Marcy Stonikas to Sing Final Performance of TOSCA Saturday 1/24

Marcy Stonikas will sing the title role at our final performance of Tosca this Saturday, January 24. Ausrine Stundyte, who sang on opening night and on Wednesday, January 14, has withdrawn from the production after not recovering from a cold. Stundyte was originally scheduled to share the role with Mary Elizabeth Williams, who sang her own scheduled performance on January 11 as well as the broadcast performance last Saturday, January 17, and last night's show, January 21. Williams will also sing tomorrow, Friday, January 23, as scheduled. Williams returns to Seattle Opera twice next year: as Abigaille in Nabucco and as Queen Elizabeth in Mary Stuart.

Stonikas gave Seattle Opera riveting mainstage performances of Turandot and Leonore in Fidelio in 2012 as well as Magda Sorel in The Consul in 2014. Prior to those performances Stonikas sang Tosca in an Opera Santa Barbara production directed by Josemaria Condemi, who also staged Seattle Opera's current production. She sings Fidelio in Vienna in March and Turandot in Cincinnati in July. The Chicago-born soprano is scheduled to return to Seattle as Ariadne in May’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos, a role she will share with Christiane Libor.

Seattle Opera engages two casts for major roles, so that the company can present back-to-back performances such as this weekend’s Friday and Saturday. Leading roles, like Tosca and Ariadne, are so vocally demanding the singers need at least a day off between performances.

Best wishes for a speedy recovery for Ausrine Stundyte, whose riveting opening night performance received strong reviews. And many thanks to Mary Elizabeth Williams and Marcy Stonikas--both graduates of Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program--for their professionalism as well as their incredible voices.

Photo of Marcy Stonikas as Tosca at Opera Santa Barbara

New Goethe Movie just in time for Seattle Opera's "Werther"

Today the new German movie Young Goethe in Love opened in New York; the New York Times has an insightful review. Seattleites got a chance to see it last May, when it played at the Seattle International Film Festival. In the tradition of Shakespeare in Love, the film is a fictionalized account of how Goethe came to write The Sorrows of Young Werther--the brief epistolary novel that launched the Romantic movement and inspired Massenet's opera, which our Young Artists will be singing at 7 pm tonight at the Kirkland Performance Center in Kirkland, WA.

Here's a trailer for the new film, which stars Alexander Fehling as Goethe, Miriam Stein as his beloved, and the great Moritz Bleibtreu as his rival:

A Chat with Brian Garman

Ariadne auf Naxos, with its very distinct “Prologue” and “Opera” portions, is undoubtedly a difficult opera. And, acknowledges conductor Brian Garman, a rather unusual choice for a Young Artists Program. It’s “really ambitious—if not almost completely unheard of—to do in a Young Artists Program,” says Garman, who is also the YAP music director. “But we have these ‘crazy’ ambitious ideas from time to time and Ariadne was one that we were kicking around for awhile.” Garman and Artistic Director Peter Kazaras knew they had a great Composer in Vira Slywotzky and a thrilling Zerbinetta in Megan Hart, plus some talented men who could sing and act the comedian roles “like they’ve been performing together for years.”

“What sealed the deal, though, was Marcy Stonikas,” he says. Once she completed her aria at auditions last December, “Peter Kazaras and I looked at each other at the same time and said, ‘Ariadne?’ After a few days of consideration, we knew it was the right opera at the right time.”

This is Garman’s first time conducting Ariadne, but “it has always been among my very favorite Strauss operas. It has wit and humanity and charm and passion. And that music.... It's visceral and overwhelming—the last half-hour is so beautiful it could make a stone weep.”


As it was originally conceived, the opera Ariadne was performed immediately after an adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, written by Ariadne’s librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. But the original production was over six hours long, so Strauss and Hofmannsthal dropped the Molière play and wrote a prologue to set up the drama of what happens in the opera—that the opera company and the troupe of comedians are forced to perform simultaneously—and this revised version is what’s performed today.

