A Salute to Opera Idaho
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart- Symphony No. 41 in C Major "Jupiter" Leonard Bernstein - Suite from Candide Guests Artists: Jennifer Welch-Babidge, soprano Karim Sulayman, tenor Michele Detwiler, mezzo-soprano, Opera Idaho Jason Detwiler, baritone, Opera Idaho artist in residence Artistic Partner- Opera Idaho American soprano Jennifer Welch-Babidge is in constant demand for her sparkling vocal technique, natural stage presence, and both her dramatic and comic acting ability. Opera News lauds recent performances, “Jennifer Welch-Babidge served up some ravishing soubrette-singing. Her voice is agile and beautifully projected, with a lavish bloom and a silvery edge; she clearly loves the stage.” Frequently appearing on the Metropolitan Opera stage, some of her roles with the company include Marzelline in Fidelio, Chloe in Queen of Spades, Blondchen in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Freia in Das Rheingold. She has also graced the stages of the San Francisco Opera as Blondchen in Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Adele in Die Fledermaus, which led to her debut in Japan Seiji Ozawa at the Saito Kinen Festival. She has also joined Utah Festival Opera for Gilda in Rigoletto and Liu in Turandot. Among her recent appearances on the concert stage are performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 and Cunegonde in Candide with the San Francisco Symphony, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and Handel’s Messiah. She has also appeared at Carnegie Hall with the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Ensemble and James Levine singing Berg’s Lulu Suite and song cycles of Anton Webern. Ms. Welch-Babidge, a native of Aulander, North Carolina, is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts with a Masters degree in vocal performance and currently serves as a professor at Brigham Young University. Karim Sulyaman, tenor Quickly garnering attention for his “beautiful voice that is warm and rich,” and “acting of the highest and most fascinating quality” (Asheville-Citizen Times), tenor Karim Sulayman displays his versatility in a vast repertoire that spans baroque to contemporary. He has sung the world premiere of Carlos Alberto Vazquez’ Requiem Domesticus at the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. He has been the haute contre soloist in Charpentier’s Les arts florissants and Le mariage force in concerts at the Kennedy Center with Opera Lafayette. In the summer of 2008, he participated in the prestigious Steans Institute for Young Artists at the Ravinia Festival. Other engagements include Bach’s Cantata No. 110 with Helmuth Rilling at the International Bach Festival in Toronto. He sang with L’Opera Francais de New York and in a new production of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole with Berkshire Opera Company. At England’s esteemed Aldeburgh Festival, he sang Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and Bach’s Cantata 182. His other concert performances include Orff's Carmina Burana; Stravinsky’s Les Noces; Pärt’s Passio and Handel’s Messiah. Mr. Sulayman is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he received his Bachelor of Music with high distinction and received his Master of Music from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He is the 2006 winner of the inaugural Lys Symonette Award in the Kurt Weill Foundation’s Lotte Lenya Competition and the 2005 second place winner in the art song division of the Joyce Dutka Arts Foundation Voice Competition. Opera Idaho's Soloist Michele Detwiler, mezzo-soprano Michele Detwiler is a most wonderful, riveting and rich mezzo-soprano with an excellent range. She is native to California and was principal artist of Opera San Jose. Her performances are intense and passionate and she has a fearless presence on the stage in opera and in symphonic pieces such as Handel's Messiah and Mozart's Requiem. Opera Idaho's Soloist Jason Detwiler, Opera Idaho Artist in Residence, baritone Jason Detwiler has been recognized for an equally commanding stage presence. His low baritone register is warm, expressive and fluid. His national career has taken him to the Virginia Opera Company, Syracuse Opera Company and Opera Idaho in the summer of 2009. As Opera Idaho's Artist-in-Residence, his stellar performance will continue. Mozart: Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K.551 “Jupiter” Mozart was himself a child of the Enlightenment, and likewise his adopted city, Vienna, was the seat of the “Enlightenment” Emperor Joseph II of Austria. The Emperor read Voltaire as a youth and strove to put such ideals into practice in his reign, making significant steps towards greater religious freedoms, the unburdening of peasantry from feudal strictures, and the removal of impediments to free inquiry. His Imperial Majesty was also a great lover and patron of music. Mozart had come to Vienna to make his own way and to disentangle his fortunes from the control of his father Leopold. But when father came to visit Mozart and his new bride Constanze in 1785, the composer went out of his way to show him that his life there was respectable and his music acclaimed. The toddler Karl, Leopold’s grandson, behaved charmingly; Constanze’s handling of household affairs even found begrudging fatherly approval. The great eminence Joseph Haydn made a house call to hear some new quartets Mozart had written in his honor, and after the performance (in which father and son played alongside one another), Haydn told the proud father that Mozart