Opera News Review

IN REVIEW
NEW YORK CITY — I Tre Compagni, Encompass New Opera Theatre, 6/19/09

September 2009 , vol 74 , no.3

June 19 marked the world premiere of Encompass New Opera Theatre's I Tre Compagni, a two-act production with music and libretto by contemporary American composer Louis Gioia, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theatre of Manhattan's John Jay College.

Gioia, who studied in both the U.S. and Rome, wrote a previous opera — Un Racconto Fiorentino, also given its premiere (in 2000) by Encompass — after a story by Geoffrey Chaucer's contemporary Boccaccio. The present work, based loosely on the Pardoner's monologue in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, follows a trio of close friends celebrating Carnival and arguing over stolen treasure. Gioia sets the opera in early-sixteenth-century Spain, more than a century after Chaucer wrote the Tales. The libretto, no doubt to the mild chagrin of Chaucer fanatics, is in not Middle English but in Italian, and the shamelessly corrupt Pardoner who narrates Chaucer's parable is cut from the drama entirely.

But the composer has added some engaging dimensions to the formerly all-male exemplum: he rewrote one of the companions as a woman (Maddalena), another as her jealous, alcoholic lover (Tonio), the third as their brooding friend (Moro), recently forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Envy, suspicion and vice cause these tenuous relationships to falter, and Gioia, by dramatizing the sins that Chaucer treats in homiletic passages, inflects the parable with something like modern psychology.

Under artistic director Nancy Rhodes, music director Mara Waldman and conductor/orchestrator Glen Cortese, I Tre Compagni reflected the excitement of a cast, production team and orchestra performing a new work they truly enjoyed and believed in. (It was only slated for one more performance, on Saturday evening.) Stage manager Kathleen Stakenas and choreographer/dancing matador Justin Sherwood helped engineer some lovely crowd scenes that must have posed logistical difficulties but in the end furnished some of the production's most lyrical, aesthetically integrated moments. The set design (Damon Pelletier), sculpture (Ed Herman) and lighting (Izzy Einsidler) were generally simple but bold, beautifully setting off the various but unobtrusive color scheme of A. Christina Giannini's festive costumes. Towering over stage left, an unaccountably prominent statue of the goddess Fortuna, called "[a] metaphor for compassion and justice" in the program notes, grew on me as an artifact of the allegorical overload characteristic of medieval poetry.

The neo-Romantic, Italianate melodies and cadences of Gioia's score felt predictable at times, but solid direction and a few excellent performances invigorated the first night. Seasoned baritone Shannon A. De Vine played Moro with extreme gravity of bearing but remained likable even during more sinister moments. Soprano Ulla Westlund confidently carried the role of Maddalena, and mezzo Laura Stevens gave a poignant, sincere performance as a mother mourning her child's death. Raemond Martin, with his dark baritone and hauntingly sculpted, gaunt face, was brilliantly double-cast in roles of authority and prostration: he played both the intimidating, stentorian, yet elegant priest in clerical garb, as well as the innocent reveler, costumed as Death, whom Moro and Tonio murder.

If Martin, in his two roles, embodied an allegorical dualism, it could be said that tenor Noah Stewart, as Tonio, embraced eerily contrasting psychological extremes. The libretto introduces Tonio as a handsome, avuncular storyteller but soon after exposes his avarice and violent passions. With stunning vocal control, Stewart tackled the murderer's public exuberance and private pathologies in a performance that was energizing to watch. Of everyone in the talented cast, he showed the most charisma and dramatic range, negotiating Tonio's abruptly rendered dramatic transition — a one-eighty from affability to menace — with astonishing naturalism. Your browser may not support display of this image.

ABIGAIL ROSEBROCK