Julia Cooke, Artistic Director and General Director of Baltimore Concert Opera, a passionate advocate for opera in Baltimore.
What is opera about? When Julia Cooke, Baltimore Concert Opera’s Artistic Director and General Director, picked up the microphone and ascended to the stage of the Engineers Club on Saturday night, prepared to make opening remarks as she does for every BCO production, she faltered. She started to speak, but the words would not come. This accomplished opera executive, a trained opera singer herself, choked up. Her eyes welled up with tears, tears of relief and joy, and it took a few moments before the words could come out. The last time she was able to introduce an opera before a live audience inside the Engineers Club was March 1, 2020; then, the pandemic came crushing down, interrupting performances, careers, and fans’ access to live opera. Not intending to cry, her emotion conveyed what needed to be said in operatic style. The reaction from the audience was swift and simpatico – cries of “We love you, Julia,” rang out. She recovered, made her remarks, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium began.
Now, for the first time in over a year and a half let’s talk about a BCO live, in house, opera performance that we could see and hear in person. To get started, I asked Ms. Cooke why The Medium was selected and why now? She responded, “I selected this opera to open our “return season” for many reasons, and I’ll tell you that there are about 10 different season drafts which I tore up every time more COVID news came! It was very challenging to try to predict where we’d be at this point since I needed to announce the season in July at the latest…I did my best to offer a balanced season as we move into not only a post-COVID world, but also BCO’s major expansion this year. I knew that to mitigate as many of the COVID obstacles as I could, we’d need a short opera (to limit time the audience is in the same room together), with a small cast (limiting the number of people in rehearsals and on stage for distancing purposes), and which would pack a big dramatic punch. Because it’s short, it needed to have a memorable impact dramatically. The Medium is frequently performed by very young casts, often at music schools, but you don’t often see it done by more established professionals. I wanted to give it a treatment it rightfully deserves, in a professional setting.” More on the ‘major expansion’ further down in the Fan Experience section.
This is not the first time, Baltimore Concert Opera has performed a Menotti opera; BCO previously performed The Consul, in 2019. From the mid-forties into the seventies of the twentieth century, Gian Carlo Menotti was the dominant American composer of opera. He attempted to bring opera to the masses by writing operas for radio, television, and the stage. His opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was the first opera written for television; it is his best known and most often performed work. He pioneered the “Broadway Opera”, a through-composed work with libretti written in the American idiom, several of which had successful runs on Broadway that brought him great acclaim and won him two Pulitzer Prizes. To keep his operas focused on engaging average American audiences, he not only wrote the music but also wrote the libretti, and he insisted on directing the staging, going Richard Wagner one better. BCO’s new Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Aaron Ziegel, told us in the pre-opera talk that Mr. Menotti deliberately used idiomatic American speech patterns, and while including many short tunes, he avoided long, drama-interrupting arias. He also kept his operas short – The Medium is two acts and an hour long, fitting BCO’s requirements at this point in the pandemic recovery.
Monica, played by soprano Amanda Shariff and Toby played by dancer Peter Pattengill in The Medium. Photo by Britt Olsen-Ecker; courtesy of Baltimore Concert Opera.
Dr. Ziegel also reported that Menotti’s idea for The Medium came from an experience he had attending a friend’s séance. I think it would have made an excellent episode of the popular TV show, The Twilight Zone. It takes place in the home of a life weary medium, Madame Flora, who holds séances where she helps her clients get in touch with their dead children; they call her Baba. Her daughter Monica and a servant boy rescued from the streets, Toby, both teenagers, are accessories to the ruse. In one séance, Madame Flora felt that someone or something touched her throat. Fearing it was a brush with the supernatural in which she does not believe, she demands to know who did it. She sends her clients home. During the next week, she is drinking heavily and has begun to hear a voice singing. Her clients return for their weekly séance, but distraught and now reexamining her life, she admits she is a fraud and returns their money. They leave but insist their experience with her was real. I dislike including spoilers, so let’s just say that Baba continues to become unhinged and there is gun play. She, like we, never know what touched her throat. Cue the Twilight Zone theme, do do do, do do do, and Rod Serling. It is an entertaining story that does have “a big dramatic punch”. There is enough ambiguity in the story to leave one wondering when it was over: was it a ghost story, an exposé on mediums, or a nod to the possibility there is more in this world than are dreamt of in our philosophies? Personally, I am glad that this one survived the tearing up of proposed drafts of BCO’s “return season”.
What about the music? BCO productions to this point (more on this later) have used piano accompaniments, as they did for The Medium. Mr. Menotti’s score was mainly tonal in the tunes and dissonant for conveying the distraught and for special effects, sounding very Broadway like. Keeping with the composer’s desire to keep the drama moving, the closest number to an aria was Monica singing “The Black Swan”, a fairytale lullaby. There were however plenty of tunes, again consistent with Broadway; my wife remarked to me how much she enjoyed the music. Piano accompaniment was provided by Wei-Han Wu. I noted to myself early on that it must be difficult to maintain the correct timing and dynamics for music changing so often and so quickly as the story progressed, sometimes the softest voice of a child, conversation in a group, and then the shrieks of a mad woman. Mr. Wu gave an impressive performance, aided by Conductor Joshua Hong.
l to r: Madame Flora (mezzo-soprano Jenni Bank) had a surprise in the séance with her clients, Mr. Gobineau (baritone Travis Lucas), Mrs. Gobineau (soprano Samantha Lax), and Mrs. Nolan (mezzo-soprano Taylor Hillary Boykins). Photo by Britt Olsen-Ecker; courtesy of Baltimore Concert Opera.
