Washington Opera

The Washington Opera production of "Semele" by George Frederic Handel opened Saturday night at the Kennedy Center with a splendid cast, excellent sets and a sense of wit and humor that brought this Baroque masterpiece to life."

Time was when American opera companies considered musicals as suspect artifacts from another planet, hardly worthy of serious attention -- not even on a par with the operettas those companies would occasionally stage when they needed a box office lift. Bit by bit, thinking has changed at a lot of places, and a welcome thing, too. Washington National Opera has enthusiastically embraced this broader view, offering an inspired staging of the path-breaking 1927 musical "Show Boat," a co-production with the Lyric Opera of Chicago (where it debuted last year)

The Washington Opera and the D.C. Federation of Musicians Local 161-710 representing the opera orchestra will resume contract talks Oct. 16, one day before the company makes a final decision on whether to cancel its first production. Verdi's "Don Carlo" is set to open Nov. 9 at the Kennedy Center.Martin Feinstein, general director, said the company would make a final decision about "Don Carlo" Oct. 17. The old contract expired Aug. 31. Talks started in June and were last held Sept. 30.The next day the company said the parties were at "an apparent impasse" and that the opera may have to cancel part or all of its 1991-92 season of 63 performances.

It's easy to find opera lovers who dismiss the present state of the art in favor of some distant "golden age. " Actually, it has always been that way. Folks who now wax nostalgic about, say, the heyday of Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli would have run into people back then saying, "You think this is great? You should have heard Ponselle and Martinelli. " And, of course, in the indisputably grand era of Caruso, you just know someone in the audience would have been going on and on about how much better it was back when Jean de Reszke was in his prime.

One-fourth of Wagner's Ring Cycle, an operatic treatment of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and the original 1853 version of Verdi's La Traviata are among the attractions of Washington Opera's 2003-2004 season. Artistic director Placido Domingo spent part of his 62nd birthday yesterday holding a news conference to announce the lineup and discuss the company's new temporary home at DAR Constitution Hall. That hall is currently being refurbished and reconfigured to accommodate Washington Opera productions for a year, starting next month with Aida and continuing with Don Giovanni and Fidelio this season, while the Kennedy Center Opera House is being renovated.

The revival of the Jean-Pierre Ponnelle production of Mozart's operatic masterpiece "Le Nozze di Figaro" ("The Marriage of Figaro"), which received its second performance Monday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House, is a triumph in every way.The opera is perfectly cast, the sets and costume are first-class, and the supreme music of Mozart is given its proper center-stage attention. The stage direction is intelligent, witty and very lively. This is a must-see Washington Opera production, and remaining shows have sold out.The four-act opera is done in two extended acts, with scene changes occurring at the middle of both acts.

WASHINGTON -- Revivals of his hitherto obscure operas in recent years makes one doubt the existence of "minor" Verdi operas. "Luisa Miller" is not exactly obscure Verdi, but even the Washington Opera's somewhat flawed current production makes the opera seem very major indeed.The composer called "Luisa Miller," the 14th opera in the first 10 years of his career, a "tragic melodrama." He was not exaggerating: several murders, including what is in effect a double suicide; political and sexual intrigue; betrayals of sons by fathers and lovers by their beloveds; sadistic pleasures; and much, much more.

The Washington Opera opened its 1994-95 season Saturday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House with a generally very pleasurable production of Gounod's "Faust."This opera is full of justifiably popular and familiar arias and choruses. This production may not be on the level of the finest French productions, but it is well worth experiencing on its own merits.The main reason to see this particular production is the diabolically sinister portrayal of Mephistopheles by Jeffrey Wells. He is imposing both vocally and physically.

For the second time in what is still a young season, the Washington Opera on Saturday night introduced another new work to its repertory. It was Manuel Penella's "El Gato Montes" ("The Wildcat").You may not have heard of Penella (1880-1939) -- he rates only a single paragraph in the New Grove Dictionary of Opera -- but he was one of Spain's most prolific composers, producing some 80 zarzuelas, musical comedies and revues between 1894 and the year of his death. "El Gato" belongs to the tradition of the zarzuela, the Spanish equivalent of what is called operetta in Vienna, opera-comique in Paris and Broadway musical in New York.

The Washington Opera's current production of Richard Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" is almost pure magic: beautiful sets, insightful direction, wizardly lighting and solid singing make it as good as anything you're likely to see on stage this season."

