United States Pauline Viardot, The Last Sorcerer (Le Dernier Sorcier): Soloists, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus’ Chamber Singers (Artistic Director: Fernando Malvar-Ruiz), Lucy Tucker Yates (piano), Sing for Hope Production. Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, 3.3.2023. (JRo)
Production:
Narration textual content – Camille Zamora, based mostly on the libretto by Ivan Turgenev
Musical path – Lucy Tucker Yates
Stage path – Sharyn Pirtle and Camille Zamora
Production paintings and design – Ok-12 college students from throughout the Greater Los Angeles Area
Cast:
Krakamiche – Babatunde Akinboboye
Stella – Monica Yunus
Reine – Camille Zamora
Prince Lelio – Julia Johnson
Perlimpinpin – Karim Sulayman
Verveine – Anastasia Malliaras
Fairies – Los Angeles Children’s Chorus’ Chamber Singers
Narrator – Monique Coleman
Born in France in 1821, Pauline Garcia Viardot had a life that reads like a romantic novel of the interval. The daughter of an illustrious household of Spanish musicians, she was a baby prodigy who studied piano with Franz Liszt and a famend opera singer who debuted at age 17. Her musical skills have been prized by one of the best composers of the day, amongst them Berlioz, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Chopin, Brahms and Wagner, and she or he wrote greater than 250 items, together with German songs and ballads, Russian romances and French chansons. She was a confidant of George Sand, a good friend of Charles Dickens and Henry James and Turgenev’s lover. And if that’s not sufficient, she was the mom of three and an exiled revolutionary who deplored the French Second Empire and Napoleon III.
Also famed as a voice trainer, she created The Last Sorcerer (Le Dernier Sorcier) in 1867 as a automobile for her youngsters and college students. It was initially scored for piano accompaniment, and she or he later organized the piece for chamber orchestra. Performances of each variations have been primarily personal, however there was a public engagement in 1869 carried out with a chamber orchestra on the Court Theatre in Weimar.
Soprano Camille Zamora found the unique manuscript of Viardot’s opera, with its French libretto by Turgenev, at Harvard’s library. Zamora wrote an English narration for the piece and maintained the arias within the unique French.
Co-founders of the humanities group Sing for Hope, Zamora and her colleague, Monica Yunus, produced the opera, partnered with the Wallis. Sing for Hope’s most seen endeavor was to place pianos in public areas for anybody to play (they have been later distributed to colleges, hospitals, refugee camps, and so forth.), which served their mission of utilizing the humanities to unite, encourage and heal communities.
Viardot and Turgenev’s creation has echoes of Mozart and Schikaneder’s The Magic Flute, with forest creatures, dad and mom guiding or thwarting their progeny and romantic love that endures regardless of obstacles. Set in an enchanted wooden populated by fairies and elves, The Last Sorcerer facilities across the magician, Krakamiche, whose powers are waning. Reduced to residing in a poor hut with solely the inept Perlimpinpin to serve him, the sorcerer is taunted and laid low with the fairies. The Queen of the Fairies has taken a shine to Stella, Krakamiche’s mild daughter, and needs her to marry Lelio, a prince from a neighboring kingdom. While Krakamiche tries to revive his former glory with chants and incantations from Merlin’s guide of spells, Stella and Lelio meet in secret and fall in love. Though Krakamiche rejects Lelio, all comes proper in the long run: the lovers are united, and Krakamiche agrees to reside out his days in Lelio’s palace and quit magic.
It is a captivating story with the texture of a Carlo Gozzi commedia dell’arte play, and hints of Turgenev’s Russian roots within the forest fairy tales that characteristic Prince Ivan, Father Frost or the deliciously depraved Baba Yaga.
As for the music, I used to be reminded, at first, of Jacques Offenbach. His most well-known opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, wasn’t carried out till after his dying in 1881, however Viardot would have been greater than conversant in his earlier operas. Her adeptness on the French artwork music was evident within the rating and heightened by the solo piano accompaniment, winningly performed by Lucy Tucker Yates. Though at instances the overture felt extra like overwrought, silent-film piano accompaniment (forward of its time, in fact), that quickly eased into extra sprightly rhythms.
Viardot’s mastery of the French artwork music was particularly obvious within the Queen’s aria, ‘Ramasse cette rose’, sung with stately magnificence by Zamora, and in Stella’s shimmering music, ‘Coulez, coulez gouttes fines,’ delivered to perfection by Yunus.
A solid of succesful singers rounded out the manufacturing. With little rehearsal time – or none, as within the case of soprano Julia Johnson who substituted for an ailing Adriana Zabala – the solid prevailed, supported by the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus’ Chamber Singers performed by Fernando Malvar-Ruiz.
Baritone Babatunde Akinboboye was a languishing Krakamiche, Karim Sulayman displayed comedic chops because the dim-witted Perlimpinpin, Anastasia Malliaras was successful as Verveine the elf and Johnson introduced harmless ardor to the function of Lelio.
Operating on a shoestring price range, the manufacturing was extra like a beefed-up live performance model. Fortunately, the stage within the Bram Goldsmith Theater on the Wallis Annenberg Center wasn’t too massive or cavernous for the gamers. It could be pleasant to see this little gem in a full manufacturing, minus the English narration (which was ably learn by Monique Coleman) and with full dialogue inserted between arias. As it’s a small-scale salon opera, it might definitely profit from a storybook setting in an intimate venue – or maybe a movie within the method of Ingmar Bergman’s remedy of The Magic Flute.
One candy final result of this naked bones manufacturing was the pairing of paintings by native space college students, projected on a big display behind the refrain. The college students rendered forest glades, palaces, fairies, monsters and moonlit skies, and it appeared acceptable that an opera initially written for college students must be interpreted by their counterparts, 156 years later.
Jane Rosenberg