The singers, led by soprano Amanda Sheriff as Monica, in her BCO debut, and mezzo-soprano Jenni Bank, in a return to BCO, represented a well-balanced and uniformly excellent cast. Ms. Sheriff displayed a lyrical gift in an uneven beginning and then absolutely shone in “The Black Swan” and in providing the child-like singing off stage. Ms. Bank sang and acted her role of Baba beautifully, a bit of a challenge since the role is for a contralto and Baba’s mood swings present sharp vocal shifts. Though excellent, she is such a strong force on stage that it was difficult to accept her as a tormented woman losing touch with reality, or was it being confronted with an alternate reality. The third lead role, that of Toby, Baba’s nonverbal servant taken into her care, was well acted by dancer Peter Pattengill. The séance regulars, soprano Samantha Lax as Mrs. Gobineau, baritone Travis Lucas as Mr. Gobineau, and mezzo-soprano Taylor Hillary Boykins as Mrs. Nolan, sang and acted so well that I thought while I listened to them that I hope BCO brings them back to feature in more prominent roles. Goal to have The Medium “done by more established professionals” – check!
BCO chose to partially stage The Medium with costumes and props, making the stage appear as a room for a séance. I wondered if having an important role be a tacet one (nonverbal) required some staging. I asked Director Cooke and she responded “we would call this production semi-staged. We have moved more toward a semi-staged model in all the concert operas, even prior to COVID. It depends on the piece: our Adriana Lecouvreur next year will be more akin to the way we did Anna Bolena—artists singing from memory, but with only very minimal blocking rather than a fuller semi-staging as we did with The Medium, and The Consul back in 2019. I feel that there are some pieces which need more defined stagecraft, like The Medium and The Consul, because of the nature of the storytelling and the way the music is set. The Italian repertoire tends to be more lyrical and the drama moves more slowly and is easier to discern primarily through the music and singing. I wouldn’t say this is standard by language or era, but more individually defined by each opera itself.”
With Madame Flora, a.k.a.Baba (mezzo-soprano Jenni Bank) standing and Toby (dancer Peter Pattengill) on the floor, what has happened? Photo by Britt Olsen-Ecker; courtesy of Baltimore Concert Opera.
The staging by Director Catrin Davies was well done overall, though staging didn’t seem crisp. The use of a thin, backlit screen as the puppet theater was a clever idea. However, staging in a theater where the seats are not tiered presents a difficulty – anything much lower than hip level on stage will not be seen by a sizable portion of the audience. In this staging, much of the action with Toby and the play between Toby and Monica occurred at floor level. That said, the staging was helpful and effectively portrayed the drama.
In closing, I’ll answer my opening question: what is opera about? Opera is about more than music and singing and storytelling. It’s also very much about people and community. We suffer without the community as well as without the music and singing. So, Julia cried; we all felt better, and a brighter future has opened up.
The Fan Experience: The two performances of The Medium were given on Friday night and the following Sunday afternoon, as is the usual practice of BCO. The Engineers Club in the Garrett-Jacobs Mansion is a palatial, intimate venue for concert opera, worth seeing in itself. Ticket prices for BCO performances are a bargain, and be forewarned, performances are typically selling out in the small 200-seat theater. The current requirement for proof of COVID vaccination and the wearing of masks in the theater were strictly enforced.
In what I think is a major enhancement, BCO has added Dr. Aaron Ziegel to their staff as Scholar-in-Residence. He provided four one-hour, highly informative Zoom classes on Menotti and The Medium prior to the performances and an engaging half hour pre-opera talk on site. In college I had a history professor whose classes I would not miss because he made history sound like a soap opera, but with real facts. Dr. Ziegel, Associate Professor of Music History at Towson University, has that gift for storytelling. My wife kept talking about how much she liked the pre-opera talk. Access to the classes is included with your ticket. BCO also had magicians performing in between the pre-opera talk and the performance. BCO is following in Menotti’s footsteps, doing their best to make opera accessible to everyone.
In her opening comments, Ms. Cooke remarked on their ambitious plans for expansion this season. BCO’s next production, The Barber of Seville, will mark their first ever fully-staged opera with an orchestra, to be performed on February 18 and 20 in Stephens Hall at Towson University. Their final production of the “return season”, Adriana Lecouvreur, will return to the Engineers Club on April 22, 24 in the more traditional concert format (Yay!). Dr. Ziegel will present four Zoom lectures and the pre-opera talk for each of those productions as well.
There are some additional issues affecting the fan experience to be mentioned. The venue does continue to be plagued by controlling the temperature in the ballroom where performances are held. Once, the room fills up, it can get uncomfortably warm. As noted in the text above, staging in the venue can be problematic, with the low-level portion of the stage blocked from view for a portion of the audience. Also, while I typically utilize on street parking for performances, I used valet parking this time and there was an uncommonly long wait for my car to be retrieved (over 30 min). The attendant explained that this is unusual; this time they had to use a lot three blocks from the venue, which slowed bringing the cars back. While there are many superb restaurants in Baltimore, there is also a food court, Mt. Vernon Marketplace, two blocks from the Engineers Club, convenient for a quick bite before a show; pre-pandemic, it was also possible to make reservations for dinner in the Club. BCO offers an open bar for its performances. While in Baltimore this trip, we ate a dinner at Charleston, a fine dining restaurant; it was the way life ought to be but rarely is.