Caldwell’s famous girth that sometimes made for an unkind remark or two. But there’s a lot of Zambello even so, and when she speaks it’s with Caldwell’s forward-thrusting, dynamic, bronze-colored alto, and, of course, with the same sense that she knows exactly where she’s going and how to get there. If we’re lucky, history will repeat itself, Zambello in for Caldwell.

Born in New York to an American mother and an Italian father, both actor/singers, she got her degree (in philosophy) at Colgate University and launched her operatic career as assistant to yet another in the pantheon of innovative stage directors, the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, a man governed by the philosophy that anytime you don’t like what the composer tells you to do, do something else.

She’s come a long way; who, outside of Milwaukee, knew her name six years ago? That’s where she did her first important professional work, starting in her mid-20s as co-director of that city’s Skylight Opera Theater. Her partner there was Stephen Wadsworth, best known as the librettist for Leonard Bernstein’s unfortunate fling into grand opera known as “A Quiet Place.” They have now gone their separate ways, but Zambello pinpointed the Milwaukee experience as the best kind of training for a stage director with innovative ideas.

”It’s a small theater, 300 seats and only a chamber-orchestra pit,” she said. “But we accomplished a lot there, eight productions a year, 15 or 20 performances of each. It became a sort of laboratory, where you learned to focus on intimate performance details, on acting rather than just belting out high notes.

”Actually,” she continued, “I like to balance large and small productions, and sometimes they even intermix.” She talked about her now-famous production of Puccini’s “Tosca” in London last season, not at an opera house but in a sports arena at Earls Court, seating 10,000. “Sure, it had to be big. We put the production in the center of the arena, with a set that looked like the whole city of Rome, with 10 horses and 20 dogs. When the shepherd sang in the last act, instead of being offstage as the libretto demanded, he came on with a flock of sheep.”

Still, according to the star of that production, Los Angeles resident Julia Migenes, the great thing about Zambello’s concept was the intimacy it provided. “Instead of having to sing XI Love You’ to the second balcony,” Migenes remembered during a recent conversation, “the microphones made it possible to sing it to the tenor.”

Zambello also spoke with good feelings about her most recent gig, the American premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Oedipus” at the Santa Fe Opera, where she was working for the first time. Here was innovative opera at its most resolute, and it demanded innovative staging: singers on the opera house’s topmost towers (in, as it happened, howling rainstorms at all four performances), one onstage singer simulating (awesomely) suicide by hanging, all manner of amplification tricks. The critics (present company excepted) hated it; Zambello, she claimed, had a ball.

”That’s my kind of opera house: no stars, heavy emphasis on ensemble, 4 weeks of rehearsal. Sure, the critics jumped all over it, and that’s a real tragedy nowadays. We don’t have enough critics who love opera, really love it I mean.”

Will the critics love the 4-1/2-hour expanse of Berlioz’ “The Trojans”? Nobody is saying, yet; the least everybody is saying is that our local company is brave beyond belief in even attempting to cope with it. But that’s Peter Hemmings’ doing; after all, it was his Scottish Opera’s production in the 1960s that restored the long-neglected score in its full glory to world attention. When Hemmings took over the Los Angeles Music Center Opera six years ago, he made no secret of the fact that a revival of “The Trojans” was his fondest hope.

Zambello feels that the recent popularity of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” that 17-hour epic beside which any other opera (even “The Trojans”) is no longer than a sneeze, cuts through any resistance to modern full-length productions. This “Trojans,” she poined out with pride, is even longer than previous “complete” performances. “There’s an 8-minute scene, early on, where the Greek double agent Sinon tries to convince the Trojan King Priam to accept the Greeks’ gift of the famous Wooden Horse. Berlioz never finished the orchestration of that scene, so it’s never been done. Now it has been completed, by the Berlioz scholar Hugh MacDonald, and this will be its American premiere.

” XThe Trojans’ really is the French XRing,’ ” Zambello said. “It doesn’t only tell the story of the fall of Troy and the love of Dido and Aeneas; it frames all this, as Wagner framed his gods and goddesses, with a text of even higher significance. I’ve tried to bring this out in this production.

 “As in Wagner, I have the ancient gods standing around the stage, overseeing the action of the mortals. I see Troy as a dead culture, its beaten warriors mourning that demise, the whole thing set in dark colors and black.

 “But Carthage is different, and here we’ve brought the action up to Berlioz’ own time, and with lighter, brighter colors. After all, Carthage is only 7 years old when the Trojans land there. The city is still being built; there’s scaffolding all around. And it’s being built as a Utopian society, Marxist, Hegelian. But now Aeneas comes along and the whole plan goes up in flames. Human weaknesses win out over grand ideas.”

Pressed to describe the look of her production, Zambello hung back. “No, I’m not going to tell you what our Trojan Horse will look like,” she said with a conspiratorial wink. “Some things you have to find out for yourself.

 “I promise you,” said Francesca Zambello, “you won’t be bored. Not for a minute.”
]]> http://www.soiveheard.com/1990/04/ala-zambello/feed/ 0 http://www.soiveheard.com/1990/04/new-york/ http://www.soiveheard.com/1990/04/new-york/#comments Sun, 22 Apr 1990 17:06:11 +0000 Alan Rich http://soiveheard.com/?p=3017 Every visitor, and even a few residents, recognize Manhattan as a paradise for the sightseer. But there needs to be a comparable word — “soundhearer,” perhaps? — for the music critic, with a few hours off from official duties, who decides to cruise the island specifically to sample its indigenous noises. Herewith, an account of a few hours of noise-cruising in Manhattan on a recent Thursday, a sp[endid day warmed by an Indian summer sun.

9:30 a.m. My hotel maintains a small coffee shop, run on what you might call informal principles. You find a seat; the man at the cash register, across the room, yells out a friendly “what’ll ya have?” and somehow a process is set in motion. A benign pandemonium reigns, punctuated by the horns and engine roarings of heavy crosstown traffic on 51st St.

9:50 a.m. Surcease awaits, directly across the street in the form of Greenacre Park: a small, blessed oasis, no larger than a single building site, with a 25-foot waterfall at one end, some handsome plantings, a few chairs and tables, a coffee bar. My day’s second cup, therefore, has a far more agreeable sound setting. From a seat beside the waterfall, all of New York recedes.

10:30 a.m. Not many years ago New York’s subways were a sonic nightmare: rattletrap cars, screeching brakes, outcries from protesting wheels rounding curves that could set your teeth on edge. New cars and track repairs have made life underground somewhat more bearable. Now you get harangued, all too clearlu, by the sleazoid beggars and peddlers on their rounds from car to car. And they get outshouted from time to time by the conductor’s station announcements over the p.a.system that is usallu on the blink.

10:50 a.m. End of the line, and blessed, momentary relief. Manhattan’s true miracle is the transformation that has taken place at the lower tip of the island: not only the gigantic towers of the World Trade Center, the World Financial Center and the waterside apartment complexes at Battery Park City, but the complex of personal amenities that have been installed in, under and beside these structures.

A walkways leads from the subway station directly to a concourse lined with markets, snackbars and formal restaurants. One level up, on the streets of Lower Manhattan, the sounds of traffic roil and surge; here, below ground, there’s only the sounds of foot traffic on stone flooring. Where else can you hear this strange mix of urgent pedestrian sounds in a seeming sound vacuum? The back streets of Venice (the one in Italy) come immediately to mind.

11 a.m. My wanderings lead me to the architectural jewel of the building complex, the Winter Garden on the ground level of Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center. A cascade of broad marble steps leads down to the floor level, to a vast garden lined with our own California fan palms. At the far end, a windowed facade looks out on New York harbor, with Lady Liberty and the newly restored Ellis Island in clear perspective.

Here, in a city where real estate is valued by the cubic inch, the prodigal space-wastage of the Winter Garden stops the breath. It astounds the ear as well. From the marble stairs, the distant rattle of china and silver at the cafe tables rings like the chatter of far-off birds. The clink and purr from the marimbas of a Mexican band, rehearsing for a free concert later in the day, echo from the upward-curving roof like points of audible light. As is only right, the Winter Garden serves as site for an ongoing list of free concerts; I note with envy that jazzman Milt Hinton is scheduled a few days from now when, alas, I’ll be otherwise engaged.

12 noon. Outdoors once again, I head toward Broadway, two blocks to the east. Silence reigns, as always, in the small, handsome churchyard at St. Paul’s Chapel, and inside as well. George Washington prayed here, moments before his inauguration as our first President, and his pew is nicely preseved. Trinity Church, a few blocks to the south, is the grander of New York’s two 18th- century churches, but I love St. Paul’s for its intimacy, and the way the silence seems to wrap itself around the visitor.

12:15 p.m. On route to Trinity, there is a small park a few steps below street level. There a girl on roller skates holds the crowd enthralled with her rap songs, helped by a ghetto blaster whose sound probably carries to New Jersey.

12:20 p.m. Fortunately, it doesn’t carry to Trinity’s elegant inner space, where an organist runs through some tortured 19th-century harmonies. I wait for a while, in hopes that he might try some Bach. No such luck.

12:30 p.m. Starting with the restrained, elegant rococo of Trinity, and then along the twisted, tiny, aimless streets of Lower Manhattan, it’s possible as in few American places to imagine yourself in some European town. Sure, the old buildings are now festooned with fast-food signs, but if you aim your gaze upward the fantasy of Old New York, before the invention of the grid pattern for streets (and the consequent gridlock), does take hold.

1 p.m. Along Fulton Street, heading east, the crescendo in fish odors tells me I’m heading in the right direction. To the west, Lower Manhattan is greatly enhanced by the new construction; on the east side, it’s the old structures, handsomely restored, that seize the attention. An area of several blocks at the end of Fluton, just before the East River has been closed to daytime traffic, and turned into a pedestrian mall, ringed by great old buildings. Again, as in the underground concourse, memories of the unnatural quiet on Venice’s untrafficked streets become inescapable.

The crown of the restoration is the South Street Seaport, with its few old ships still at anchor — converted, for the most part, into tourist traps, but still handsome on a late-September sunny day. In the open space a superior jazz combo holds forth (trombone, bass, drums): the Chicken Wing Trio. Not bad.

1:30 p.m. Across the street are New York’s two most serious seafood restaurants: Sweet’s, which as usual looks jammed, and Sloppy Louie’s, which doesn’t.Sloppy Louie’s main dining room is entirely tin-lined: walls and ceiling both. The bluefish is marvelous, but the sound level creates the sensation of a huge thumb, pushing me down toward the floor.

3 p.m. Back uptown, I soothe my ears in the sound of my waterfall.

“Pelleas” is an opera for the brave in heart, on both sides of the footlights. It invests Maeterlinck’s sad, symbolic tale with a musical tapestry woven out of shadows. On the other hand, the opera — both text and music — is so full of half-meanings and ambiguities that it can be made to work in either a literal or symbolic production. The Long Beach forces, marshalled by stage director Brian Kulick, designers Mark Wendland and Craig Pierce, and conductor Paul Connelly, have chosen the latter approach.

You know what’s in store almost immediately, as the lost Golaud walks onto a bare platform, facing a barren mound that looks like sand strewn with waste paper, and sings of being “lost in a forest.” The forest is in Debussy’s music, not on the stage and that, to the producers, is enough. They make us believe, as well.

Some of the symbolic gadgetry may, in truth, be a little excessive. Melisande has no long hair to let down from her tower, so her Pelleas must cope with a symbolic bolt of some shiny fabric. The child Yniold does his spying number, not through a window into Melisande’s room but down into a cut-away doll-house. It isn’t Golaud who gets to hurl Melisande around by her hair, but a black-clad surrogate, one of three silent stooges who function as stagehands and who, on occasion, clutter the production with a welter of gratuitous images.

Yes, there are moments when less might have been more. Overriding these passing flaws, however, is a consistent production philosophy under which Debussy’s subtle, supple operatic masterpiece fills in the cramped spaces of the Center Theater, throbs with its own life-force, and comes across as the kind of challenging, memorable entertainment that has marked this company’s best work through the past decade.

Musically, the forces are equal to the dramatic demands. Nobody could confuse the matronly Michal Shamir for the child-bride of Maeterlinck’s text. Yet, under Connelly’s expert pacing, she creates a Melisande out of whole fabric, and her final moments are truly moving. James Schwisow is a Pelleas ardent and haunted; Neil Howlett a marvelously fluent, menacing Golaud. But the authentic miracle here is the Arkel of Jerome Hines, 70 this year, 50 years out from his professional singing debut (which happened to be in Los Angeles). You have to have those figures in front of you, to underscore the unbelievability factor in the rolling, rock-solid eloquence of this performance.

Connelly’s pacing of the score was judicious and sympathetic; his orchestra, behind a scrim in back of the performance, contributed an appropriately shadowy visual background — and an unscheduled laugh as well when, at the end, the scrim was pulled away on the line “why are all these people here?” Oh yes, the opera was sung in English, a translation by Hugh MacDonald. Against all fears of violence to the strange, half-lit French of Maeterlinck’s text, the new words worked remarkably well. A memorable, spellbinding evening, then; go see for yourselves.

THE FACTS: What: Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande,” by the Long Beach Opera.

When: Tonight [*] FRIDAY [F/L] at 8, April 28 at 2.

Where: Center Theater, Long Beach Convention Center.

Behind the scenes: staged by Brian Kulick; conducted by Paul Connelly; designed by Mark Wentland and Craig Pierce.

Tickets: $22 to $55. Information: 213 596-5556.

Our rating: * * * *

Pavarotti was, in fact, in fair voice quite a bit of the time. His chosen program could not exactly count as arduous. There was a generous spattering of instrumental pieces to allow the singer to replenish his stock of high notes, loud notes, soft and crooning notes and the rest of the vocal paraphernalia that has earned him his particular place on the cultural landscape.

There were also, of course, problems. As early as the third aria on the program, the “Cielo e mar” from Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” there were identifiable moments of strain. Later on, in the set of three sentimental Italian songs that concluded the program, there were vocal slips, small but constant. Now and again he seemed motivated to try a full-throated pianissimo, a beautiful effect when it works. This time, nothing worked.

Why nitpick? Simply because in a program such as this, with a vocal superstar at the center and nothing much around the edges. there isn’t much to concentrate on except questions of vocal excellence. There was only one message here, that Pavarotti can do no wrong. When he did something wrong, therefore, it stood out.

In fairness, there were also moments that were glowingly, glisteningly right. The big aria from Verdi’s “Luisa Miller,” which began Pavarotti’s part of the program, was ravishingly delivered. The “Turandot” aria that was the last of the five encores, was sent aloft sheathed in vocal brass, gold, steel and many rarer metals as well. Either of those moments was easily worth the price of a ticket (up to a thousand-dollar top).

Pavarotti aside, however, it was an evening strewn with silliness. This was the final stop of a portable package, put together by impresario Tibor Rudas, that also included the dubious services of conductor Leone Magiera and flutist Andrea Griminelli — here with an aggregation from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A clutch of instrumental tidbits filled in the spaces around the Pavarotti numbers, dispatched with no discernible grace. The lighting design leaned heavily toward a lurid hot pink that turned the stage into a monumental boudoir. Two truckloads of sound equipment were brought in, to replace — but not improve upon — the Bowl’s own excellent facilities.

This last proved an especially sore point. Someone among Rudas’ minions dreamed up the notion of bending the whole sound image toward a rock-style presentation, with dozens of microphones around the stage and with Pavarotti so heavily miked that the orchestra behind his arias might as well have gone home. The effect was more of a vocal recording being mimed than a live performance.

IIt could be that Pavarotti likes this line of work, and he can’t be blamed for liking the money it brings. But with the world’s supply of tenors in dire straits,it remains a shame that he has sealed himself off from serious culture. It must be noted, however, that nearly 18,000 screaming, whistling, stomping, cheering Pavarottists, at the Bowl on Monday night, acted as if they believed otherwise.

Allan Miller, previously known for his Oscar-winning 1981 documentary “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China,” is obviously a practiced hand at keeping a low profile around his subjects. He actually makes you believe that he and his camera crew just happened to be at the Guarneri Quartet’s rehearsal sessions during moments of hand-to-hand (or foot-to-mouth) combat over points of interpretation and repertory.

Did that crew just happen to be on the plane, for example, when viola player Michael Tree pulled a peevish tantrum about wanting to play violin once in a while? Were they really just in the neighborhood when violinist Arnold Steinhardt vainly tried to interest his colleagues in the trashy String Quartet by Fritz Kreisler, only to have cellist David Soyer ridicule the work as “Chinese monkey-business”?

Whatever its ratio of verity to hokum, “High Fidelity — the Adventures of the Guarneri String Quartet” is loaded with valuable insights. You do get to eavesdrop on some illuminating rehearsal moments, and come away with a fair idea of the genuinely democratic outlook that forms the heartbeat of any such ensemble. You weep along, as the group must sacrifice its comfortable stage setups to appease a gang of smug German television engineers. You shudder, as manager Harry Beall, obviously a shrewd money hand, laments that the group refuses to play more than 100 dates a year.

There is also some excellent travel footage, lots of in-and-out-of-airports stuff, a Prague audience turned rapturous at music by their own Smetana (in a Guarneri performance described by a critic as “staggeringly and wonderfully Americanm”); the absurdly gorgeous venue of a made-over theater in Tampa, miles too large for chamber music; adoring college audiences asking bright questions in pre-concert get-togethers.

Therein, in fact, lies the real “fidelity.” As far as the Guarneris themselves are concerned, Miller’s documentary is mostly high-class contrivance. Then you get a look at a young audience held spellbound by what the Guarneris have been doing so well these 25 years (and still do): the dizzying virtuosity in a Beethoven finale, the diabolical mystery in a Bartok excerpt. And so you believe at least one of the Guarneri statements into Miller’s ubiquitous microphone. “There aren’t many musicians,” says cellist Soyer, “who can say that they’re doing exactly what they want to do.”

Accompanying “High Fidelity” is a 5-minute short, “To Her Glory,” in which Los Angeles Philharmonic harpist Lou Anne Neill loads her harp into a van, drives through some pretty Oregon scenery, and ends up serenading Mt. Hood “in a personal act of honoring Mother Nature.” She plays a Handel concerto, and an invisible orchestra materializes in the background, just like in the old Harpo Marx movies.

THE FACTS*The film: “High Fidelity, the Adventures of the Guarneri Quartet” (unrated).*The stars: The Guarneri String Quartet — Arnold Steinhardt and John Dalley, violins; Michael Tree, viola; David Soyer, cello.*Behind the scenes; Produced and directed by Allan Miller; released by the Four Oaks Foundation.*Running tiime: One hour, 25 minutes.*Playing: Laemmle’s Monica 4-plex, Santa Monica.*Our rating: ***