INDIANOLA, Iowa — Des Moines Metro Opera doesn’t stick to bread-and-butter standard repertoire. Its adventurous choices, coupled with high-quality productions, have resulted in more than half the audience regularly coming in from far outside the Des Moines area. General director Michael Egel says that ticket sales are the highest they’ve ever been. Performances regularly sell out, and season subscriptions have been hitting record levels. This summer, the company located a 15-minute drive south of downtown Des Moines, in the quiet suburb of Indianola, is celebrating its 52nd season with an eclectic lineup that includes a world premiere.
Des Moines Metro’s offerings are given at the Blank Performing Arts Center, a unique theater that lends itself to intimacy. The auditorium’s 450 seats are in a curved, stadium-style formation surrounding a large thrust stage, underneath which sits the orchestra pit, including a doughnut-hole opening for the conductor and for the release of orchestral sound. It’s an unusual but remarkably effective setup for opera, challenging stage directors and designers to pursue new avenues and ideas, and bringing the performers close enough to the audience that one never misses a facial expression.
Pelléas et Mélisande, seen on July 12, capitalized on all this. Director Chas Rader-Shieber and scenic designer Andrew Boyce used a concept already familiar to those who saw Jonathan Miller’s production: They set the action mostly inside an elegant country manor, and, judging from Jacob A. Climer’s costumes, moved the time frame to the era of the opera’s composition around the turn of the 20th century. Connie Yun’s incisive lighting design sent slashes of light and shadow across the stage, echoing the often unsettling, nightmarish quality of Debussy’s otherworldly score. If Rader-Shieber’s concept was not entirely fresh, his direction drew focused, nuanced reactions from his cast in an opera where characters leave so much repressed and unexpressed. One of many unforgettable moments in his Personenregie — a production style that prioritizes psychologically plausible characters and acting — came in the final scene, with Geneviève leveling a long glare of anger and disgust at her murderous son, Prince Golaud.
Edward Nelson replaced the originally announced Pelléas on six weeks’ notice and proved himself more than up to the task. He wielded his kavalierbariton with elegance and, in his final love scene with Mélisande, winning urgency. As Mélisande, Sydney Mancasola gave a deeply committed performance expressed through her graceful, poignant presence, limpid phrasing, and appealing lyric soprano.
Brandon Cedel’s Golaud was appropriately threatening, but he also used his fine-grained bass-baritone to project sympathy as Golaud’s world unravels. Cedel does need to spend a bit more time with a French diction coach, however, if he is going to continue singing Gallic roles.
Matt Boehler was a moving King Arkel with a resonant sound. In her few brief scenes as Geneviève, Catherine Martin displayed a riveting presence and used her strong lower register to lend dramatic intensity to a role that is too often sung as if the mezzo-soprano is sleepwalking. Scene 3 of Act 4, Yniold’s solo moment, was cut, possibly because it would have been too demanding for the rather thin, uninflected treble voice of young Benjamin Bjorklund. Derrick Inouye expertly maintained the score’s brewing tension, despite the fact that he may have been working with a reduced orchestration. The string section, in particular, sounded a bit small.
Richard Strauss’ own approved reduced orchestration for 60 players was used the following day for Salome, though one would not necessarily have known, so energized was the conducting of David Neely. He led a blisteringly intense reading of the score and was blessed with a vivid production and a gifted cast. Stage director Alison Pogorelc and scenic designer Steven C. Kemp presented a stage littered with pieces of a huge shattered statue — an arm here, a leg there, part of a head in the foreground — and dominated by a steep staircase, sheer, gauzy curtains, and, of course, the cistern. Over-the-top excess, welcome and basically expected in this opera, was provided through the often outrageous costumes by Jacob. A. Climer and the makeup and wigs of Brittany V.A. Rappise. Lighting by Connie Yun reflected the changing effects of the oft-mentioned moon, here projected as a huge, hollow circle of white moving across a backdrop.
