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GSA Hansel and Gretel We saw the 2:00 pm April 27th performance of the fully staged Hansel and Gretel (1893) by Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) and directed by Shelly Milam Ratliff and the twenty-two piece orchestra conducted by Amanda Gates. This performance moved the action of this German fairy tale opera to New Orleans. The settings were different but the actions were the same. Hansel was sung by Savannah Stephens (alternate performer Sophia Bourcier). Our Gretel was Riah Lubansky (Abigale Bodvake). The children are left at home with chores while the parents are away but they dance and play instead. Mother, sung by Nalani LasMarias (Jolie Ragin), returns and is furious and in a fit of anger knocks the pitcher of milk, their only food, off the table and it is broken. She sends the children to beg on Bourbon Street, where Voodoo abounds. Indulging in self-pity she puts her head on the table and falls asleep. The pitiful mother is tired and hungry—the curse of being poor? Her self-recrimination was deeply moving. The children wander the streets stealing and begging for food. Gretel sits down to play with a doll she received from a stranger. As night falls the two become nervous and wander into a park. The Sandman appears (Avery Eure, Olivia Lawrence), the moon rises and we see spectacular projections of witches riding their brooms across the sky. In the meantime the father (Devin White, all performances) returns from the town happy and with plenty of food since he has sold all of their handmade brooms. He panics when he learns that the children were sent to Bourbon Street and have not returned. Mother and Father go to look for them. Hansel and Gretel are lost but happy until night falls. Magic begins when the Sandman soothes their fears into sweet sleep. The cuckoos, represented by ten singers and dancers, appear in their dreams. While the children sleep, after they have sung their evening prayers, we hear the lovliest and most famous music in the whole opera. A brief intermission followed. Hansel and Gretel remain peacefully asleep as projected nightlife continues in the street of New Orleans. The Dew Fairy, sung by Dasianae Cross (Kya Baldwin) recognizes the children and sends the crowds away so she can gently wake them. Gretel wakes first, feeling mystified by what she has dreamed. Roughly waking her brother, the children discuss the dreams they have had and suddenly see the Cupcake Cottage. They are hungry and cannot resist eating bits of the cottage. Madame LaRoux, a witchy Voodoo Priestess, Aurora Sauer (Sophia Hill), is delighted to provide as many sweet treats as they wish to eat. A brick oven appears on the left side of the stage and a cage on the right. The witch forces Hansel into the cage and demands that Gretel serve her and her two assistants. She ominously says: "I try my best to serve my guests." The children devise a plan to force the witch into her own oven. Once the witch BBQ happens, the stage is suddenly filled with all of the gingerbread children who had gone missing. Using the witch's magic spoon, Hansel frees the children as Gretel touches each one and they come back to life. As Mother, Father and Dew Fairy arrive they find the children and all celebrate their reunion. The amazing choreography for such a small stage was by Morgan White. Woody Robinson and Jim Leyden did the set design and construction. The Stage Manager was Sage Miranda. The hard working rehearsal pianists included Suzanne Daniel, Tanya Holland, and Oksana Lutsyshyn. Vocal instructor Andriane Kerr did the witty supertitles. The wonderful costume design was by Tracy Bodvake and the hair and makeup designer was Candace Heidelberg-Denison. All eight Vocal Department graduating seniors appeared in Hansel and Gretel and sang Aaron Copland's The Promise of Living from The Tender Land at GSA Graduation on June 5, accompanied by Suzanne Daniel. GSA Instrumental Music Department Chair Amanda Gates on Conducting Hansel and Gretel Even though it seems like it's a "children's opera," because of the story, Humperdinck's Hansel & Gretel is a notoriously difficult score. I have played the score several times as a violinist, in both the Virginia Opera and the Chautauqua Opera. It's one of those books that we pick up as violinists with a bit of trepidation. It sounds "easy" because the themes are quite tonal, but the constant playing coupled with the ever-shifting time signatures makes it quite difficult. I have always loved playing operas, and this is one of my favorites. I was very excited to conduct Hansel & Gretel for my first opera. I'm indebted to my teacher and mentor, Dr. Paul Kim of ODU, for his guidance in helping me become a better conductor. Humperdinck was a contemporary of Wagner and Strauss, and uses similar compositional techniques to bring his musical ideas to life. That means the score is quite dense, much like Wagner's operas, full of tricky arpeggiated passages. Additionally, the time signature and rhythmic motives are constantly fluctuating in the third act as The Witch, by turns, lures the children and then reveals her true colors, sometimes within the span of a few seconds. The orchestra has to provide the emotional underpinning of all these ideas, while being nimble enough to adjust to the vagaries of performance, and in our case, two different casts. ODU's University Theatre has a very small pit and that limited the number of musicians. Humperdinck scored the work for a full orchestra of 80 players; we only had room for about 20. Knowing this, my first step was to find a suitable orchestral reduction. I reached out to Jonathan Lynesse, an arranger in the U.K., who provided us with an excellent set of parts and score for our reduced forces. It is a wonderful reduction, but of course, it meant that each performer is covering two or even three parts at times. So, the next step was to simplify some of the notorious virtuosic passages to make it simpler to put together. This meant some cutting and pasting several of the violin parts in particular. This was a major challenge for our student musicians. We started rehearsals in January and while the students were also learning Mahler Symphony #4 for our Side by Side concert with the Virginia Symphony and ODU Symphony Orchestra, so you can imagine how difficult it was for them! The singers were all very well prepared by the time our joint rehearsals started, and hearing the themes sung was very helpful for the orchestra. The trick for any opera with leitmotifs is to get the "groove" and the feel for each of the different themes. The next task was to come together as an orchestra to quickly anticipate the transition to each new theme before we arrived there, so that we were ready to turn on a dime. As a conductor, that meant identifying the predominant rhythmic elements and making sure to cue the players clearly so the rest of the group could follow. This was sometimes difficult to discern as the score is dense, and the reduced orchestration meant that several parts were assigned to instruments different than the score indicates, with arrows in the score pointing down or up to the actual instruments playing. Singing with an orchestra rather than a rehearsal piano is an art in itself, so I tried my best to be helpful and encouraging to the singers, some of whom were performing on stage for the very first time. I loved connecting with each of them and bringing out the emotional content of the music, and they each responded brilliantly.
I believe it was a real triumph— especially for high school students! |