Wolf Trap Opera: Something Old, Something New(ish)
By • July 18, 2024 0 615
Attention: Lovers of “La bohème”! Tomorrow, Friday, July 19, is your sole chance to catch Wolf Trap Opera’s production of Puccini’s heartstring-puller, in which impoverished bohemians in 19th-century Paris sing beautiful Italian while trying to stay warm and alive (spoiler: not all of them make it).
In the Filene Center pit: the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Grant Gershon. The chorus master is Nate Raskin and the production’s director is Katherine M. Carter. A pre-performance talk by Mary Jo Heath, the “Voice of the Met” for 15 seasons, will begin at 7 p.m. on the Farmhouse Lawn.
Generally ranked as the fourth most-performed opera worldwide — after Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Verdi’s “La traviata” and Bizet’s “Carmen” — “La bohème” is considered an ideal opera for young singers to tackle. And young singers are what Wolf Trap Opera is all about.
The summer residency program began in 1971, the year that Wolf Trap opened. Five years earlier, Catherine Filene Shouse had donated to the U. S. government 100 acres of her Vienna, Virginia, farm and estate, along with the funds to build an outdoor amphitheater (the Filene Center). The Barns, transported from upstate New York and reconstructed as a second venue at Shouse’s initiative, were added to the property — managed by the National Park Service and the nonprofit Wolf Trap Foundation — in 1982.
This summer’s class of Filene Artists numbers 21: four sopranos, three mezzo-sopranos, five tenors, six baritones, one bass-baritone and two basses. There are also 17 Studio Artists, current students or recent graduates of top college, university and conservatory voice departments, who perform smaller roles and sing in the chorus.
The leading “La bohème” roles of Rodolfo and Mimì will be sung by tenor Eric Taylor and soprano Amanda Batista. A Westminster College and Rice University graduate who sang the title role in Charles Gounod’s “Faust” at Wolf Trap last summer, Taylor was a member of Houston Grand Opera’s Butler Studio. Batista, a Rutgers University and Juilliard School graduate, sang roles at the Met during its last two seasons as a participant in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. Earlier, she was a member of San Francisco Opera’s Merola Opera Program.
Wolf Trap Opera’s season will wrap up with four performances in the Barns — Friday, Aug. 9; Sunday, Aug. 11; Thursday, Aug. 15; and Saturday, Aug. 17 — of “Silent Night,” for which Kevin Puts, a composition faculty member at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music (not bad for his first shot at opera).
Co-commissioned by Minneapolis Opera and Opera Philadelphia, “Silent Night,” a collaboration of Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, was inspired by “Joyeux Noël,” a 2005 film by French director Christian Carion that was nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar.
Following a prologue, “Silent Night,” in two acts, covers a four-day period in December of 1914. The action leads up to a moving Christmas truce that actually took place on a World War I battlefield. Given its international milieu, the opera is sung in English, German, French, Italian and Latin — all captioned in English — which must be some kind of record.
Called upon to play in a range of styles, the Wolf Trap Opera orchestra will be conducted by Geoffrey McDonald. Alex Munger is the chorus master and Tony and Ryan McKinny are the production’s directors.
Startlingly, “Silent Night” opens with an opera-within-an-opera. A performance in Berlin of a charming Mozartean work (composed by Puts), sung in German, is brusquely interrupted by an announcement onstage that war has been declared.
Do you relish male voices? “Silent Night” is a showcase for them. Apart from soprano Keely Futterer, the roles on “The German Side” are all sung by men: tenor Ricardo Garcia, bass-baritone Andrew Gilstrap and tenor Demetrious Sampson Jr. On “The Scottish Side” (did I mention the bagpipes?) are tenor Martin Luther Clark, baritone Kyle White, bass Wm. Clay Thompson, baritone Ryan Wolfe and bass-baritone Joseph Calzada, a Studio Artist. Not to be forgotten, “The French Side” consists of baritones Jacob Scharfman and Charles H. Eaton, bass Le Bu and a second woman, a Studio Artist, mezzo-soprano Tivoli Treloar.
According to Vice President Lee Anne Myslewski, who has been on Wolf Trap’s opera and classical programming staff since 2006, selecting “Silent Night” for the 2024 season had multiple benefits.
“In recent years, the opera industry has started to place a heavier focus on contemporary work, which has been quite exciting for our artists,” Myslewski said. “It has definitely been enriching to be able to approach a role that doesn’t have 200 years of performance practice behind it, since this allows [the Filene Artists] to put their own particular spin on a character.”
In addition, “We heard many strong men when we were holding auditions and choosing repertoire last fall,” she said, pointing out that Wolf Trap Opera chooses works based on the voice types of the Filene Artists in each class.
Best of all, singers and staffers could pick the brains of Puts and Campbell, “which we can’t do with Mozart or Puccini,” Myslewski added (in case that wasn’t clear). “The cast is thrilled to be able to perform the work for the people who created it.”
Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts
1551 Trap Road, Vienna, VA
wolftrap.org
703-255-1868
