Review: Where Politics and Opera Meet - New York Times
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Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Lest there remain any doubt, Leon Botstein, as music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, made clear in notes for a concert at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, “Troubled Days of Peace,” that the program was aimed at politically minded listeners with the November presidential election in view. “That election will occur at a troubled and unstable moment,” Mr. Botstein wrote, “marked by discontent, an exceptional frustration with democratic politics, economic anxiety, mistrust and sharp divisions.”
But he was overtaken by events. He could not have been sure of who the candidates would be when he programmed Ernst Krenek’s 1926 one-act opera “Der Diktator,” with its title character fashioned after Mussolini. Nor could he have anticipated that the climactic third debate would fall on the same night as the concert, obviously siphoning off a good part of the potential audience.
In a preconcert lecture, Mr. Botstein backed off a bit from the live-wire issues of the presidential election, declining to draw explicit parallels to the American situation and discussing “the world we live in now” in terms of authoritarian personalities thriving in Europe and the idea of democracy as a messy, ineffective thing. The companion one-act opera, Richard Strauss’s “Friedenstag” (“Day of Peace”), though Hitler attended its premiere in 1938, had less overt political relevance, as a paean to the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War (and centuries of religious bloodshed) in 1648.
The 30-minute “Diktator,” with Krenek working to his own libretto, shows its antihero in private moments, swooning for Marie, the wife of an officer blinded in combat, who resolves to kill the dictator to avenge her husband’s plight. Instead, Charlotte, the dictator’s wife, tries to shoot him out of jealousy, but Marie, now smitten with the dictator, takes the bullet.
“Friedenstag,” to a libretto by Joseph Gregor, is an altogether more public affair, as the commandant of a besieged town resolves to fight to the death — his and everyone else’s, if need be — to avoid surrender. His wife, also named Marie, intervenes, peace breaks out unexpectedly, and the commandant reconciles with the enemy commander.
This was an ambitious evening of concert opera, the 80-minute “Friedenstag” in particular demanding a chorus (the Bard Festival Chorale), large orchestra and multiple vocal soloists. Mr. Botstein led good, representative accounts, and the many rough edges were only to be expected.
The star was the baritone Donnie Ray Albert, strong and resonant as both Krenek’s dictator and Strauss’s commandant. The other singer doing double duty was Mark Duffin, a tenor, who portrayed Krenek’s blinded officer with a bluffness that was perhaps appropriate, but who showed considerable strain in his high register as Strauss’s bürgermeister (mayor).
Kirsten Chambers, a soprano who filled in just days before as the “Friedenstag” Marie, performed admirably, though the core pitch was sometimes hard to find in her overall sonority. Karen Chia-ling Ho, another soprano, was effective as Marie in “Diktator.”
So did anything happen in the debate?
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