Gianni Schicchi
Presented by Vanderbilt Opera Theatre
8 p.m. Feb. 14, 16 & 18 at Ingram Hall, Blair School of Music, 2400 Blakemore Ave.
For information call 322-7651
The Fisk Jubilee Singers inaugurated Blair School of Music’s new Ingram Hall a couple weeks ago. That performance showed how comfortable and responsive the venue is, and it whetted appetites for other programs already booked into the space. Local classical music aficionados are pleased that Blair dean Mark Wait wants to make the new hall available to other performing groups in the city. But this should not obscure an important fact: The facility’s cardinal function is to help the Blair School better do its job as an educational institution.
One part of that job is to train young people as dramatic vocal performers. Accordingly, Ingram Hall is superbly equipped to present state-of-the-art operatic productions. The first fully staged opera in the new hall opens Thursday, in the first of three performances featuring a cast composed largely of Blair students. Rehearsals foretell a delightfully comic run.
Director Gayle Shay has astutely chosen Giacomo Puccini’s only comic opera, Gianni Schicchi. The substance and style of the story recall the film It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, in which Jimmy Durante launches a fable driven by human vanity and greed when he croaks out something about a big cash stash before literally kicking the bucket. Puccini’s opera runs on similar petrol. The opera takes its name from a character Dante places in his Inferno—though in this opera Gianni ain’t there yet, and might deserve a pardon.
Shay chose this opera, she says, because it is a comedy, and because it lets her give some 15 young singers a little time onstage. All the singers are Blair undergrads—except Keith Moore, Belmont University’s vocal studies chair, who sings the title role. Moore looks right for the part and performs with power, taste and grace. The rest of the company are not yet ready for Nashville Opera, but they are poised and talented singer/actors with good voices that are maturing into very good voices. All in all, this cast is quite solid.
The story is set in Florence, Italy. Shay transposes the time to the 1940s and has the story sung in English, not the original Italian. The fable centers on Schicchi and his daughter, despised as low-born by a famiglia whose Don Corleone is Buoso Donati. Buoso defunto gets his surviving relations’ attention when in his will he leaves everything to a monastery. Luckily, only the family know that, and so, despite their disdain for the cunning and resourceful Schicchi, they hire him to forge a new will properly re-routing the loot. Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta (soprano Kacey Cardin) and the dead Donati’s distant relative Rinuccio (tenor Todd Patrick) want to get married. The family oppose the marriage. One can see where the story is going.
And so it goes—in costumes by Rowena Aldridge on a set by Rudi Aldridge. Puccini’s melodious musical wit is ably realized by the singers, who are themselves abetted by the Vanderbilt University Orchestra, led by David Childs. The future of Ingram Hall looks quite bright through the lens of this molto robusto bit of sophisticated funnybonery, which is not merely fluff: The overtones get pretty serious on the way home. That shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the fable’s godfather is Dante Alighieri.