“The prologue is essentially a pastiche of tunes from the opera interspersed with lots and lots of accompanied recitative. There are changes of tempo every few bars, and always dictated by what the dramatic moment is, not necessarily by anything musical,” Garman says. “The ‘opera’ itself is very, very difficult also, but it has a certain amount of musical and structural logic that’s sometimes lacking in the prologue.”

The music of the opera, Garman says, is distinctly Strauss. “It has a lot of Strauss's trademarks—many busy thematic lines happening in the orchestra simultaneously, and lots of conversational bits in the prologue. Similarly, the highly romantic music that Ariadne and Bacchus sing to each other is full of Strauss's typical melodic suspensions and horn solos, and is incredibly, almost unbearably, lush. It certainly more than rivals even the most beautiful moments of Rosenkavalier.”

Photo: Brian Garman conducting the Ariadne orchestra © Rozarii Lynch photo; Marcy Stonikas, Jennifer Edwards, Jenni Bank, Vira Slywotzky, Joanna Foote, and members of the Ariadne orchestra © Chris Bennion photo.

Glowing Reviews of ARIADNE

Opening night of Ariadne auf Naxos earned raves from critics who were in the house; Gavin Borchert wrote that "For sheer ear-gluttony, this production will be hard to beat" in the Seattle Weekly, and Bernard Jacobson of the Seattle Times said "For the Ariadne of Marcy Stonikas, only superlatives will do. The warmth, flexibility, and apparently inexhaustible power of her voice easily rode even the larger orchestral climaxes, and enveloped us all with its loveliness — most definitely, this is a singer with a big future."

We hope to see lots of you at the remaining three performances of this unusual and exquisite opera.

A Chat with Michael Krzankowski and Eric Neuville

We have two Harlequins in this year’s Young Artists’ production of Ariadne auf Naxos—Eric Neuville and Michael Krzankowski. These two young singers get a chance to play the young male leader of Zerbinetta's comedy troupe.

Michael is finishing his second year with YAP, after singing Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Siegfried in the children's adaptation of Siegfried and the Ring of Fire, and Guglielmo in Così fan tutte. Before coming here, this Chicago native studied at the University of Iowa and Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, but his first inspiration came from the Rodgers and Hammerstein movie-musical Carousel. "No one can play Billy Bigelow better than Gordon MacRae. It's a role I hope to play someday."

Eric's first year in YAP is ending with his final role as a baritone -- this summer he makes his tenor debut as Beppe in I Pagliacci at Chautauqua Opera. He studied at St. Olaf College and University of Texas - Austin. This is his first Ariadne, and in fact, his first experience in a Strauss opera. "[Strauss's] harmonic vocabulary is superbly romantic and took several weeks for my ear to latch on to. He's no Mozart!"

Take a listen to a snippet of Harlequin's aria, sung by Stephen Genz, as he tries to cheer up the lovelorn Ariadne.

Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen,
Alle Lust und alle Qual,
Alles kann ein Herz ertragen
Einmal um das andere Mal.
Aber weder Lust noch Schmerzen,
Abgestorben auch der Pein,
Das ist tödlich deinem Herzen,
Und so musst du mir nicht sein!
Musst dich aus dem Dunkel heben,
Wär' es auch um neue Qual,
Leben musst du, liebes Leben,
Leben noch dies eine Mal!




Loving, hating, hopes and fears,
Cause for laughter, cause for tears,
In your heart all these must play
Today and every other day.
But you feel no joy, no pain;
Your broken heart beats on in vain.
To this grief do not succumb.
You must not let your heart go numb.
I will bring you back to life,
though your path be dark with strife.
Life is ours now; you must live,
Must move on, forget, forgive.

This is also Michael's first Ariadne, and he's really enjoying the comedy aspect. "There's a camaraderie among the actors playing the troupe, which has easily transferred onto the stage," he said, and he's looking forward to seeing how the audience reacts. "There have been plenty of laughs and tears during rehearsals, even among the cast members."

