Baaah!

The Boston Lyric at its worst; Russell Sherman at his best

by Lloyd Schwartz

Except for one crucial moment (perhaps the most critical moment), the Boston Lyric Opera's new production of Mozart's Il re pastore (The Shepherd King), the 10th and last of his early operas (he was 19), was one of the worst in the Lyric's checkered (a euphemism) artistic history. That moment was the big aria, "L'amerò, sarò costante" ("I shall love her"), sung by Kendra Colton as Aminta, the opera's hero (a soprano role). Alexander the Great has revealed that this modest young shepherd, who's in love with the shepherdess Elisa, is actually the legitimate heir to the throne of Sidon. To accept the kingship, he must renounce his beloved and marry the daughter of Sidon's deposed ruler. In the aria, Aminta promises to love his assigned royal wife, but he's really singing about his abiding love for Elisa.

Coming late in the second act, it's the richest music in the entire opera -- the most eloquently lyrical and, because of the context, also the most dramatic. Colton sang it with aching simplicity and let her honeyed tone pour out without forcing. Conductor Martin Pearlman (the director of Boston Baroque in his Lyric Opera debut) relaxed the tempo and for the first time allowed the music its natural flow, while concertmaster Maynard Goldman emphasized the swooning emotionality of his accompanying violin solo.

For a moment, Ron Daniels, late of ART (staging his first opera), stopped making singers fall to the floor or stroll listlessly around the stage in figure eights and let Colton sing directly to her one listener, and to herself. Adam Silverman muted his harsh lighting, so one could ignore the proliferation of ugly green sheep cutouts (it's the pastoral world, see?) or the black-and-white warriors (the bad men who are invading that peaceful world, see?) filling Peter Steinberg's low-budget sets or the uncoordinated, gauche colors of Catherine Zuber's costumes (a rose and coral dress or a violet Balenciaga cape -- worn by a shepherdess! -- conflicting with the glaring yellow panels covered with all those green sheep). Even the stilted libretto, in a yet more stilted British translation by Nancy Evans and Eric Crozier ("Go, then, and reign, my dear one"), seemed suddenly heartfelt, and you could hear -- briefly -- the voice of true feeling. The aria moved me. Some better productions have not had such a genuinely moving event.

But why, mightn't one well ask, put on this opera in the first place? Except for "L'amerò," a pretty duet at the end of the first act, an exuberant finale-quintet (the two times Mozart allows the voices to blend), and a few random snatches of accompaniment, the music is fairly conventional. He waited five years to complete his next opera, Idomeneo, and it was a masterpiece. In Il re pastore, he set an old Metastasio libretto to celebrate a state occasion. There's so little dramatic conflict, or action of any kind, even a more inventive operatic director than Daniels would be hard pressed to come up with compelling stage activity -- though a more experienced one might have found a more convincing way to have his singers move in relation to the music. In 1984, Craig Smith conducted a concert version at Castle Hill (with a cast that included the local operatic debut of an impressive young mezzo-soprano named Lorraine Hunt). There was no staging and it wasn't missed (Smith even dropped all the recitative).

Perhaps the only reason to revive Il re pastore is as a vehicle for five elegant high voices (three sopranos, two tenors). Although Colton's fresh voice doesn't yet have enough variety to carry all the demands of Aminta, it's extremely clear and pretty, and she has an appealingly earnest, and modest, stage presence. But Susannah Waters (returning from last season's Xerxes), despite her lively acting, has a shrill voice that's consistently strained (and a strain to listen to -- a disaster in this opera). She raced through lines of recitative like "I hear that our true and lawful monarch is still in hiding" as if she were presenting a traffic bulletin. Mezzo Laura Tucker (in Lorraine Hunt's role) has a pearly but monochromatic tone. I hope she works on her diction before she's back with Pearlman in Boston Baroque's April concert version of Don Giovanni.

