For their 2024 mainstage summer festival season, Opera Theatre Saint Louis (OTSL) paired two fixtures in top-ten performance frequency, “ The Barber of Seville ” and “ La Bohème ,” with two exciting, less offered menu items. Philip Glass’s “Galileo Galilei” (2002) received just its fourth staging anywhere, while George Frideric Händel’s operatic capolavoro, “Julius Caesar” (“Giulio Cesare in Egitto,” 1724) achieved an OTSL premiere in its tercentenary. A deep roster of talent made “Julius Caesar” the vocal highlight of this season, and the sort of production that OTSL patrons will recall for years, much like 2023’s “Susannah.
” Celestial Music Descends From the Spheres to Steal My Soul Away Celebrating its recently deceased founding general director, Englishman Richard Gaddes (1942-2023), the company referenced the Glyndebourne Festival’s influence on OTSL’s now well-known garden and picnic pavilion (AKA “The Tent”). An apologia for opera in English quoting erstwhile artistic director Colin Graham (1931-2007) leads the company’s Anglophone libretti, not only issuing a shoutout to English National Opera but also reminding Americans that ROH Covent Garden too performed mostly in English prior to midcentury’s widespread air travel. With this DNA, you’d believe the company fertile ground for oodles of Handel, but in five decades, only three works by “The Great Bear” have appeared here, a 1987 “Alcina,” a 2000 “Radamisto,” and most recently, a US premiere of a rarity, “Richard the Lionheart” in 2015.
OTSL’s most recent venture into pre-Mozart opera, Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea,” (1642) coincided with the Saint Louis Blues’ championship parade in 2019. Handel moved into today’s standard operatic repertory in North America more slowly than in Britain, and Saint Louis hasn’t yet seen semi-regulars like “Rodelinda,” “Tamerlano,” and “Partenope.” OTSL used Brian Trowell’s translation, which you can hear in YouTube clips of John Michael Phillips’ 1984 TV movie starring Janet Baker as Caesar and Valerie Masterson as Cleopatra .
Heavily cut from Nicola Haym’s original Italian text, the print libretto that OTSL circulates also credits James Robinson as editor, splitting the opera into two acts, not three—the initial stretch of the second act batched with the first, prior to intermission. So in the Gateway City, now was high time for “Julius Caesar,” which boasts a couple of multifaceted early modern characters in Caesar and Cleopatra, and a hit parade of arias and duets adorning an unrelentingly lovely score. Though this Baroque work functions as Baroque works often do—drama deemed somewhat static by present-day audiences, with the theater located mostly in people’s voices—the score’s delights make a long evening seem short.
Perhaps more than any other Baroque opera, “Caesar” sells itself well to the general audience, not just Baroque superfans. When it’s sung well, nothing else matters for three or four hours. Julius, What Have You Seen? Nonetheless, one must do something onstage past the old twentieth century park-n-bark.
The more conservative corners of The Tent complained about the production, but your reviewer believed it worked dramatically, and more importantly, it put the singers in position to excel, crafting relatively simple set pieces for the arias at Handel’s intersection of Chronos and Kairos, in which ten-minute arias seem like two, but also expansive past the limits of human perception. Director Elkhanah Pulitizer and set designer Allen Moyer crafted a single setting, a contemporary penthouse foyer, backed by symmetrical doors backstage left and right, bookending a row of windows looking onto a hallway from which the dramatis personae entered and exited. Elegant quadrangles framed almost every visual element, with some vaguely Celtic-looking inlay on black wood providing accent.
Centerstage, paired with end tables resembling pop-sockets, sat two broad black leather chaises, usually purposed for sitting, but pushed together for Caesar and Cleopatra’s erotic meetings, like two extra long twin beds approximated in a college dorm room when one’s boo visits. This furniture formed the arena of Ptolemy and Achillas’ house of sexual harassment, about which Cornelia moved, evading their advances. Blue-dressed housekeepers cleaned these surroundings; vague hints of sexual captivity wafted from the staging.
This disconcertingly clean, spare environment threw into relief Cleopatra’s divine second act entrance, performed as the finale of the first, for “Imploring, adoring” (“V’adoro, pupille”), the only visual break from the penthouse, its doors and windows rising to reveal Emily Pogorelc atop a platform, backed by a golden and sundried tomato sun, and embraced by oyster shell fans wielded by four backup dancers, rendering Sarah Mesko ’s Caesar amorously defenseless. This quartet, Eibhlin Arvizu, Jennifer Egley, Lauren Kravitz, and Alyssa Watson, collected the jocular moniker “the Cle-ettes,” decked in flowy “Charlie’s Angels” jumpsuits—now with 33% more angels. They augmented the production, adding a light sprinkling of kinetics that didn’t vault over the top like some of what we saw in the famed David McVicar production from Glyndebourne and the Met a decade hence, which featured a middle-aged David Daniels attempting to.
..Riverdance? The inappropriate-laughter-at-supertitles cadre giggled at some of the dance, and inexplicably at Pompey’s severed head, but the Cle-ettes acquitted themselves well, managing to support, not distract from Pogorelc’s otherworldly delivery of “Hear my prayer” (“Se pietà”).
The eyes naturally perceived them about her, while never leaving the soprano. Sean Curran ’s choreography mostly worked, adding a dash of whimsy to the show’s closing happily-ever-after duet between the leads, who danced with the remaining four principals, the Cle-ettes, and four bodyguards dressed like fellows whom James Bond quietly dispatches. Dress Impeccably and They Remember the Woman In this century, more than the last, opera companies have realized that of the two main ways to visually titillate the audience, costumes go further than sets, fiscally.
Constance Hoffmann ’s costumes generally looked handsome but saved all the razzle-dazzle for Cleopatra. I counted six costumes, but upon a query at The Tent, Pogorelc informed me of an additional change of kit, for a total of seven. We’ll not lead you through the whole closet and negligee drawer, but list at least her Carolina blue halter dress as “Lidia” (Cleo’s guise as one of her own attendants), her glittering champagne-colored jumpsuit and cape matching her fluted beverage, and the white and gold pantsuit with bejeweled stiletto boots.
While less prepared for the Met Gala, the remaining principals also looked great. Key’mon Murrah ’s Ptolemy rocked a burgundy smoking jacket. His henchman, Cory McGee ’s Achillas, wore a black militaristic uniform and ominous fingerless gloves.
Meridian Prall’s Cornelia dithered anxiously in funereal black, Mary Poppins headed to a wake, with Megan Moore ’s Sextus, clad in a purposely sloppy loose necktie and crested private school blazer. Even supporting characters Curio and Nirena got striking costumes, John Mburu in a hunter green leather jacket, and Madeleine Lyon in a smart purple men’s suit. Amid all this color, Sarah Mesko’s Caesar projected that he was powerful enough to need none, with a charcoal suit early and a dark brown trench coat late.
Directing traffic musically, OTSL Principal Conductor Daniela Candillari fulfilled three duties, conducting, prompting, and playing the harpsichord. She reported that when General Director Andrew Jorgensen and Artistic Director James Robinson asked her which of the four 2024 works she wanted to conduct, she didn’t hesitate to reply with “Julius Caesar.” Candillari’s musicianship marks one of the best developments at OTSL in the 2020s, with refreshing renderings of the overprogrammed chestnuts “Tosca” in 2023 and “Carmen” in 2022, and a masterful execution of difficult music in her company debut, 2021’s “New Works Lab” of short one-acts by Laura Karpman, Steven Mackey, and Damien Sneed.
She correctly asserted that the oft-denigrated da capo form’s “strict structure allows for improvisation and personalization of the characters.” Form has been making a comeback in the academic humanities; I wished for New Formalist, Caroline Levine as a seat partner. Candillari cited Nikolaus Harnoncourt as a guide for “finding different orchestral colors that could be used to express various dramatic layers and offer a variety of textures.
