Age of Good Opera' begins with gem of a performance

October 8, 2005 - About two-thirds of the way through Mercury Opera Rochester’s performance on Friday of Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz it suddenly dawned on one that a new age of opera had finally emerged in Rochester. Perhaps future music historians will refer to it as the “Age of Good Opera.”

Gone are the days when touring companies brought in predictable sets and equally predictable bad singing. Banished are the amateur orchestras that went out of tune the moment a bow was pulled across a string. And hopefully exiled for good is the notion of “Opera Rochester” as an oxymoron.

Mercury, of course, is Rochester’s new and greatly anticipated professional opera company, and it had a splendid opening night at Roberts Wesleyan’s Hale Auditorium. The singing was sensation, the orchestra marvelous and the all-important visuals were simple but appealing.

All the same, when Mercury first announced that it would debut with Fritz, it struck me as an odd choice. With so much at stake, why open with an opera that most Americans don’t know, when a guaranteed crowd-pleaser like Madama Butterfly – which Mercury plans to produce this season anyway – could have hit an opening night home run?

There are two answers. First, though Fritz is little known, it is nonetheless a sweet little gem, an opera with an effervescent score and a charming plot. Here’s the story: A rich landowner, Fritz Kobus, is generous to a fault but remains unmarried. This greatly disturbs Rabbi David, a wily fellow who spends most of the opera trying to hitch Fritz and Suzel, a beautiful young farmer’s daughter.

The second reason is that Mercury already had in hand some perfect voices for this opera, most especially soprano Jennifer Gliere as Suzel. Let me start by saying that I’m totally in love with Gliere. I mean with her voice. In its lowest register, her voice is as plush and warm as a velvet chair. It’s silvery at the top. She can sing softly for sustained periods even when her notes are in the stratosphere. And she can send fortissimo phrases over the orchestra. Whenever she left the stage, I felt crushed.

Tenor Broadus Hamilton (Fritz) got off to a slow start, with a voice that seemed a bit shaky during Act 1. No doubt, this was due to nerves, since by Act 3 he was in full bloom, singing with passion and conviction. Quinn Patrick (the gypsy Beppe) is a mezzo-soprano, though on Friday her singing was so luminous one almost believed she was a soprano. For his part, Mario Martinez (David) sang with a stentorian baritone of unfailing sensitivity.

Because of a proofreading error that was completely my fault, I misidentified Mercury’s opening night conductor, Gerard Floriano, in a previous story. Now, I feel like the guy who misidentified Toscanini after a debut at the Met. That’s because Floriano proved to be nothing less than a virtuoso conductor, and he led his fine orchestra with color, precision, and a welcome degree of sweep.

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