For most people, the attractions of Christmas do not include the possibility of children roasting over an open fire. But that has not kept Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" from becoming a favorite opera at Christmastide. Based on a vivid tale by the Brothers Grimm and first performed Dec. 23, 1893, Humperdinck's most famous opera does, of course, feature lots of talk and images of sweets, notably gingerbread. So it's easy to make a seasonal tie-in, which is what Washington National Opera did over the weekend with a revival of its 2007 family-friendly production.

Verdi's "A Masked Ball" makes an appropriately grand choice for Washington National Opera's season opener. It's a big-gesture work with terrific sweep, yet one with many a subtle musical and dramatic detail. The composer was forced by government censors to turn the opera's plot about the assassination of Sweden's King Gustavus III into an unlikely scenario set in Colonial Boston. But like some other companies these days, WNO restores the original Swedish setting. Although Salvatore Licitra doesn't always use his sizable tenor gracefully, his singing as Gustavus has a certain visceral appeal.

Although a substantial success for several decades after its 1868 premiere, the grand opera version of "Hamlet" by Ambroise Thomas fell into neglect, even in the composer's home country of France. To paraphrase one of Hamlet's lines from the Shakespeare original: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seemed all the uses of this opera. But recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Thomas' "Hamlet" on both sides of the Atlantic. A couple of months ago, the piece returned to the stage of New York's Metropolitan Opera after an absence of 113 years.

There was romance among the rutabagas yesterday at the downtown Whole Foods Market, passion among the persimmons. Jesus Daniel Hernandez was stationed in one corner of the produce section in the Harbor East store at 1010 Fleet St., wearing the black apron used to designate employees of the grocery chain. He hefted a ripe avocado in his palm, and wistfully eyed lissome Jennifer Waters as she stood by the oranges. Waters rubbed her thumb meditatively over one of the sunny globes, then flicked her eyes quickly in Hernandez's direction.

There was romance among the rutabagas this afternoon in the Whole Foods grocery store, passion among the persimmons. Five singers from the Washington Opera's young artists program took to the aisles of the Harbor East market at 1001 Fleet St., disguised in the black aprons and black caps normally worn by employees of the market. A few minutes after 1 p.m., an announcement came over the store loudspeaker announcing that tickets to this weekend's Baltimore Symphony Orchestra concert were being given away in the produce section.

Verdi's "Falstaff," the astonishing product of a 79-year-old-composer, is getting a freshly conceptualized treatment from Washington National Opera. Some of the bare-bones physical material comes from a co-production with the Royal Opera and other opera companies, but director Christian R?th has devised something new out of it for this run of performances at the Kennedy Center, the WNO's first "Falstaff" in more than 25 years. Given the last moments of the work, with its hearty, "the whole world is a jest" message, it's easy to see where R?

The opera "Vanessa," a neglected American masterpiece by Samuel Barber, was given a superb production by the Washington Opera Saturday in the opening performance of its month-long run at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater.The opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera Jan. 15, 1958, was immediately hailed and p,5l won the Pulitzer Prize for music. With the libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, "Vanessa" represented only the second time in music history that two great composers collaborated in an operatic effort (the other being Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi in "Otello")

Many an uncomfortable lesson about human nature lies within Benjamin Britten's 1945 operatic masterpiece, Peter Grimes, a tale of small-mindedness, conclusion-jumping and rapid swells of populist outrage in a seaside village. Those multilayered messages seem even more relevant than usual in the Washington National Opera's striking production at the Kennedy Center. The sight of villagers brandishing prayer books as they march off to confront the outsider Grimes, singing about how they "shall strike and strike to kill," bring to mind many an outbreak of knee-jerk, cable-TV-flamed behavior in our own society.

Phyllis Frankel, a widely known opera singer who taught voice for nearly two decades at Towson University, died of pneumonia Feb. 17 at Northwest Hospital Center. She was 82. Born in Kingston, N.Y., Phyllis Levey studied piano for nine years and then began voice lessons. In 1943, she moved with her parents to Baltimore and graduated in 1944 from Forest Park High School. She continued studying with Elsa Baklor and later with Metropolitan Opera diva Rosa Ponselle. In 1950, at age 23, she made her formal recital debut at Cadoa Hall.