” One cannot gauge whether Baroque performance practice fetishists would ratify Candillari’s reading, but she delivered something far more satisfying than that crew usually manages: three hours of lush, inhabited, breathing beauty. She’s a great singers’ conductor. Ptolemy Got Served Maestra Candillari led a festival of alto voices.
One is hard pressed to name a better opera, in fact, for the job prospects of mezzo-sopranos and countertenors. “Caesar” features one soprano, five gender-flexible altos, and two basses. In OTSL’s casting, with Sarah Mesko as Caesar and Madeleine Lyon as Nirena, rather than countertenors in either role, no fewer than four women embraced us with mezzo warmth, including Meridian Prall as Cornelia and Megan Moore as Sextus.
This Mezzopalooza therefore drew a sharper contrast with the lone countertenor, Key’mon Murrah as Ptolemy. Murrah’s voice is magnificent. He features a robust lower register, a meaty middle, and a shockingly powerful top, all seamlessly connected.
The top of his voice nearly sounds like a female soprano’s, but with more punch. The audience audibly gasped at the high C in “Upstart, barbarian, and traitor” (“L’empio, sleale, indegno vorria”) and showered him with some of the loudest applause of the performance. More delicious yet was the middle D ♮ , pianissimo, with the last fermata.
He repeated the high C trick effortlessly in his second act aria “Deep within my bosom burning” (“Sì spietata”), driving the crowd wild with a laser-focused sound. His multihued timbral flavor suggests umami in middle and low register, like a vegan broth that carries the force of beef consommé. Dramatically, his Ptolemy displayed thoughtless entitlement and lack of regard for others more than proactive malice.
Hilariously, during Cleopatra’s “No don’t despair” (“Non disperar”), the siblings commenced a dance-off. Cleopatra got the better of it, but at that stage of the proceedings one almost rooted for Ptolemy. In the last act, Sextus and Cornelia ganged up on him with daggers in the hallway.
Preceding him in death, bass Cory McGee gave us a gentle and slimy Achillas, who obviously wouldn’t pass muster in post-#metoo standards of behavior but managed something like genuine affection for his captive target, Cornelia. His aria “Don’t deny a tender lover (“Cornelia, se all’amor mio”), though perhaps less idiomatically Baroque than some of the cast, offered a pleasant, sort of Märzen-colored timbre. Opening the third act, McGee was tasked with delivering much of the second-half plot in a text-heavy recit, in extremis.
Paired with a cut-n-paste of “Flow my tears” (“Piangerò la sorte mia”), this constructed an extraordinary fifteen-minute scena for Cleopatra, divided only by Achilla’s exposition. Condemned to Grieve and Cry Megan Moore’s Sextus and Meridian Prall’s Cornelia kicked off Mezzopalooza during the overture, Cornelia pacing anxiously and an equally stressed Sextus enjoying some snortable white powder his mother proceeded to smack out of his hand. Sextus later emptied his stash in favor of expressing resolve to kill his father Pompey’s murderers.
Moore gave a reluctant hero’s affect in Sextus’s development from ineffectual youth to avenging assassin. Of all these alto voices, Moore’s voice is lighter and nearly sopranistic in color, with a Mozartean flavor. Though occasionally a tad flat, she offered float in “The time for tears is past”” (“Vani sono i lamenti”) contrasting appropriately with Prall’s more mature sound.
The two aced “Condemned to grieve and cry” (“Son nata a lagrimar”), for my money the most beautiful nine minutes in all of Handel’s currently performed operas. They sang while pantomiming, which found its most effective comment in a mismatched grasping gesture that reminded of gold medalist ice dancers Gabriella Papadakis’s and Guillame Cizeron’s disjointed embrace in their 2022 exhibition routine set to “Avec les temps.” The circling body men departed briefly, and Moore and Prall transported the audience as they ought with those pianissimo repetitions of ‘no more’ (‘mai più’).