The two tenors are also problematical. Mark Thomsen's "Alessandro" (since the opera is sung in English, why isn't he called Alexander, which has the identical pattern of stresses?) was hampered by an absurd costume (Darth Vader armor, cape, and plumed helmet) and even more by the "idea" that Alexander symbolizes the dark evils of war invading the Edenic countryside (in Mozart's celebration of the monarchy, Alessandro is the voice of reason and forgiveness). Thomsen delivered the recitative with punch, but his coloratura was effortful and bellowy. Paul Kirby, as Alexander's confidante who finds his beloved offered up as the shepherd king's consort, took an act to warm up his sizable voice, and his legato singing remained shaky throughout. But his matinee-idol looks and stage confidence (he's a good listener) were significant assets, especially since he's on stage most of the opera.

The orchestra played well, and Pearlman is a stylish conductor, if too timid about pointing up Mozart's already highly developed sense of tonal and dynamic contrasts. Finally, though, you have to question what motivated the Lyric to go forward with a project for which it had such inadequate resources. (Final performances at the Emerson Majestic January 24 and 26.)

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Both by contrast and by any absolute standard, Russell Sherman's astounding Celebrity Series recital was everything musicmaking should be: not merely accomplished (though high accomplishment is hardly negligible), but ambitious, humane, visionary, and fearless -- maybe the most powerful recital of his I've ever attended (though that's what I say after almost every concert of his I hear), and one of the most draining.

This time along with two cornerstones of the piano repertoire -- the Liszt Sonata and Beethoven's Appassionata -- he played two world premieres: George Perle's Six Celebratory Inventions and Ralph Shapey's Sonata Profondo (dedicated to Sherman). The six Perles, exercises in complex counterpoint that were also subtle portraits of each of its six composer dedicatees (Ernst Krenek, Henri Dutilleux, Oliver Knussen, Gunther Schuller, Richard Swift, and Leonard Bernstein), were as cultured and scintillating as the Shapey was broad and direct (even the irony of the joky Scherzando movement was straightforward).

In the two 19th-century masterpieces, Sherman seemed to be exploring the tragic side -- the cost -- of choosing such no-holds-barred Confrontations-with-Fate: dramatizing how the hero gets so caught up in the dangerous adventure he doesn't want to escape even if he could, and how the inevitable place he comes to is not necessarily the happiest one (like Yeats's "terrible beauty" born out of the martyrdom to a noble cause). For Sherman, Liszt's nervous excitement seemed inseparable from his terror at that sense of inevitability; the Beethoven ended in a mad victory dance celebrating the relentless need to pursue the quest -- or be pursued by it. Rarely are these grand spiritual journeys as compelling or as moving as Sherman made them.

Alternately, the two new pieces go poking around in the pleasures (and nightmares) of the intimate and the teasingly familiar -- the anti-heroic and everyday that somehow also includes a kind of heroism. Perle turns "Krenek at 85" into a quicksilver 12-tone music box; "Dutilleux at 80" is a pointillist Webern with the blues; "Schuller at 70" gets a melancholy and tender waltz; "Bernstein at 70" is full of familiar quotations -- "Here come the Jets" -- and abrupt dynamic shifts. Shapey builds large structures out of obsessive rhythmic kernels and playful syncopations. There's a darker serenade before he finally instructs Sherman, at the end of the Rondo, to "Go, Buddy, go, in a Voice of Thunder."

Sherman, of course, isn't all thunder. His textures (emotional as well as tonal) are always dappled, his phrasing is pointed and poignant, even his arpeggiation is expressive and dynamic. Everything has a rhythmic ebb and flow, thrust and retreat, that acknowledges a larger architectural plan. Without explaining away what's inherently intangible or spiritual, he lets you see an X-ray of the mystery.

He preceded the Liszt B-minor with a brief, obscure, and sublime late-Liszt Wiegenlied ("Cradle Song"), which begins with the simplest rocking two-note figure and moves into increasingly stranger, unearthly harmonies. And he ended the concert with two lighter-than-air encores: a Beethoven bagatelle that acknowledges a kind of heavenly absurdity and Rachmaninov's exquisite, limpid pastorale, Daisies -- Sherman's final reminder of the sheer, undutiful joy that underlies all music.

After Il re pastore, I wondered why I should care about music at all. Sherman gave me the answer, and he demonstrated what a privilege it is to be in the presence of music when it's real.