May, 2006

Opera!

Two Masterful Performances from Masterworks Chorale
Keith Kreitman, Contributor, Inside Bay Area

Bryan Baker of Masterworks Chorale has pulled off an almost perfect concert.

As of this year, his fourth as artistic director and conductor, Baker has performed just short of a miracle in raising a first-class choral group, under founder Galen Marshal, to one artistically competitive with any in the land.

He raised the bar again with a pair of concerts last weekend at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center.

He's closing in on the title of great musical director — and I don't mean just choral. You've got to admit this guy knows how to merchandise his stuff.

He selects some of the most beautiful arias in the history of operatic literature — try Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Bizet, Verdi and Tchaikovsky — throws in one from my favorite living American composer, Kirke Mechem, folds in a super supporting orchestra, four superb operatic singers, an honors high school chorus and some cute-as-a-button kids from the Ragazzi Boys Chorus and packages it all as "Hear the Voices."

And boy, those voices were something to hear. The chorus never sounded better. And the Chorale's 34-piece orchestra is right in there with them, supporting the lyrical quality of the singers perfectly.

The overall effect was warm, perfectly pitched, buttery smooth and dynamically vibrant. After several of the vocal solos and duets, the audience demanded curtain calls.

Soprano Luana DeVol took the place by storm in arias from Bellini's "Norma," Puccini's "Turandot" and Verdi's "The Force of Destiny." She is a statuesque beauty who, without the slightest strain or loss of pitch, filled every nook and cranny of that 1,600-seat auditorium with the surpassing beauty of her powerful voice.

Mezzo-sopranos are by nature denied the acoustical carrying power of the higher voices, so Erin Neff made up for that with richness of timbre and elegance of interpretation in Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," catchy singing in "The Force of Destiny" and in duets with Leland Morine in Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Kevin Courtemanche in Verdi's "La Traviata."

Courtemanche, who was filling in for DeVol's ill husband, Norman, matched the richness of her style with that rare operatic commodity: a clear, round, loose-throated, unforced tenor. He was featured solo in arias from Donizetti's "Lucia de Lammermoor," "Turandot" and in a duet with baritone Leland Morine in Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers.

Morine's rich baritone soared in the "Toreador Song" from Bizet's "Carmen.

The chorus itself showed how far it has advanced in quality and technique in the "Priest's Chorus" from Mozart's "The Magic Flute," "Chorus of Peasant Girls" from Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin," "Chorus of Scottish Refugees" from Verdi's "Macbeth," "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" from Verdi's "Nabucco," and a hair-raising, wall-shaking "Anvil Chorus" from Verdi's "Il Trovatore."

The Aragon High School's Honor Choir was called in to give voice to Mechem's powerful "Blow Ye the Trumpet" from his new opera "John Brown."

And a snappy gaggle of young boys from Ragazzi stole hearts, acting out the cute "Zeid uns Zum Zweitenmal" from "The Magic Flute.

I'm sure that future audiences will look back and recognize this is a golden era in the performing arts on the Peninsula, and especially the youth groups performing in all of these arts.

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