Prall’s stunning voice has reached a state of maturity beyond her youth—her next stop after OTSL, no less than Operalia. I’d previously heard her live only in The Atlanta Opera’s “Die Walküre” as Schwertleite—so, barely heard her, individually, since the eight Valkyrie sisters do a lot of cross-squawking and hollering over gargantuan orchestration. Prall stopped time with her first aria “Grief and woe all hope deny me” (“Priva son io d’ogni conforto”).
She calibrated pitch-dominant onsets with a perfectly cycled vibrato phasing in. Her fulsome chest voice—yes, people still have those—bathed the room in warmth, with an autumnal color and texture, butternut squash bisque. Cornelia doesn’t enjoy much of a developmental arc—she’s sad, then sad some more, then sad yet more, spelled only by a couple of trips around the penthouse attempting to avoid some #metoo, but Prall sang so beautifully that twice as many grief arias would be welcome.
“In your bosom, friendly marble” gave her an opportunity for delicate /u/ vowels with “entombed.” Her evening of controlled sorrow gave way to visible relief after helping her son waste Ptolemy in the corridor. Though cast in a somewhat wooden role in the libretto, Prall nonetheless proceeded to steal every scene in which she appeared, with her voice.
One must hear this singer live. She’ll excel in the lanes of repertory associated with the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. More Cast Highlights Assisting team Cleopatra & Rome, bass John Mburu’s sonorous Curio and mezzo-soprano Madeleine Lyon’s poised Nirena combined dignity with a lightly comic affect.
Neither had many lines past some recitativo secco, as the cuts took Nireno/a’s first act aria. As Caesar, mezzo-soprano Sarah Mesko anchored the proceedings with ideal vocalism and acting for a breeches role, and my goodness, how much the intimacy director gave her to do with Pogorelc. Act two involved nearly as much osculation and snuggling as singing, atop the chaises and often under a gold-plated, jillion-threadcount sheet.
Her sound, unusually, resembles one of your better countertenors, a dark red color, sort of like licorice. The pervasive gender-bending in “Julius Caesar” rates as one of its chief attractions, and Mesko here excelled. Her vocalism and dramatic sense broadcasted the sort of confidence you need to conquer the whole Mediterranean, with postured benevolence of the Enlightenment era.
She flexed agilità in “Evil and full of spite,” with some interesting Bartoli-esque aspiration, tossing platters of jewels with rage upon being presented Pompey’s avulsed cranium in a plastic sack drawn from a gift box. “How silently, how slyly” (“Va tacito”), Mesko’s duet with SLSO principal horn Roger Kaza, unfolded as a delightful symphony of mistrustful looks and deliberate steps between Curio/Caesar and Ptolemy/Achillas. A wheeled liquor cart provided whiskey, from which Caesar toasted but never drank, presuming it poisoned, as Curio made a throat-cut gesture.
She punctuated the last verse with a studied impatience. Her superb acting, all evening, gave this Baroque work a modern verisimilitude; her Caesar lost any will to resist Cleopatra, utterly, but by degrees. Mesko’s greatest moment arrived with “Zephyrs fly to me” (“Zeffiri”), leveraging her song with the naturalness of speech; she shapes formants with /i/, an unmusical vowel by its tense, high/front nature, in such a way as to make them attractive.
Opening that aria, she built a lovely messa di voce, I can still hear in my mind’s ear. Well received was Mesko’s “Carmen” at OTSL two years ago, but one might agree this repertory better suits her. Great Jove in His Heaven Hath No Melody to Match Such Peerless Singing The sum of the above, were that all, would have combined for one of the best sung productions in recent memory at OTSL.
This opera, however, might more aptly have been titled “Cleopatra,” and here we meet this roster’s most ravishing singer. We must discuss Emily Pogorelc . Pogorelc’s voice is so beautiful as to defeat verbal description and one must hear her live.
Her voice cuts without the slightest shrillness, as she flawlessly balances warmth and brightness, her technique is solid which makes her voice seem larger. The production is perfectly lean, and her legato—so important in Handel—flows like massless liquid. Many fine singers successfully connect registers of slightly different timbre; hers displays multifaceted hues but sounds integrally identical throughout Cleopatra’s range.
