Sun Oct 20, 2024
at 12:27 pm
By Lawrence Budmen

Danielle de Niese offers a star turn

Witness a poignant exploration of resilience at The Seven Deadly Sins. Part of the New World Symphony’s 2024-2025 season, this staged production takes place on October 19 and 20 at the New World Center. Conductor Stéphane Denève leads the NWS Fellows in a powerful program featuring two works by composers ostracized by the Nazi regime. Viktor Ullmann’s “The Kaiser of Atlantis” and Kurt Weill’s satirical masterpiece “The Seven Deadly Sins” are presented together for a thought-provoking exploration of the human spirit in dark times. Groundbreaking director Yuval Sharon creates a captivating experience through dance, opera and cutting-edge technology. Soprano Danielle de Niese makes her NWS debut alongside a special guest choreographer and dancers.

The New World Symphony’s “Resonance of Remembrance” series, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the Holocaust, reached high gear Saturday night with a stunning operatic double bill. Imaginative direction and design transformed the stage of the New World Center into a theater space for performances of Viktor Ullmann’s The Kaiser of Atlantis and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins.

Ullmann and librettist Peter Kien created The Emperor of Atlantis in 1943 while interned at Terezin, the concentration camp that the Nazis created for Jewish artists to fool the Red Cross and international community about their murderous agenda. In fact, the camp was a mere stop on the way to the prisoners’ extermination. The SS and powers that be at Terezin stopped the production of the opera during rehearsals and deported the work’s creators and entire cast to Auschwitz where Ullmann was murdered and Kien died of disease. Friends of the opera’s authors, who survived, saved the score. The one-act opera was staged in the 1970’s and has received many productions since then around the operatic globe.

The opera is a parable about an emperor who commands his subjects to fight a holy war in which there will be no survivors. Death, portrayed as a disillusioned former soldier, is enraged that the dictator usurped his authority and breaks his sword, announcing that nobody can die. Chaos ensues as soldiers supposedly killed in battle continue to live and executions fail. Facing attacks from dissident factions, the Emperor asks death to return. Death agrees if the emperor will be the first to die which he ultimately agrees to. While the Nazis believed the tale was a satire of Hitler, it is more a symbolic portrait of any megalomaniacal dictator and his disdain for humanity and his own subjects.

The work is a remarkable testament to the triumph of the artistic spirit under the most dire and inhumane situation imaginable. In four scenes lasting 57 minutes, Ullmann and Kien crafted a tense, riveting music drama that is ultimately dramatically devastating and moving. Ullmann studied with Schoenberg and suggestions of that seminal composer, as well as Hindemith and Weil, run through the piece’s musical textures. Still, this is the work of a composer with a distinctive voice.

Directors Yuval Sharon and Alexander Gedeon have staged the opera as a puppet show that inmates at a futuristic internment camp are forced to present which is broadcast live to an imaginary audience. The singers often manipulate the puppets which are projected on the hall’s screens. Images of the camp’s dormitories and the audience also appear, adding a feeling of surveillance and claustrophobia.

In a uniformly excellent cast, Kevin Burdette stood out as the menacing specter of Death. His firm bass and depth of tone made his final monologue the production’s vocal highlight.

The commedia dell’ arte character of Harlequin becomes a foil for Death’s pessimism and tenor Freddie Ballantine excelled in the role’s high tessitura and skittery leaps. His sound turned lyrical and expressive in the comedian’s recollection of his idyllic childhood. As Emperor Überall, Emmett O’Hanlon’s movements were almost mechanistic but the warmth of his baritonal timbre and ability to spin lyrical flights was finally evident in the Emperor’s farewell aria.

In the role of the Drummer, Renée Rapier’s dark mezzo brought a stoic demeanor and solemnity to the emperor’s proclamations. As soldiers on opposite sides who ultimately become lovers in the absence of dying, soprano Magdalena Kuźma and tenor Chauncey Packer registered supple ardor in their duet. Rolfe Dauz was the appropriately voluminous Loudspeaker. A final quartet welcoming Death’s return resounded like a Bach chorale.

Jason H. Thompson’s projections were inventive, powerful and entertaining. Wilberth Gonzalez’s prison costumes and Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting vividly pictured the venue’s oppressive atmosphere. Sibyl Wickersheimer and Yuri Okashana-Benson’s set allowed the action to move fluidly.

Stéphane Denève drew out every nuance and instrumental coloration in Ullmann’s orchestral writing, alternately lush and tart. The first-rate ensemble playing offered a firm undercurrent to the score’s stylistic variations.

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Kurt Weill and his long time collaborator Berthold Brecht reunited in Paris to write The Seven Deadly Sins for George Balanchine’s short-lived company Ballets 1933. The 39-minute opus tells the story of Anna and her sister, perhaps one and the same, who venture from their home in Louisiana to seven American cities in order to earn money to send back to their family to build a new small house. Along the way, they become involved in vaudeville, the Hollywood casting couch and prostitution. Brecht pictures the women’s family as greedy capitalists whose lust for money break Anna’s spirit. The spirit of Weimar cabaret hovers over the entire work and Weill’s melodic genius is amply on display.

Most productions utilize two artists as the sisters but director Bill Barclay had soprano Danielle de Niese play both parts, suggesting the sister’s conflicted views about their dilemma were in fact two sides of the same personality.

De Niese offered a star turn, combining a richly hued soubrette soprano with the idiomatic stylishness of protagonists of the era like Lotte Lenya (Weill’s wife) or Gisela May, a frequent Brecht heroine. She brought slinky languor to a ditty about choosing a lover for money in the Boston sequence and voiced a final march like a tirade against sin and wasted youth in throaty tones. In an effective final tableau, Barclay has De Niese point a gun at the door of the new house her escapades financed. Throughout the entire opera, she was never less than stunning and a vivid stage presence.

Blake Denson, Ricardo Garcia, Lucia Lucas and Lugan Wagner were pompous and vocally strong as the family, their mock religious chorales both witty and stirring, often sung from the audience and balconies.

Denève had a field day with Weil’s pastiche score, conjuring up the jazz of the roaring twenties and romanticism of Weill’s future Broadway ventures in equal measure. The orchestra’s flexibility and idiomatic precision took a starring role that the conductor and cast acknowledged.

Gonzalez’s glamorous costumes for De Niese were eye filling and Clyde Scott and Michael Matamoros’ projections effectively displayed the cities on Anna’s journey at their best and worst, aided by the evocative lighting designs of Courtney Amaro.

In both operas, the singers were subtly amplified in an unobtrusive manner; the offstage voice of the Loudspeaker in the Ullmann was given enhanced prominence.

It is unfortunate that this outstanding presentation is not being given an extended run of performances but there is one remaining opportunity to see South Florida’s operatic event of the year.

The New World Symphony repeats The Kaiser of Atlantis and The Seven Deadly Sins 2 p.m. Sunday at New World Center in Miami Beach. The performance is available via stream at nws.edu/inside.