MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010 MUSICREVIEW


Virginia Opera’s ‘Cosi Fan Tutte’: Frivolity, after months of drama


BY ANNEMIDGETTE “They’re all like that.” That’s


an approximate translation of the title of Mozart’s opera “Cosi Fan Tutte,” which demonstrates that all women are fickle and will betray their lovers, and which the Virginia Opera brought to George Mason Uni- versity on Friday night. But at the Virginia Opera, the


title might be taken as descrip- tive of the vagaries of opera companies. The company found itself in veritably operatic cir- cumstances during the past cou- ple of monthswhenthe question ofhowto take leave of its 36-year artistic director, Peter Mark, erupted in publicandwasfinally answered when the company terminated Mark’s contract last month. The move occasioned much hue and cry from Mark’s supporters, but a quiet sense from many corners of the indus- try that the action was, if any- thing, overdue. The Virginia Opera is doing


everything it can to signal that business is continuing as usual. It has appointed an interim ar- tistic adviser: Robin Thompson, the former director of artistic administration at the New York City Opera who lost his own job in the company’s bungled lead- ership transition in 2008 (“They’re all like that,” indeed). And the opera proceeded as planned with “Cosi Fan Tutte,” which opened inNorfolkonNov. 13,cametoRichmondonNov. 26 and concluded its run in Fairfax this past weekend. “Cosi” was conducted, as scheduled, by the opera’s associ- ate artistic director, Joseph Walsh, a Mark protege whom Mark strongly wanted as his successor. Walsh’s current con- tract expires at the end of this season; he will conduct “Ma- dame Butterfly” in March and April, and his loose, emphatic gestures should fit that opera quite a bit better than they fit Mozart on Friday night. “Cosi” itself is not the blood- and-guts melodrama of operatic stereotype; you could even call it an acquired taste. It’s got a lot of exquisite music wrapped around a pretty silly plot: Two men,goaded by a third, test their girlfriends’ fidelity by pretend- ing to go off to war and then reappearing in disguise as two exotic foreigners (“I don’t know if they’re Slavs or Turks!” ex- claims the maid, Despina) who improbably manage to snare the women’s affections. Dealing with this farcical plot


is a challenge for a stage director — it’s hard to make credible characters out of these frivolous figures. Lillian Groag offered some nice touches, making abundant use of the six-member


KLMNO


EZ RE


C3 BOOKWORLD


The seamier side of small-town ‘Nights’


BY PATRICK ANDERSON M


ilton T. Burton’s third novel, “Nights of the Red Moon,” is set in fictional


Caddo County, in East Texas, a corner of the universe not entire- ly unknown to me. In my college years I used to drive from my home town, Fort Worth, through the dusty towns and piney woods of East Texas on my way to New Orleans, Nashville and points be- yond. Inthose days, even byTexas standards, that 150-or-so-mile stretch from Dallas east to the Louisiana line was considered an un- enlightened region. As you entered some towns, you were met by “Impeach EarlWarren” billboards and other signs that warned cer- tain citizens not to let the sun set on them there. Sundown Towns, they were called. That, it seemed to me then, was all I needed to know about East Texas: It was an excellent place to get the hell out of.


Now, however, I am


indebted to Burton’s novel for showing me that there ismoreto be said about the area. Real people live real lives there. It’s still dangerous territory, but Burton’s hero, Cad- do County Sheriff Bo Handel, is doing his best to bring law and order, if not outright enlighten- ment, to East Texas — the latter, one fears, may await the Second Coming. Bois62andhasbeensheriff for


ANNE M. PETERSON


OPERATIC FARCE: TimothyKuhn as Guglielmo and Katharine Tier as Dorabella inMozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte,” which centers on the ploy of two men to test their girlfriends’ fidelity.


chorus as silent extras — fellow guests at an inn, a team of servants — and placing the su- pertitles in an ornate box above the proscenium as if setting the action in a period frame, like the old masterpiece it is. She also worked to delve into the drama on its own terms; this meant, though, that the characters’ silli- nesswasprettymuchunalleviat- ed, but she did cast into doubt the happiness of what is some- times portrayed as a pat ending, when the suitors return in their original guises and everyone is faced with the consequences of what they’ve done.


Vocally, the men had the edge


on Friday: The two deceitful boyfriends were the strongest singers of the evening. David Portillo, who also sang Ferrando in the 2009 production at Wolf Trap, has a solid light tenor and willingly played the straight- man buffoon to Timothy Kuhn’s macho Guglielmo, who backed up his sometimes shirtless an- tics with a rich baritone voice. Their girlfriends were less as- sured: Jan Cornelius had some nice moments as Fiordiligi but lacked the low notes for the role; and Katharine Tier, as Dorabel- la, had a stridency to her mezzo-


soprano. Camille Zamora was assured as Despina, though per- haps overplayed the comic shtick; as Don Alfonso, the cyni- cal instigator of the plot, Todd Robinson sang in a rather undis- tinguished mumble. “They’re all like that” may


apply more to opera companies than to women: lots of drama backstage, an earnest mixed bag on it. As Virginia Opera deals with the new gusts of wind cur- rently wafting its way, its chal- lenge will be to distinguish itself from the “tutte.” midgettea@washpost.com


30 years, long enough to see the end of the Sundown Towns and the acceptance of blacks and womenas deputies.He’s a decent, honest lawman, but no saint. When he learns that one of the county commissioners, a married man, has been carrying on with “that cute littleMexican waitress at Poncho’s Cantina in Nacogdo- ches,” he persuades (blackmails, some would say) the man to sup- port the funding he needs to give his deputies a raise. A widower, Bo is breaking the


rules to carry on a secret romance with a younger woman on his staff.He tolerates low-level dope- dealing and bootlegging so long as the culprits keephiminformed about the county’s more serious criminals. A carnival of crime unfolds in


the weeks chronicled here. Ex- plaining both the crime wave and the novel’s title, Bo tells us that “back in frontier times when a summer drought lingered on to- ward the fall equinox, the Chero- kees called it the Season of the Blood Moon, and feared it as a time of madness and death.” The red-moon carnage begins


on the book’s first page, when the wife of the local Methodist preacher is murdered. The sheriff


