By PAUL HORSLEY
For years friends have been urging me to attend the Des Moines Metro Opera, a boutique summer opera festival three hours north of Kansas City. Something always seemed to come up. Having finally taken the plunge this year, I wish I'd heeded their advice sooner. This festival of three opera productions (some years they do four) is a national treasure situated in the seemingly unlikely town of Indianola, Iowa. (See our coverage of the festival in The Star's A&E section from July 8.) This year's festival offered a pretty good "Carmen," an "Otello" with flashes of genius and an exceptional "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I attended all three in a single weekend, the sort of gluttony that you can afford in sleepy Indianola, population 14,000. (I did sneak out to Des Moines on Saturday afternoon, though, to peruse its annual Arts Festival, visit its sleek new downtown library and sample the excellent menu at Centro.)
Fans of the Lyric Opera of Kansas City will recognize the fine work onstage of R. Keith Brumley, who has designed sets at both the Lyric and Metro Opera for years. Fans of opera in general will recognize the profound musicianship of Metro Opera artistic director Robert L. Larsen, who founded the company 35 years ago at Simpson College (where he teaches) and has built it to an annual operatic event from the sheer force of his own personality and drive. (Call him a control freak, but the 72-year-old Larsen conducts and stage-directs all of the productions himself, something you're unlikely to find anywhere else in the world.) Fans of theater will love the intimate, semi-circular interior of Simpson's Blank Performing Arts Center, whose dramatically thrust stage in front makes you feel like you're actually inside the action.
"Carmen" is not the easiest opera for me to sit through, having been bludgeoned with countless mediocre productions of it over the years. Larsen's "Carmen," which included every note of the often-trimmed opera, convinced me once again of the work's brilliance. With all of Bizet's music included (and Guiraud's recitative in place of dialogue), the opera made unusually sharp dramatic sense, despite a sense of near-overkill with crowd scenes and overly busy choral action. Keith Brumley's sets had a sort of period integrity to them, and one couldn't help admiring the elaborately craggy rocks for Act 3 (which took so long to reset for Act 4 that the orchestra played the Farandole from Bizet's "L'Arlesienne" to fill the time).
Notable was Scott Piper's searing performance as Don José, which built from a low simmer to an explosive Act 4 that nearly set the stage on fire. Piper, a Missouri native whom Kansas City audiences will remember for his dazzling Pinkerton in the Lyric's "Madama Butterfly" in 2000, has one of the most compelling stage presences of any tenor I know. You forget he's acting. In the final scenes of this "Carmen" he was hugging himself, his voice cracking with anguish, as if wanting to envelop himself in a cocoon. It was powerfully intense. Vocally, though, the performance was a little disappointing, from the strangled half-voice of Act 1 to the overly open top and the wavering pitch of Act 4. Piper is still capable of producing some of the most beautiful sounds of any young tenor I know, as he showed in the flower-song of Act 2. But he seemed to be struggling to get a consistent good sound.
Janara Kellerman, a former DMMO apprentice, was a decent Carmen, vocally sure and even torchy where necessary but hardly a match for Piper when it came to heart-on-the-sleeve passion. Brandon Mayberry was an unctious Escamillo, smiling perhaps a bit too much and painting the character in broad strokes. (Granted, it's not an easy character to play for subtleties, but it can be done.) Laura Portune and Kellie Van Horn were an unusually strong Frasquita and Mercédes pair.
Robert Larsen is a complete musician, and in the pit he knows just what he wants from both singers and orchestra. But the orchestra sounded suprisingly below the par of the singing throughout the weekend, a problem that was exacerbated, apparently, by a baton technique that often seem to leave the string players (in particular) scrambling.
"Otello" might be the greatest opera in the 19th-century Italian repertoire, but I don't always feel that way when I'm sitting through it. (The last time was a snooze-fest with Levine at the Met, which despite Ben Heppner's towering portrayal was dead in the water musically.) Larsen again got me interested in the opera again, with a production that underscored the complexity of the relationships that lead from love and friendship to jealousy, betrayal and doom for all. He also knew how to make Verdi's complex scenes pull you along, like the brindisi-turned-sword-fight of Act 1, which had a harrowing sense of dramatic continuity.
As in "Carmen," the most impressive performance did not come from the singer in the title role. Todd Thomas was an unusually convincing Iago, dark and impish and conniving throughout. His famous "Credo" of Act 2 was riveting, both vocally and dramatically, to the point where he made you delight in the depths of his blasphemous depravity. ("I believe in a cruel God, who has created me in His own image.")
Allan Glassman was the Moor, and at his famously stentorian Act 1 entrance I thought, wow, what a powerhouse of a voice. But that was about as good as it got. Dramatically he wrapped himself in the role, and he went to great lengths to plumb a wide range of vocal color. But his top was sometimes a strangled cry, and you often felt he was trying to make his voice bigger than it was. It's hard to build a good "Otello" without a good Otello. (To make matters worse, his face-paint was more drag queen than Moor.)
Dana Beth Miller was a likeable Desdemona, especially in the "Willow Song," of Act 4, which she imbued with great subtlety. As in the "Carmen," the chorus of some 60 singers was extraordinarily strong. (Metro Opera has an active apprentice program, and the singers it draws from around the country also provide the productions with an over-the-top chorus.) The orchestra playing was, again, spotty, with the brass fanfare almost collapsing under cracked notes.
All in all, though, this "Otello" kept me interested throughout, thanks also to Brumley's simple but splendidly versatile set, which with Barry J. Steele's inventive lighting made for continual visual delight.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" gave lighting designer Barry Steele even more of a chance to shine, with moving lights that produced swirling pools of dappled lighting that esssentially WAS the stage design. True, Brumley had provided minimal sets for Benjamin Britten's peerless Shakespeare adaptation, but it was the lighting in greens and blues and golds that captured the magical atmosphere of the piece. I love this richly hued opera more every time I hear it, and this was by far the coup of this year's Metro Opera season.
The consistently strong cast was led by countertenor Randall Scotting as Oberon and Jane Redding as Tytania, who as a quarreling love-couple played off each other with great savvy. Also notable were Marc Schreiner as Lysander, Kellie Van Horn as Hermia, Gwendolyn Jones as Hippolyta and the whole ensemble of Rustics, who planned their drama on the thrust stage in Act 1 and then for the "performance" in Act 3 moved up to the proscenium stage. (The separated spaces were used to great advantage to demarcate the woods from the fairy lands.)
Adam Alexander was wildly acrobatic in the spoken role of Puck, which he delivered in the midst of somersaults and flying leaps. The young singers in the children's roles were well trained but not consistently strong vocally. Larsen led with consummate musical command, pushing his young orchestra to put out all they could, which was not quite enough but almost.
It was a triumphant ending to a pleasant weekend in Indianola, one that reinforced my conviction that I need to make this an annual sojourn. You should too. If you don't get in this year, make sure you act early next season, because they often sell out, and for good reason.
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