Your reviewer traffics in potable and comestible metaphors for voice but struck out this time. One color Pogorelc gives is like the best thing that happens in life, pretty much, sunlight on a severe clear 60oF day in October, post-equinox. Inimitable, but vaguely gestured towards by Hoffmann’s final costume for her, a swooshy gown with gold everywhere.
She’s the complete package: clarity like Sabine Devielhe, precision headed in a direction towards Erin Morley, and absurd timbral beauty resembling no one else. Not yet thirty, if she cares for this gift and the Opera Machine shoveth her not into too-heavy repertory, we’ll enjoy decades of gorgeous singing. She appears twice at the Metropolitan next year, as Musetta, and Pamina in Julie Taymor’s rather Maurice Sendak-ish, abbreviated, Anglophone “Magic Flute.
” Outfitted in those lucky seven costumes and beneath a wig the shade of red that compromises the decision-making of a guy like Caesar, Pogorelc conquered both Caesar and the Loretto-Hilton Center with her otherworldly voice. “No don’t despair,” sprinkled florid runs on the listener, betraying no effort, as the Cle-ettes unloosed some Macarena-esque moves. From the corridor she surveilled Caesar as he cogitated upon Pompey’s urn—another standout moment for Mesko—and then she emerged to hatch the “Lidia” deception.
But her act one was just the beginning. Veni, Vidi, Obstipui Pogorelc’s Cleopatra wrecked Mesko’s Caesar in a mesmerizing set piece for “Adoring, Imploring” (“V’adoro pupille). Candillari led Handel’s orchestration introducing Cleopatra’s stagy reveal atop her podium—though Geoffrey Burgon often garners comparisons to Vivaldi, I think this sound was his aim in his famous soundtrack for “Brideshead Revisited”.
All night, concertmaster Celeste Golden Andrews’s violin popped from the pit. Mesko stood agog at the orchestral intro before Pogorelc even sang. With a Statue of Liberty tiara matching the triangular rays of the sun behind her, Pogorelc cascaded the aria’s legato while emerging slowly from the Cle-ettes’ reduced Busby Berkeley number and their oyster shell fans.
By the time she’d undone her hair and reached Caesar, Egypt had conquered Rome rather than the other way round. Pogorelc capped a night of great singing by the whole cast with a soul-takingly beautiful scena, consisting of “Hear my prayer” (“Se Pietà”) and “Flow my tears” (Piangerò), aided by the cuts to occupy the stage only with the Cle-ettes, and interrupted only briefly by Achillas’s news briefing and death. Though warm most of the time, she would accent a phrase with a steely cut like a very sharp knife obliquely caressing skin that it elects not to puncture.
In the first aria, effortless spin with vibrant overtones in middle voice in the A section made the voice sound like weeping without tears. She fashioned build with granular dynamic contrasts, a soft trill here or there for accent. Every volume and every register sounded gorgeous.
She managed to sing like this while changing her shoes à la Fred Rogers. Then in “Flow my tears,” she authored a jarring transition. From the resigned sorrow of the A section, with each diminuendo forming a droplet, like rain slowly beading from flower petals in Disney’s “Fantasia”, she pivoted to believable rage in the B section, and back again, beginning the da capo in chest voice.
The sometimes chatty OTSL audience who had laughed at Pompey’s head and Ptolemy’s and Achillas’s stabbings silenced themselves, making audible her last inhalation, even that, music. Forever Shine in Grace and Beauty All the characters who’d escaped stabbing reconvened as audience for the happily-ever-after duet to close the opera, “Dearest, Fairest” (“Caro! Bella!”). Mesko and Pogorelc paired to blend once more, like birds spiraling each other, ending with a last kiss.
Lights out for the final tableau, with one photographic flash. An appropriate ending for one of the finest productions in OTSL’s history. Let us pray that OTSL can reemploy each principal singer from this show at some later time, and that Baroque opera returns more frequently than a couple times per decade.
This was the highlight of OTSL’s 2024 season . Categories.
