January 26, 2006 Issue                                               

©2005 The Chestnut Hill Local

Ben would have been proud of Hill concert Sunday
By MICHAEL CARUSO

Chestnut Hill’s beautiful Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the Fields was the venue for the most recent installment of Philomel’s celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin last Sunday afternoon. And Germantown’s Richard Raub added to his already impressive resume by conducting a thrilling concert performance of Puccini’s Le villi for the Academy of Vocal Arts Opera Theater.

YOUNG MT. AIRY COMPOSER: Philadelphia Sinfonia, a Delaware Valley youth orchestra, will debut a world premiere composition by Eliza Brown, a Mt. Airy native and 2003 graduate of Germantown Friends School, on Sunday, Jan. 29, at the First Presbyterian Church in Germantown. Philadelphia Sinfonia is conducted by Gary White, Head of Instrumental Music at Germantown Friends School. (Brown and White are pictured here.) The 3 p.m. concert will include works by Saint-Saens, Grieg, Beethoven, as well as Brown’s Teneo, a piece she created especially for Sinfonia. The church is located at 35 W. Chelten Ave. The concert is free and the public is invited. For more information, call 865-616-0633. (Photo courtesy of Philadelphia Sinfonia)

Philomel, the Chestnut Hill-basedbaroque instruments ensemble, has been combining its own 30th birthday celebration with the tercentenary of Ben Franklin by making musical connections between our most local founding father and the baroque and early classical music typical of his epoch. The group’s 2005-06 season opened with “Franklin’s London.” This set of three concerts, also performed in Old City Philadelphia’s Christ Episcopal Church and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Doylestown earlier in the weekend, was dubbed “Franklin’s Philadelphia.”

It highlighted the kinds of music heard in Penn’s “faire countrie towne” during the middle decades of the 18th century. Interestingly, Franklin was often “out of town” representing first the colonies and then the new Republic in London and Paris. Philomel plans to take a break from “Franklin-mania” with a program entitled “Venetian Magic” to be performed in the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill on Sunday, March 19, at 4 p.m. It’s scheduled to get back on track with “Franklin’s Paris” on Friday, May 5, at 8 p.m., once again in St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.

Although Sunday afternoon’s concert was as much a musical history lesson as it was a concert, the program nonetheless featured several purely musical high points connected to the playing of guest artists.

The three members of Pittsburgh’s Chatham Baroque — violinist Julie Andrijeski, violist de gamba Patricia Halverson and Scott Pauley on theorbo and baroque guitar — were heard to splendid advantage in Arcangelo Corelli’s Sonata in E minor, Opus 5, no. 8. Aside from the score being the most substantial piece of music on the program, it also received a compelling interpretation.

The afternoon’s other guest was Carolinn Skyler, who played one of Franklin’s most fascinating inventions: the glass armonica. Ever the scientific adventurer intent on making life better by making it easier, Franklin found a way to capture the ethereal sounds of glasses filled with water to varying degrees and then rubbed across their top by a moistened finger. His armonica was not only easier to play but it could also be easily transported, which in Franklin’s peripatetic case, was extremely important.

Skyler played two Scottish tunes by one of Franklin’s favorite composers and arrangers, James Oswald, as well as Mozart’s Adagio in C major, K. 365, composed for a cousin who was also blind like Skyler. She gave expert and moving renditions of all three pieces.

Philomel’s Elissa Berardi, Bruce Bekker, Nancy Wilson and Mark Zaki joined Catham Baroque for the concert’s biggest number — Samuel Arnold’s Overture to the Castle of Andalucia — for a rousing finale of the program’s first half.

AVA DOUBLE BILL

The Academy of Vocal Arts Opera Theater continued its tradition of presenting rarely heard works in concert version. By stripping the production of its sets ands costumes, AVA’s executive director Kevin McDowell of East Falls has managed to give local opera lovers the opportunity to focus on the music of unusual repertoire. This year, the spotlight fell on two one-act operas: Jules Massenet’s La Navarraise and Giacomo Puccini’s Le villi.

Although the former was a product of the composer’s mature period while the latter was that composer’s first effort in opera, it was Le villi that scored the triumph Saturday night with an audience that virtually filled the Haverford School’s Centennial Hall and that even gave one of its cast members a standing ovation.

Le villi is ripe for concert performance because most of its action takes place offstage. A narrator explains a good portion of the story, leaving the singers to deal with the results of that action. Of course, it could be effectively staged with lots of imagination and even more money, and it could make a fine pairing with either Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci or Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, but I suspect that one loses only a little from not seeing it and just hearing it as long as the performers are top notch.

Such was the case Saturday night. Although Germantown’s Richard Raub got off to a too-loud start with the AVA Opera Theater Orchestra — which was placed onstage rather than in a pit below the stage — he quickly reined in his emotions and musicians to accommodate the beautifully modulated singing of his cast.

Most impressive was Northeast Philadelphia tenor Stephen Costello as Roberto, the young man who inherits a fortune only to lose it, his love and eventually his life. Costello possesses a ringing timbre to a voice he employs to deliver a visceral impact on his audience.

Soprano Ailyn Perez was lovely as Anna, Roberto’s jilted betrothed. Her voice is ample yet supple, sumptuous yet agile. She reminds one of the young Mirella Freni, and there’s no better compliment than that.

I was less impressed with La Navarraise. Its plot of love and misfortune during a civil war in Spain struck me as potentially riveting, but Massenet’s librettists, Jules Claretie and Henri Cain, produced not one convincing character to hold one’s interest let alone excite one’s feelings. Basses Matthew Arnold and Keith Miller sang effectively in the smaller roles of Garrido and Bustamente, respectively, but the rest of the cast failed to invest their parts with sufficient commitment and intelligence to raise this opus above the level of sentimental melodrama.