The Castleton Festival
![]() |
Lorin Maazel (photo by Chris Lee) |
Tiresome as that complaint may be, it aims merely to stage
the warm welcome for Lorin and Dietlinde Turban Maazel’s Castleton Festival—now
concluding its third year in youth. An
expansion of their longer-lasting Châteauville Foundation (and literally, of
their farmhouse), the Festival was founded around the time when Maestro Maazel
concluded his appointment as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Centered in the Piedmont region of rural
Virginia, the Festival expanded this year for the first time to an outer suburb
of Washington, at the new Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas. An architectural triumph (while less
successful on the inside), the Hylton Center is not just easier accessible to
its nearest major market, but also…has good HVAC (compared to the Festival Tent
on the farm), and credible acoustics.
Moreover, the Maazels are expanding the reach of their Festival in its
critical infancy.
For three consecutive Thursdays there, the Castleton Festival has
delivered, first, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,
then Puccini’s Il Trittico (minus
one), and concludes tomorrow with a variety show sort of thing that rounds up
American music to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Bull Run.
Less interested in the bookending Americana, I was
thoroughly rewarded with the Puccini one-acts.
Il Trittico is a marvel
in Puccini’s opus. Giacomo’s aficionados
readily swoon at the mere mention of his operatic triptych, which moves from a
love triangle to a miracle play to a riotous farce. Sadly, it is rarely performed in whole (as
intended), owing to a contemporary estimation of audiences’ attention
spans. First-to-go, usually, is Suor Angelica, though the Festival gave
it (along with the others) their full due at the farm last year. For its Manassas appearance, Il Trittico delivered Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi with mostly the same casts from 2010.
Thinking of Il Tabarro
in particular that started the July 14 program, you have in this one-act opera
arguably the pinnacle of Puccini’s mastery.
Compared to Puccini’s larger, evening-length works wherein the composer needed
to contend with complex and epic literary narratives, each from Il Trittico is uncompromising musical
perfection. Il Tabarro, for all its melodrama, has some of the most wrenching
passages of "pure" music that Puccini ever wrote.
Freed from set-piece villainry (that we can call, for need of a name, Franco
Zeffirelli) and ambitions of scale, these melodic lines carry a primacy unlike,
say, Tosca that hems and haws around
its outsize characters and narratives.
Remembering especially the searing duet between Giorgetta and Michele,
of a husband wondering when he lost the affection of his wife, Puccini's delicate
mastery between emotional heft and restraint is absolute. And Jessica Klein delivered these moments
with expert nuance, while the particular surprise came in Andrew Stuckey’s
performance that poured open affection after a preceding dammed-up countenance. Il
Tabarro certainly devolves into a rather old-world plot of murderous
jealousy, and much screaming at the end, but at its center you can see and hear a certain timelessness, compact
and true, about the agonies of lost dreams and points of decision in a marriage.
After all that, Gianni
Schicchi is a 180-degree turn into drop-dead comedy, literally. Based upon a situational comedy of squabbling
goofs trying to defraud a freshly decedent estate, Gianni Schicchi is a total hoot.
It ranks among Falstaff, even much
from Mozart, as a rare kind of laugh-until-it-hurts comedic spectacle. Interestingly, its central show-stopper “O
mio babbino caro,” so persistently excerpted in recitals for all its lush
prettiness, is among the most reliably abused musical passages ever. Out of context especially, but sometimes even
inside the opera, Lauretta usually swoons with virgin ambition and teary whimpering,
when the moment actually calls for farce.
“O mio babbino caro” is supposed to be sung flirty, manipulatively, and
cow-towing to the back row of the auditorium.
For the Castleton Festival, Joyce El-Khoury really got it right, and for
me, perhaps better than I’ve ever seen. (Staged using modern dress for these Italian caricatures, I even dare say that the
production designer was channeling Snooki.)
As Washingtonians, we had the rare opportunity to attend Gianni Schicchi at the Washington
National Opera in 2007—not quite this good.
All the same, you can’t blame anyone for interpretive thriving
within the sensuality of Puccini’s score. Almost
lackadaisically, the composer burns up some of the most gorgeous themes from
his whole lifetime for the sake of slapstick.
Rinuccio’s paeans to Florence can easily arouse salutes to betray our
faraway Yankee land, but Puccini is playing for laughs. That effortlessness, or even cockiness, is punk
rock. At risk of committing hyperbole in saying so, Gianni Schicchi might be one of the
greatest operas of all time, thereby timeless.
And this goes to the virtue of short-form opera
altogether. As I’ve crowed previously,
short operas (which are usually chamber operas) deserve much more serious
attention, difficult as they may be for programming into conventional
subscription seasons. Speaking
personally, from the first time I heard the first notes of perpetual motion sprung
from its waltzing overture, Leoš Janáček’s Osud
(“Destiny”) has held the mantle for me above the whole operatic repertoire,
no-matter-whose and however long. Osud runs about an
hour. No one performs it. Musicologists pass it by for extolling Jenůfa, and the Czech’s other evening-length works; but at least for me, Osud
is unsurpassed.
As the third Castleton Festival concludes tomorrow at the
Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas, with a variety concert featuring
Denyce Graves, and lastly this weekend back on the farm, one hopes that
Castleton, and the Châteauville Foundation, may long out-live its founders. As ornery as it may have seemed many years ago for our
brightest lights in classical music to convene at a Colorado ski resort, rural
Virginia easily should lead us through centuries of rich tradition, judging by
the successful launch of this wonderful new Festival.
With unusual creative
skill on a for-hire promotional piece, someone (unnamed!) made a moving documentary portrait
that is worth every minute of your time for its quarter-hour running time: