OPERA ON A CHILLING TALE FROM ANTIQUITY
                    The New Castleton Opera Tackles Discreet Works of Britten  
<>                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of March 26-April 4, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 82
            BERKELEY---Riding on the time-tested back of conductor Lorin Maazel, a Spartan portable opera company played Berkeley with two British works by Benjamin Britten. The rarely encountered initial offering, “The Rape of Lucretia,” left a lot to be desired, given the flaccid drama on stage.  
            Britten had been the ultimate neoclassicist, in this instance reverting to elements of ancient Greek theater, with the use of chorus to narrate and comment on the protagonists. He used the sparest of resources for his chamber opera, with just eight voices and close to a dozen pit musicians. His secure tonality and detached music is an appealing antidote to all the 19th-century romanticism that came before; where other composers use a broad brush, Britten used a fine-point pen of utter clarity. Ideas and text are clearly articulated, often not even requiring the supertitle projections shown above the Zellerbach Hall proscenium. And the text is paramount here, especially given the beautiful effortless flight of librettist Ronald Duncan’s poetry. But the absence of on-stage drama is as glaring as in baroque opera.
            The opera is done in recitative style devoid of arias, supplemented by some vocal ensembles toward the conclusion. This is a stoical approach to opera, tamping down the highly dramatic nature of the plot, more amenable to concert versions. The story stems from accounts of the repressive Etruscans, who reigned in Rome before the Roman republic was formed. During their war with the Romans, the ego-driven Etruscan prince Tarquinius learns that Lucretia remains one of the few virtuous wives in Rome. He barges into her home and rapes her. When later her husband Collatinus  arrives to console her, the dishonored woman remains  disconsolate, finishing in a stabbing  suicide.
            If in all this you expect lurid scenes, forget it. The rape scene is as sedate as Aunt Jennie’s quilting bee, further lamed by the theatrical limitations of Lucretia, as played by the Russian mezzo Ekaterina  Metlova, a woman with a powerful voice that blasted out into the (excessively) large space without much finnesse.
            The production---apparently created in a teamwork effort---was simple and tourable, with some low-budget facets like flashlights. Stage Director William Kerley was unable to surmount the challenges of the opus, from the dawdling of the rapist beforehand to the catatonic nature of the victim afterward, mixed in with amateur theatrics by protagonists.
            The incident is viewed through several lenses. Coming out right after World War Two, the piece alludes to the tragedies suffered by the civilian populations under oppression. In addition, the chorus provides the balm of Christian consolation in sermonizing.
            Britten was a deft and original composer, particularly adept at writing for the men, and awkward conveying feminine emotion. This is one of his rare works in which the focal character is female.
            For Maazel, now 81, founding and leading the two-year-old Castleton Festival Opera after heading the N.Y. Philharmonic is like going from Hummers to Priuses---a shift both unique and challenging. He directed the pit ensemble with a sure hand when heard March 24. CFO operates, however implausibly, on a converted chicken farm in rural Virginia, some 70 miles southwest of Washington, DC, where the Maazels adapted the facilities to an economical mode of opera.
            In the cast, the unerring lyric tenor of Vale Rideout (chorus) was the crucial linkage for what was seen, and what was not. The honey-voiced baritone Michael Rice made a sympathetic Collatinus. The attire was relatively modern dress, with the Etruscans looking like 20th-century Italian soldiers.
            “LUCRETIA” NOTES, AND THE ONE-MAN TOUR DE FORCE---This infrequent work had played once before on the Berkeley university campus, which has rarely delved into opera. In 1965,  it was presented in a makeshift assembly room by the teenaged history major Christopher Keene (1946-95), a true one-man dynamo and local figure. Having no luck doing it through the music department or through the campus performing-arts presentors, he assembled all the needed forces himself, conducted it, and passed the hat to raise the necessary money. It was one of the most remarkable one-man artistic tours de force ever seen at Berkeley. He went on to lead the Syracuse (NY) Symphony and then become music director of the NYC Opera, no less.   
            Britten’s chamber opera  “The Rape of Lucretia” (1946), performed by Castleton Festival Opera, Lorin Maazel, conductor. Under auspices of Cal Performances, at Zellerbach Hall through March 27, adding Britten’s comedy “Albert Herring.” For info: (510)   642-9988, or go online. 

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2011
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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