In Performance: Opera at Baltimore's Artscape

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American Opera Theater Offers "Solace" at Artscape

by Charles T. Downey

On Sunday, amid the zany chaos of Artscape, Baltimore's wide-ranging free arts festival, American Opera Theater presented "A Pilgrime's Solace," a dozen of John Dowland's gorgeous lute songs, in a sort of pantomimed recital at Corpus Christi Church. AOT Artistic Director Timothy Nelson credits the genesis of the idea to the cage-rattling director Peter Sellars, whom he met at Santa Fe Opera last summer, during the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho's "Adriana Mater."
(read more after the jump)

Nelson placed mezzo-soprano Monica Reinagel on and around a hospital bed, as she grieved for the death of someone beloved and then learned to cope with the pain. This inevitably seemed like a nod to Sellars's infamous staging of Bach's cantata "Ich Habe Genug," in which Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang in a hospital gown with intravenous medication flowing into her arms. Reinagel's voice, especially lustrous in its lower range, flowed in an ample, expressive line in Dowland's slow, arching melodies, discoloring slightly only with particularly agitated movements. Andrew Dickenson provided subtle and supportive accompaniment, transcribed for guitar from the lute original.

While the 40-minute work was musically rewarding, the staging was fairly static, limited in its gestures to movements on the hospital bed and some writhing and pounding of hands on the floor. A lone person's interior pain is best expressed in monologue, but here the words, already set and not about the action, could not carry that meaning. Even so, this inventive repackaging of historical music was a fitting tribute to Sellars, whom Nelson admires for obvious reasons, and through it Nelson continues to make a name for himself as an adventurous director.

-- Charles T. Downey

By Anne Midgette  |  July 21, 2009; 6:30 AM ET  | Category:  festivals , local reviews
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