Once Araidne closes, Michael heads to Glimmerglass Opera to cover Almaviva in Il nozze di Figaro. He also recently joined the roster of Hubbard-Levine Management, and is moving to New York City to pursue his opera career. After Eric performs with Chautauqua Opera, he's coming back to YAP in the fall as a tenor to sing Guglielmo in Viva La Mamma and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni. He'll also make his mainstage debut at Seattle Opera as Normanno in Lucia di Lammermoor and return as the First Priest in The Magic Flute.

You can see Michael perform Harlequin on April 9 (he also performed last night), and you can catch Eric on April 3 and April 11. Whichever night you go, you'll see a great comedic Harlequin!

Photos: Michael Krzankowski; Megan Hart and Eric Neuville. Both photos © Chris Bennion

The Great BACCHUS Taste Test

Bacchus, the tenor role in Ariadne auf Naxos, is famously difficult to sing, not to mention a challenging role to act. The ancient Greek god of wine, associated with poetic frenzy and sensual abandon, Bacchus, aka Dionysus, is traditionally depicted as wearing a leopard skin (although not by Caravaggio, left). In this story he happens to put ashore at Ariadne's island; they both make inaccurate assumptions about the other (she thinks he's the god of death, come to take her away, and he thinks she's a seductive enchantress like the one on the last island he visited, who tried unsuccessfully to turn him into an animal); and, after they've figured out who they both are, they fall in love--and their love transforms them both. If it's unclear exactly what that means, the overhelming power of the music is the real meaning.

Gregory Carroll, who sings Bacchus in Seattle Opera's production, tries not to get too bogged down trying to analyze the myth or the layers of Hofmannsthal's symbolism; stage director Peter Kazaras, he explains, has encouraged him (and Marcy Stonikas, who sings Ariadne) to try to find the human beings in this grandiose mythic scene. Musically, Carroll, who is "new to tenor-land" (he was a lyric baritone until two years ago), also tries not to worry about singing the role "heroically," even though it's sometimes considered a "heroic tenor" or "heldentenor" part: "I don't like to think about the music vertically, as in, 'Oh, I've got to hit this high note, and then stress that note, and then the next high note is coming up.' I want to sing it horizontally, concentrating on the line, the phrase, singing from the Italian, melody-centric point-of-view."

So you can hear the challenge of Bacchus, and a variety of approaches to singing the role, here's a taste test with three great tenors singing the speech in which Bacchus tells Ariadne about his parents, and about what he feels about her, Ariadne. (In Greek myth, Bacchus was born when Zeus fell in love with a mortal woman, Semele. He said, "Semele, love me, and I vow to give you anything you want." She did, and she asked to see him in all his divine glory, seated on his throne atop Olympus; he tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted, and when he revealed his full divinity to her she exploded. But Bacchus was born!)

Bin ich ein Gott, schuf mich ein Gott,
Starb meine Mutter in Flammen dahin,
Als sich in Flammen mein Vater ihr zeigte,
Versagte der Circe Zauber an mir,
Weil ich gefeit bin, Balsam und Äther
Für sterbliches Blut in den Adern mir fliesst.
Hör' mich, Wesen, das vor mir steht,
Hör' mich, du, die sterben will:
Dann sterben eher die ewigen Sterne,
Als dass du stürbest aus meinen Armen!

I am a god, created by a god.
My mother perished in the flames
when my father showed himself to her.
Circe’s magic was powerless against me,
for I am immune. Balsam and ether
flow in my veins, not mortal blood.
Hear me, being that stands before me:
Hear me, thou that wouldst die:
I would sooner see the eternal stars perish
than have thee die in my arms!

First, German opera and film star Rudolf Schock:



Next, Canadian tenor Paul Frey:



And finally, Seattle favorite Ben Heppner:



Now, vote!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com