Savoring “Seville”

From the Vocal Vault Dept.: We’re traveling back to 1985, when I was still finding my feet as a music critic, and a brief review I wrote of Texas Opera Theater’s visit to Schenectady’s Proctor’s Theater with a delightful “Barber of Seville.” (And this was before I began complaining about staging an opera’s overture.) The melancholy aspect, in retrospect, is that director James Atherton died two years later of an AIDS-related illness. He was a tenor with the Santa Fe Opera from 1973 to 1978, and made his Metropolitan Opera debut in “Boris Godunov” in 1977. He would go on to sing 277 performances there in a repertory of 17 roles. In recent years, he had branched into directing, of which this “Barber” was a shining example. He was 44 years old and lived in St. Louis when he died, where he served as artistic director of the opera studio at the St. Louis Conservatory. But let’s find him, still alive, in Schenectady.

                                                                                                 

THE AUDIENCE AT – and cast of –  Thursday night's Texas Opera Theatre production of “The Barber of Seville” had so much fun at Proctor's that it is easy to speculate that this was the kind of presentation that originally boosted Rossini’s opera to the prominence it now enjoys.

James Atherton

The opera was played strictly for comedy, low and high, with the kind of talent and zeal that makes for a great evening at the theatre.

Much of the humor originally was based on what was considered a shocking play in its time: Beaumarchais’s script mocked relations between masters and servants so savagely that productions were banned in parts of Europe. Today, of course, the subject is antiquated into quaintness. Rossini’s score added a magic of its own, and, as the Texas Opera production attests, the potential for enduring fun.

Tenor James Atherton turned stage director for this version, leading the cast through comic turns which might tax the imagination of film director Richard Lester. The scenic design, by Eduardo Sicango, used fans as a motif; fans decorated costumes and stage; there were giant folding fans on each side of the stage; and a large fan-shaped drop served as curtain. During the overture we met the principal characters with a silent commedia dell’arte-style prologue, a delightful use of those minutes.

Gieseking of the Keys

AS A LIFE-LONG INSOMNIAC, I grew up dependent on overnight radio listening to ease the struggle to get to sleep. But you know me. I sought classical-music stations for solace. And, because I grew up in the New York metropolitan area, I had a choice of several. That is, until WNBC-FM abandoned the format, followed pretty much by WBAI. WFUV and WKCR were only sporadically classical by the time I discovered them, and WRVR was bizarrely unpredictable. That left WNYC, which intruded too many public-affairs programs for my taste, WNCN, and WQXR. (There was also Bridgeport, Conn., anomaly WJZZ, profiled here.) And the overnight programming I liked best was anything offered by Bill Watson, a silken-voiced polymath with very specific tastes who gypsied from station to station. (You can hear a recording of him here.)

Watson was particularly fond of tenor Jussi Bjoerling and pianist Walter Gieseking, and Gieseking’s Mozart especially grabbed my ear. The combination of his gentle but no-nonsense performances and the warm recorded sound was hypnotic. While working for a classical radio station in 1981, I cassette-taped an eleven-LP set of Mozart piano music that Gieseking recorded in London in 1953-54. I transferred the cassettes to minidiscs (o much-missed format!) 20 years later, and not long after that sent them to a hard drive. Those journeys weren’t always kind.

Which is intended to explain my fanatical joy at receiving the 48-CD boxset of Gieseking’s “Columbia Graphophone Recordings,” covering the bulk of the studio recordings he made between 1923 and 1956, when he died suddenly. That’s a lot of listening, only somewhat ameliorated by the fact that he revisited some of the repertory here more than once, so you may wish to ration yourself.

Pass on the Salmon, Please

THAT BRIGHT PINK FISH became a centerpiece of our diet, its health benefits aggressively promoted, its resultant appeal so great that it even gave its name to a trendy color. You know what they say about All Good Things, and so it is with our favorite seafood. Turns out not only that farmed salmon is bad for you, it also is raised in such a horrific manner that the die-off rate is spectacular – and it’s also killing wild salmon.

Salmon Wars, by Douglas Franz and Catherine Collins, is an unsparing study of a brutal industry. How valid are their research and conclusions? Sebastian Belle, president of the National Aquaculture Association, an industry advocacy group, took umbrage at an excerpt of Salmon Wars that was printed in Time magazine. Without bothering to read the book itself, he wrote to the magazine’s editor in protest.

“There is a war being waged against science by activists that would prefer decisions be based on politics, anecdotes and shameless misrepresentations,” he insisted, “and the authors deliver on this approach by basing their arguments on false factoids pulled from the news or discredited old studies in place of real facts.” This appears in an article on the website globalseafood.org.

False factoids pulled from the news? Discredited old studies? Hardly. The book reflects the top-flight credentials of the husband-and-wife authors, whose journalist credentials include work for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Salmon Wars is a methodical study, well-researched and footnoted to a fare-thee-well. Its unpleasant conclusion is revealed at the start; what’s left is a lengthy journey to amass facts in the face of considerable industry opposition.

The Actor

I BEGAN MY cabaret-style performing in duet with Tom Savoy, a brilliant singer-composer-pianist whom I met in 1980. We discovered a shared love of some arcane types of music, and soon decided that we should write a musical comedy together. You have to audition a thing like that for producers, so we made the rounds locally and discovered that (A:) they couldn’t have cared less, and (B:) we really enjoyed singing together. We joined forces with Malcolm Kogut around 1984, and put together a cabaret show program featuring material such as you’ll find on my YouTube channel, including several sung with Tom. He and I stopped performing together only because he moved to North Carolina ten years ago, and that’s where he died last November. That first musical he and I wrote together was titled “Presenting Lily Mars,” based on a Booth Tarkington novel. It captured the world of Broadway theater back in the Nineteen Aughts, when Tarkington had success as a playwright – introducing Helen Hayes and Alfred Lunt, among others, to Broadway. Here’s one piece of our juvenalia, a song titled “The Actor.” This was recorded on Dec. 31, 2022, at Steamer 10 Theatre in Albany, NY.