NIGHTS OF THE RED MOON By Milton T. Burton. Minotaur. 294 pp. $24.99


learns that she was both addicted to prescription drugs and having an affair with the owner of a local liquor store. Further investiga- tion shows that the liquor-store owner is involved in a major drug deal with a supplier in Houston. Several pounds of cocaine are missing. A hit man from New Orleans comes in search of it, and Bo uses his trusty slapjack to put him down for the count. More murders occur as the intrepid sheriff scrambles to restore peace to Caddo County. It’s a lively and well-crafted plot, but “Nights of the RedMoon” is most no- table for its portrait of small-town Texas. We meet giant twins, 40- year-old pulpwood cut- ters, whose annual drinking binge, which they call their “frolic,” always leads to the near-destruction of a local dance hall. One of the sheriff ’s infor- mants is a well-off, middle-age fellow named Danny, a “gen- tle nihilist” who dis- covered marijuana in college and has been blissfully stoned ever since. The sheriff is amused by an aristo-


cratic dominatrix who has a per- verse yen for lawmen — and also by a proper Southern Baptist lady who announces that she’s learn- ing to dance, a pleasure long denied members of her faith. One night Bo visits a back-


woods honky-tonk that features a sputtering old neon sign that casts a “ghostly green glow” on the dark, silent woods all around. Did Burton intend for that image to summon up the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock? Perhaps. Inside, Bo tells us, “I loved to


watch the regulars. They were a ghostly, interchangeable crew of tired, listless women with hay- stack hairdos and defeated faces, and weathered, khaki-clad men of indefinite age and vague occu- pation who drank their beer straight from the bottle and smoked their unfiltered Camels with the calm intensity of those who know they are doomed and can’t quite summon the energy to care.” That’s an East Texas honky-


tonk, but it’s also a million other dead-end bars and saloons and gin joints all over the world. Burton has been a cattleman, a


political consultant and a college history teacher in Texas. His “Nights of the Red Moon” isn’t a great novel, but it’s a good one: a solid, entirely believable portrait of a particular lawman at work in a specific time and place. It made me glad to return to East Texas— at least in fiction. bookworld@washpost.com


Anderson reviews thriller and mysteries regularly for The Post.


MUSICREVIEW


Sparks but no flame: Dejan Lazic’s D.C. debut


BY ANNEMIDGETTE Grandiloquence is an occupa-


tional hazard for a solo musician. There you are, alone onstage, playing works that are acknowl- edged to be monumentally great with breathtaking ability. It can be hard to avoid assuming the trappings of greatness. Exhibit A is Dejan Lazic, who


made his Washington debut Sat- urday afternoon as part of the Washington Performing Arts So- ciety’s Hayes Piano Series at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace The- ater. Lazic, 33, is a pianist, com- poser and sometime clarinetist.A few years ago he made a strong mark as a performing partner of cellist Pieter Wispelwey.More re- cently, his claim to fame was turning Brahms’s violin concerto into something dubbed “Piano ConcertoNo. 3,” which he record- ed with the Atlanta Symphony earlier this year. The feat ranks somewhere on the “because it’s there” spectrum of human achievement: attention-getting, large-scale and a little empty. His recital ofChopin and Schu-


bert on Saturday was unfortu- nately on the same spectrum. The selection of those two composers is usually a way to demonstrate a pianist’s sensitivity as well as his virtuosity. This performance, though, kept one eye fixed on monumentality. Some of the piec- es, such asChopin’s ScherzoNo. 2, sounded less like light solo piano


works thananattempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoonlike in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large. It’s not thatLazic isn’t sensitive


— or profoundly gifted. The very first notes of Chopin’s Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante at the start of the pro- gram signaled that he can do anything he wants at the key- board, detailing chords with a jeweler’s precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. Again and again, throughout the afternoon, he showed what a range of colors he could get out of the instrument, switching from hard-edged per- cussiveness to creamy legato, crackling chords to a single thread of sound. The sheer tech- nical ability was, at first, a delight. Soon, though, all of the finesse


started to seem like an end in itself. Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand con- ducting the righthand;orawhole ballet of fingers hovering over keys and picking out their targets before an opening note was even struck at the start of Chopin’s Ballade No. 3. There were fine moments, but they stubbornly refused to add up to anything more than a self-conscious dis- play of Fine Moments. The final


WPAS


GIFTED: Dejan Lazic played in theHayes Piano Series.


movement of Chopin’s Second Pi- ano Sonata was in a way the most successful part of the program: sheer virtuosity, and perfectly un- hinged. Schubert’s B-flat Sonata, D.


960, was a chance to shift into another gear and show a more reflective side, but it was a chance Lazic didn’t quite take. The notes, again, were exquisitely placed, and there were things to like, but the human side fell short. All of the precision didn’t help bring across the lyricism of the first movement’s theme, or the threat of the bass growl that keeps warn- ing off ease from the bottom of the keyboard. The second move- ment, instead of being a search- ing, tugging quest, was reduced to merely very pretty music. The pianist was received with reasonably warm applause, but it didn’t last longenoughto drawan encore — which ought to get his attention. He’s a pianist of prodi- gious gifts, and he’s too good not to do better, to move beyond the music’s challenges and into the realm of its soul. midgettea@washpost.com


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