![The Ogre [Photo by Richard Termine]](http://www.operatoday.com/El_Gato_Gotham.png)
08 Oct 2010
El Gato con Botas: Gotham Chamber Opera
Haven’t you always secretly felt that singers who reach for high notes (and make them) ought to levitate and maintain themselves in mid-air when they do it?
Recently in Performances
ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude
English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
Love, always: Chanticleer, Live from London … via San Francisco
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Dreams and delusions from Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
Treasures of the English Renaissance: Stile Antico, Live from London
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
A wonderful Wigmore Hall debut by Elizabeth Llewellyn
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
The Sixteen: Music for Reflection, live from Kings Place
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
Iestyn Davies and Elizabeth Kenny explore Dowland's directness and darkness at Hatfield House
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Paradise Lost: Tête-à-Tête 2020
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
Joyce DiDonato: Met Stars Live in Concert
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Where All Roses Go’: Apollo5, Live from London
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields 're-connect'
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
Lucy Crowe and Allan Clayton join Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO at St Luke's
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
Choral Dances: VOCES8, Live from London
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Royal Opera House Gala Concert
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
Fading: The Gesualdo Six at Live from London
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Met Stars Live in Concert: Lise Davidsen at the Oscarshall Palace in Oslo
The doors at The Metropolitan Opera will not open to live audiences until 2021 at the earliest, and the likelihood of normal operatic life resuming in cities around the world looks but a distant dream at present. But, while we may not be invited from our homes into the opera house for some time yet, with its free daily screenings of past productions and its pay-per-view Met Stars Live in Concert series, the Met continues to bring opera into our homes.
Precipice: The Grange Festival
Music-making at this year’s Grange Festival Opera may have fallen silent in June and July, but the country house and extensive grounds of The Grange provided an ideal setting for a weekend of twelve specially conceived ‘promenade’ performances encompassing music and dance.
Monteverdi: The Ache of Love - Live from London
There’s a “slide of harmony” and “all the bones leave your body at that moment and you collapse to the floor, it’s so extraordinary.”
Music for a While: Rowan Pierce and Christopher Glynn at Ryedale Online
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.”
A Musical Reunion at Garsington Opera
The hum of bees rising from myriad scented blooms; gentle strains of birdsong; the cheerful chatter of picnickers beside a still lake; decorous thwacks of leather on willow; song and music floating through the warm evening air.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Performances
And quiver with emotion and vibrato when they sing on the ground? The title character of Xavier Montsalvatge’s El Gato con Botas (Puss in Boots) does just that, in the delicious production Gotham Chamber Opera has put together at the New Victory Theater just off Times Square, under the direction of Moisés Kaufman, with the Tectonic Theater Project creating the marionettes and other special effects. You hardly notice the singers at times, good as they are; the Cat (and, later, the Ogre), singing in the manner of Avenue Q, occupy all your attention.
On the evidence of this score, Xavier Montsalvatge, a Catalan modernist, was more national than modern. El Gato con Botas, delicately played by piano, strings, a few almost incidental woodwinds, is tuneful, angular, swift-moving, with a Spanish rhythmic pulse. There is much witty scene-painting and dancing, and the harmonies are attractive and piquant without falling into cliché. The piece has character, but its scenic demands no doubt give opera companies pause. There’s a lively cat who dresses very well—sword, cape, plume, boots and, in an underwater ballet in this production, snorkel. There’s a rescue from the river. There’s an Ogre who transforms himself into a lion, a parrot, and a rat. (El Gato has evidently attended Das Rheingold to pick up fairy tale stratagems—or else Wagner had read his Perrault.) There’s a rabbit hunt, and lots of rabbits.
None of the magic gives the production team at the New Victory any difficulty—scene-changing interlude music just provides more opportunities for madcap special effects, and transformations are what the game is all about. There is some kowtowing to the idea that it’s a kids’ show, and several matinees in English translation are part of the run (I preferred to attend one of the performances in the original Spanish), but the kids ae just a cover story. The sophistication of the humor, the charm of the musical presentation, the dizzy delights of the occasion are much too good to waste on kids, however much they are sure to love it.
Gotham has provided multiple casts. On opening night, Ginger Costa-Jackson “voiced” El Gato, standing self-effacingly aside as the scrawny marionette leaped to capture notes high in the air. Nadine Sierra sang a dulcet princess; Craig Verm a heroically befuddled miller/marquis with a pleasant growl to alarm any cat to heroic deeds; Kyle Pfortmiller made a smug monarch, his head atop a tiny, strutting body; and Kevin Burdette was unusually serene for an Ogre whose body starts in disassembled body parts, before he comes together to threaten our feline hero. (You know the kids are going to love singing, twirling, headless body parts.)
Jonothan Lyons; Aaron Schroeder and Stefano Brancato (puppeteers); Craig Verm (Miller vocalist) and Ginger Costa-Jackson (Cat vocalist)
Where has this delicious little score with its spoof-ballets and arias been hiding all these years? I guess it’s been waiting, like a princess in a tower, for a company creative enough to set it free.
John Yohalem