Abductions with Musical Accompaniment: the Utah Opera's Die Entführung aus dem Serail

A night at the opera!  My first such since before Tanzania!  How delightful!  The plans were the best laid, and as such, ganged aft agley, as my lovely sister was stricken sickly and I drove myself the whole way accompanied only by music and guilt.  Nevertheless, the Utah opera was presenting Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and while I fully expected it to be rather sexist and rather racist, because Mozart, I also expected the music to be breathtakingly lovely, because Mozart.

Music-wise, I was not disappointed.  The orchestra was fantastic.  I made friends with a knowledgeable lady sitting beside me who said that the Utah orchestra and opera are now one entity, so we were hearing the Utah Symphony Orchestra.  They played the heart and soul, not to mention the blood and the guts, out of that music.  A thousand bravissimis to the orchestra.  Seriously.  I was swept away from the first notes of one of Mozart's most kick-butt overtures.

I was also swept away by the entrance of the tenor, because he was wearing a really sparkly purple waistcoat and pretty gold shoes.  Between his costume, his sweet voice, and the orchestra, he made Mozart tenor arias not boring!  This is an accomplishment.  Then he stopped singing and I lost some of my enchantment. Entführung is, of course, a singspiel, with lots and lots of spoken dialogue which, presumably for reasons, was rendered into English while the sung pieces remained in German, which made the transition between singing and speaking very jarring indeed.  To make matters worse, throughout the presentation, several of the cast were having projection issues, but since I was close enough to see their mouths moving and just couldn't hear them, the general impression was that they were singing in dubbed-in German.

To continue, Pedrillo, in a nice green, was adequate, but not fabulous.  It seemed as if he wasn't quite fully committed to what he was doing on stage.  He did achieve full commitment and a beautiful moment in act three with his comic serenade, but until then he was rather shown to a disadvantage at having to share with stage with, first, Osmin, and later Blonde.  Osmin was wonderful.  Gustav Andreassen is not only a great bass (with a few projection issues at the beginning, but most of them were having those.  The orchestra was fully committed to their dynamics and the singers couldn't always keep up), he is the sort to dance about doing headslides while gleefully singing about executing people.  He was also in pretty red (stereotypical, but oh well) Turkish-ish robes and pretty red shoes.

The costumes were all rather wonderful, actually, with the notably notable exception of Konstanze's.  It's cake-topper pink poof, with presumably several layers of Crinoline of Doom beneath, and topped with a wig that looked like a toy poodle might have died on her head.

Konstanze, with the head of the Pasha taking up space in the foreground.
The Pasha is struggling to have real facial expressions. 

At least she made up for it by being unable to project in the lower registers and becoming unpleasantly strident in the upper registers.  A lady sitting next to me who is more familiar with the Utah Opera assures me that Celena Shafer is normally quite good and pretty-voiced, and was just having an off night.  Nevertheless, between her vocal failings and her one acting trick of jerkily bending forward with every dramatic phrase (for emotion?) I was not impressed.  It would have been really funny if Konstanze's music in any way supported anything but tragedy and tragic resolve, but it doesn't, and the wonderful wonderful orchestra continued to be fully committed to performing the heart and soul out of the music.  Her scenes with the Pasha just made all her problems worse.  The artistic director, who deserves all credit for having the surname of McBeth, saw fit to cast himself in the strictly spoken role of Pasha Selim, where he demonstrated that for all his directorial prowess, he has almost no personality whatsoever on a stage and attempts to make up for it with a sparkling lavender and gold robe.  Far be it from me to ever discourage a man from standing about in a sparkling lavender and gold robe, but between his standing and and Konstanze's oddly jerky emoting, the tableaux created between them was approximately as compelling as a school of jellyfish with tutus.  Appropriately enough, his entrance was hailed by a chorus whose members all had remarkably bad posture.  Back to complaining about Celena Shafer's Konstanze:  she really bugged me during "Martern Aller Arten," which is a very powerful piece of music that I happen to love, that she performed so very poorly.  She got through it, though noticeably running out of breath at points.  I mean, sure, it's hard, but that's what coloraturas are paid for.  During the final phrases, she was on her knees clutching at the legs of the Pasha.  No.  Just no.  The final phrases are defiant, not supplicatory.  Listen to the music!   This piece is when Konstanze stops being whiny and possibly in love with the Pasha (which is hard to understand with this Pasha) and declares she will die rather than love him.  Any supplicating has to take place in the middle of the aria  and then only when she promises that the Pasha will be rewarded by heaven for having mercy.  When she is declaring that she will suffer torture and die, she should not be draped beseechingly on the Pasha or lying on the floor.  I am officially over her.  Actually, that's a lie.  Later on I ended up being fascinated, because Belmonte gives Konstanze the portrait of her that he has been carrying around with him.  I think to demonstrate how devoted he has been, but she spends the rest of the scene holding onto the portrait, alternately staring at it beatifically and clutching it to her breast.  She is doing this to a portrait of herself.  The unbridled narcissism was inspiring.

Amy Owen, singing Blonde, was significantly more fabulous.  She was great. Her opening aria sounded like she was working a little too hard, but ever after that she had a light and lovely tone.  Where her colleague soprano, was boring if not annoying, she easily held my attention and won my love.  Her Blonde is the type to play on swings, fondle the biceps of the supernumeraries, take off her shoes and dance barefoot, and lecture Osmin while standing on a chair.   Quick, the Shakespeare signal! Someone needs to compare her to a summer's day!  Also, I wish I could make some bilingual pun with "Aupres de ma Blonde" here, but I don't have the language skills.   Anyway, to repeat, she was great.  Especially when Pedrillo and Belmonte demand assurance of faithfulness from women who have been kidnapped by people to whom consent isn't really a thing, Blonde responds by slapping Pedrillo.  That is exactly the response that deserved.  Konstanze just gets mopey.

A slap and indignation is also not how I was expecting a Mozart opera to handle that.  Given the unapologetic misogyny of say, Cosi fan Tutti with regards to faithfulness, I was pleasantly surprised.  While I'm on the subject, Entfuhrung isn't quite as overtly racist as I was expecting either.  I mean, sure, the whole set up is "these evil dark/Islamic people have taken 'our' women" but by and large the Muslims get a fairly fair shake.  As is historically accurate (well, maybe not with the Ottoman Turks, my memory is shaky here, I think I'm actually thinking more the Arab leaders in the Crusades, e.g. Saladin, but probably to Mozart & co, Arabs/Turks/Moors/Persians are a sort of homogeneous conglomerate of Otherness), a Muslim leader demonstrates far better ethics than his European Christian counterparts, and that rather makes up for the icky "let's get the Muslim drunk despite his religion, ha ha ha!" scene.  In fact, Osmin rather transcends all attempts in the libretto to make him look foolish here, though that is mostly because Andreassen is such a phenomenally better actor than his colleagues on stage who are attempting to make him look theatrically foolish.  There is a giant and prominent crescent and star on the gates to the Pasha's garden, which is rather weird, since it's analogous to Christians just building steeples on the roofs of their homes, but meh, it's Utah.

It was a good night at the opera.  It wasn't the level of opera of, say, the Houston Grand Opera, but it was fun and entertaining despite some flaws.  Honestly, it would be worth it just to hear that music performed with such understanding and commitment by that orchestra.  Such music will cover a multitude of sins.