In the title role, Sara Gartland gave a powerhouse performance. She looks and sounds like a lyric soprano, but her voice, lovely though it is, also has a penetrating, pin-you-to-your-seat thrust that, coupled with unerring dramatic instincts, makes her ideal as Salome. (And yes, she did her own dance, quite gracefully and with real erotic abandon, including a final topless reveal.) Gartland is the kind of stage animal one hopes to see in the future in a host of challenging roles. As Jochanaan, Norman Garrett offered a beautiful baritone and forceful delivery that, along with his attractive stage presence, made his character a charismatic doomsayer rather than the sanctimonious snooze the prophet can sometimes be in other hands. Chad Shelton sang Herod with a much sturdier sound than we often hear in this role, and his performance was infectious, funny, and joyously depraved, alive to every nuance in the text. Alex McKissick and Audrey Welsh stood out as Narraboth and the Page, respectively, with Welsh delivering a rich contralto sound. The only weak link in the cast was the Herodias of Gwendolyn Jones, whose voice sounded worn and lacked volume.
That evening saw the world premiere of American Apollo by composer Damien Geter and librettist Lila Palmer. Geter and Palmer based their work upon an historic artistic collaboration that has only recently come to light. In 1916, the great American painter John Singer Sargent began using a handsome, muscular young African American elevator operator as his model and muse. Thomas Eugene McKeller was 34 years younger than Sargent, but despite the differences in their age and race, and the racist and homophobic attitudes of early 20th-century society, their relationship may have been a close one for the few years that it lasted.
Geter has poured a great deal of tenderness and sensitivity into his lushly tonal score. There is a Coplandesque, mid-20th-century American sound to many passages, as well as occasional moments of ragtime and period jazz where appropriate. Geter is a singer himself — a bass-baritone who has performed with numerous opera companies. For the most part, his writing shows an understanding of his singers’ needs. What keeps American Apollo from being a truly satisfying work is a problem that Geter shares with many contemporary opera composers: His orchestral scoring is far more interesting than the vocal lines that sit on top of it. For all his vivid orchestral underpinning — masterfully conducted by David Neely — there is little in the sung material that really grabs the listener or remains in the memory.
Fortunately, this premiere was blessed with a fine cast of singing actors. McKeller was the charismatic baritone Justin Austin, physically and vocally ideal in this role. His gorgeous timbre and forthright interpretation were everything one could have wished for. Opposite him was the equally appealing William Burden as Sargent in a poignant performance that showcased his lustrous tenor and endearing stage presence. As the encouraging, cajoling patroness of the arts Isabella Stewart Gardner, Mary Dunleavy offered wit and glamour as well as a strong soprano that only occasionally sounded stretched in the role’s uppermost reaches. Following his Narraboth that afternoon, McKissick effectively portrayed a very different and dangerous character: that of Nicola d’Inverno, Sargent’s spurned former lover. Mezzo-soprano Tesia Kwarteng was a warm and supportive presence as McKeller’s childhood friend Ida Mae McDonald.
Lila Palmer’s libretto often seemed to want a stronger sense of direction. Sometimes it took dense poetic excursions, many of which could be trimmed with little loss. The 90-minute first act, which is somewhat lacking in dramatic buildup and tension, would have worked better with 10 minutes shorn off. Director Shaun Patrick Tubbs made shrewd use not only of the expansive stage but also of the aisles of the auditorium. The minimalist set by Steven C. Kemp admirably allowed the focus to remain on the singers, with drops and projections featuring Sargent’s paintings forming the background. Costume designer Jacob A. Climer beautifully evoked the era, especially with his 1910s fashion-plate designs for Stewart Gardner.
Broadway musicals get weeks and sometimes months of tryouts and previews in front of audiences before their official opening night. Operas have no such safeguards. They are judged by the critics and the public at the very first performance. American Apollo is clearly a major work that deserves future productions in other opera houses. With a few judicious cuts and some tweaks to the vocal writing, it could certainly attain that.
Wrapping up the four-opera weekend was Lindy Hume’s busy, manic production of Il barbiere di Siviglia for the matinee of July 14. A co-production from Opera Queensland, New Zealand Opera, and Seattle Opera, it proved a crowd pleaser, eliciting plenty of audience laughter with its nonstop gags and its polychromatic, children’s picture-book set design by Tracy Grant Lord. Rossini’s overlong opera buffa can often strain patience; what kept this Barbiere bubbly were Gary Thor Wedow’s ebullient conducting and the youthful, charismatic, and vocally adept cast led by Alexander Birch Elliott as Figaro, Duke Kim as Almaviva, Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosina, and Ashraf Sewailam as Bartolo.
