It was that rarest of sights after I walked into the Cleveland Orchestra’s corridor on Sunday afternoon: a darkish curtain drawn throughout the stage.
Uncommon, that’s, in a live performance corridor. Orchestras don’t are inclined to have dramatic unveilings earlier than they begin to play. And whereas Cleveland has finished near-annual opera displays over the previous 20 years, the ensemble has nearly at all times been onstage alongside the singers, because the stagings have labored round (and generally integrated) the presence of dozens of gamers.
However for Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” which ended a sold-out four-performance run at Severance Music Middle on Sunday, the orchestra was lowered into an honest-to-goodness pit, and the curtain was closed initially, simply as it will have been in an opera home.
It was a reminder that opera — costly to placed on and to not everybody’s style, although with a passionate fan base — has been ever tougher to seek out in American cities. And a reminder that orchestras can — and may! — summon the assets to fill even a little bit of that hole.
Because the Cleveland Orchestra’s president and chief govt, André Gremillet, mentioned in an interview, “This metropolis doesn’t in any other case have world-class opera.” Cleveland Opera, an organization that did current world-class choices for a number of a long time, light away about 15 years in the past, and a few firms left in its wake supply only a smattering of smaller-scale performances.
And but there’s a starvation for the artwork kind, and a chance for orchestras across the nation to develop their audiences. “There are people who find themselves not right here each week,” Gremillet mentioned, “who will come to the opera — and greater than as soon as.”
It helps that Cleveland has, in its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, a deeply skilled opera conductor who for a time shared his duties right here with a management place on the Vienna State Opera.
Solid with recent, youthful voices and performed with poised transparency by one of many world’s nice orchestras, “The Magic Flute” was the twentieth opera presentation of Welser-Möst’s Cleveland profession, which is able to finish in 2027 after a quarter-century — astonishing longevity in in the present day’s music world.
Seating-in-the-round halls like Walt Disney Live performance Corridor in Los Angeles and David Geffen Corridor in New York lend themselves to experimental stagings just like the high-tech model of Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” in Los Angeles in 2019, however don’t permit for conventional parts like, properly, a curtain. Severance, with its silvery Artwork Deco touches, is a extra old-school theatrical area, and Nikolaus Habjan’s “Flute” staging echoed that conventional high quality, if little of the corridor’s magical ambiance.
Tricked out with a number of cute puppets, Habjan’s work was simple and plain, even a tad bland, and maybe overly reliant on that curtain, which opened and closed continually and was enthusiastically integrated into the motion. The manufacturing was much less enchanting than Yuval Sharon’s Cleveland staging of Janacek’s “The Crafty Little Vixen,” with singers’ heads coming out of a wall of animation, or his spare, ominous “Pelléas et Mélisande.”
Denise Heschl’s “Flute” costumes supplied variants on formal put on; Heike Vollmer’s set relied closely on a scaffold-style platform that has grown acquainted to Cleveland audiences from current semi-staged opera performances, kitted out this time with some bars of white gentle. Solely Paul Grilj’s lighting actually added to the piece, often filling the corridor with a haunting pale grayness.
However definitely nothing within the manufacturing distracted from the very good musical efficiency. Among the many finest causes to do opera in live performance halls is that they are typically extra intimate (at the very least comparatively) than American opera homes.
With 2,000 seats, Severance is about half the dimensions of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and much smaller than the opposite massive legacy opera theaters in Chicago and San Francisco. (Texas’s two main homes, in Houston and Dallas, buck that state’s repute for grandiosity and are fortunately nearer in scale to Severance.)
This allowed the “Flute” performances to have unaffected readability and restraint, with out pushing. Julian Prégardien was a plangent Tamino and Christina Landshamer a sweet-voiced Pamina. Kathryn Lewek, one of many world’s reigning Queens of the Evening, managed each super-high precision and appreciable heat. Ludwig Mittelhammer was a Papageno whose clowning by no means tipped into overdone mugging; Tareq Nazmi, a easily resonant Sarastro; and Dashon Burton, a rich-toned Speaker.
And whereas not a typical virtuosic orchestral showpiece, “The Magic Flute” shows Cleveland’s wondrous cohesion and class. This ensemble’s glory is within the self-effacing particulars: the light piquancy of the strings plucking because the Three Boys had been launched; the mellowness of the horn and bassoon combining as Tamino and Pamina launched into their trials.
Welser-Möst’s music-making tends brisk, however on this case it felt much less quick than easily flowing, and never with out weight or fullness. There was ethereal lucidity within the choral singing, too, which, underneath Lisa Wong’s route, had nuance and a readability of diction that matched the soloists’.
Cleveland’s operas haven’t hewed to the usual repertory, wandering as far towards rarities as Strauss’s “Daphne.” This has led to stark variations by way of viewers attracts: Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” was decidedly not bought out final 12 months, whereas “The Magic Flute” introduced full homes (and lots of households). Early in June, the Philadelphia Orchestra is performing “La Bohème,” utilizing a beloved title not simply to draw new audiences but in addition merely to usher in the crowds which have taken a very long time to return to concert events for the reason that pandemic.
Welser-Möst and Cleveland are taking a distinct tack, doubling down on extra recondite works. Subsequent season will deliver a live performance model of Janacek’s “Jenufa,” and the orchestra mentioned on Monday that 2025-26 will embrace Beethoven’s “Fidelio” in live performance, and that Welser-Möst’s ultimate season the next 12 months will culminate in a staging of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”
All that is, in fact, not low-cost. Gremillet estimated {that a} staged manufacturing prices about twice as a lot as presenting the identical opera in live performance, which is itself far dearer than a standard symphonic weekend.
However doing it may well deepen the enjoying of even an ideal ensemble. “This orchestra has at all times been nice,” Welser-Möst mentioned in an interview. “However what I needed from them after I began was extra flexibility, and a extra singing sound. And after we did ‘Rusalka,’ Dvorak’s Ninth was a distinct piece for them. After ‘Rosenkavalier,’ ‘Until Eulenspiegel’ was a distinct piece for them.”
Because the orchestra searches for Welser-Möst’s successor, Gremillet gave a touch that he’d want a music director who can keep these common displays as a pillar of the Cleveland season. “There’s one thing about expertise conducting opera,” he mentioned, “that to me alerts an entire conductor.”
And there’s one thing about presenting opera that alerts, to me, an entire orchestra.