was the “greatest composer” alive. Joseph II himself even took a part in Mozart’s panoramic display of successes, when, at one of Mozart’s concerto performances, His Imperial Majesty waved his hat and called out “Bravo, Mozart!” Leopold was indeed impressed—but also jealous. The pair never fully resolved their complex of issues before Leopold’s death two years later. The Symphony No. 41 was written in an almost unbelievable surge of creative output between May and August of 1788. In that time—which also corresponded with his profoundest financial strain—Mozart composed his last two piano trios, an adagio and fugue for string quartet, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, an arietta for bass, and his last three symphonies. The last of these was given the subtitle “Jupiter” for pure marketing cachet by the concert producer Johann Peter Salomon, but that was years after the composer’s death a few days before his thirty-sixth birthday. Had the impresario’s marketing prowess been applied to Mozart a bit earlier, we might have record of these last three symphonies receiving successful premieres—instead, the concerts Mozart hoped would feature them were delayed several times, and may have never occurred at all. One of the hallmarks of Mozart’s increasingly personal style in this period is its self-conscious fecundity; there are so many beauties to come, he seems to imply, that it is not necessary to linger over any particular one. The first movement of the Jupiter models this tendency. There are an impressive variety of thematic elements, beginning with the ebullient puddle-splashing of the first bars. Several contrasting melodies are introduced, symmetrically balancing each other, including one particularly hummable tune that Mozart borrowed from the bass arietta he had written just a few weeks before. The lyrics for the quoted section are a lesson to a would-be lover: “you are a bit innocent, my dear Pompeo / Go study the ways of the world.” Its further possibilities are explored by Mozart in the central part of the movement, and they turn out to be surprisingly serious for such an innocent-sounding scrap of song. There is a note of mystery and agitation in the Andante which continually prohibits the mood from aspiring to unalloyed bliss. The minuet and trio which follow begins conventionally enough, but reveals surprising heft and comedy before, in a sudden turn to the minor mode, a blocky phrase of long notes appears from nowhere. It is to become the kernel of the fourth movement, where it is revealed as the “Jupiter” theme itself. The code-like quality of this four-note phrase appeared, remarkably, in Mozart’s very first symphony, which he composed some twenty-three years earlier at the age of nine. In the finale of the Jupiter Symphony, a movement noted for its powerfully dramatic contrapuntal texture, this motto is woven with four other independent themes into a five-part fugue. Bernstein: Suite from Candide When playwright Lillian Hellman conceived an idea for a comic play based on Voltaire’s 1759 novella Candide, or The Optimist, she considered Leonard Bernstein to be the perfect choice to furnish the incidental music. The composer talked her into making it a comic operetta instead. With help from several lyricists—including James Agee (though his contributions were cut from the original production), the Algonquin’s rapier-witted Dorothy Parker, and Bernstein himself, among others—the new work opened on Broadway in 1956 but failed after only two months. Before it did, however, the composer conducted the New York Philharmonic in a performance of the overture. The extremely rich, lifelong artistic relationship shared by Bernstein and this orchestra made it was fitting when, in a memorial concert after his death in 1990, the musicians chose to perform the Overture from Candide with the conductor’s space on the podium left symbolically empty. They have performed it this way ever since. The operetta underwent major revisions, including a complete rewrite of the libretto when Lillian Hellman pulled out of a 1974 revival of the work by Hal Prince; Bernstein himself organized a “definitive” version in 1989. The present work is a suite of numbers collected in 1977 by Bernstein collaborator John Mauceri from the original 1956 Broadway production. Four vocal soloists sing the roles variously of Pangloss, Candide, Cunegonde, Old Woman, the Governor, and others, while a narrator provides context for each scene. Voltaire’s story tells of the young man Candide, who learns through a number of fantastical episodes to question his mentor’s philosophical standpoint that “all is best in this best of all possible worlds.” The author’s typically satirical treatment of the prevailing authoritarian worldview articulated the tenets of the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment, a direct manifestation of which was that “noble experiment” in democracy which would become the United States of America. Voltaire’s attack on the philosophy of optimism was rooted in contemporary events such as the destruction of Lisbon by earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 1755 and the Seven Years’ war (1756-63), events which to him belied the world’s governance by a benevolent deity. Moreover, he believed, the idea that the world was constantly in the best possible hands appeared to prop up inhumane and outmoded forms of social control. Voltaire offers an enigmatically metaphorical solution in the final pages of his comedy, which is represented in Bernstein’s ensemble finale, “Make our garden grow.” |
Concerts & Events |
