Long Leaf's short operas keep festival soaring

CHAPEL HILL -- The Long Leaf Opera Festival held the high note. After premiering "Strange Fruit" in its opening weekend, the festival scored again with "Acts of Love," a program of two contemporary one-acts with strong casts, insightful conducting and high production values.

The first, a mesmerizing setting of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," is an astonishingly confident work from 23 year-old Zachary Wadsworth. The piece won Long Leaf's first one-act opera competition, beating 39 other entries from six countries. Wadsworth, a graduate of Eastman School of Music and Yale, is already becoming known for a style that combines early music forms with contemporary instrumentation.

The 40-minute work, employing two soloists, a chorus and a small orchestra (string quartet, piano and saxophone), has a pure formality appropriate to the story of a goddess whose unrequited love for a youth turns to mourning after his untimely death. The strings' sharp edginess conjures Elizabethan court masques, balanced by the saxophone's modern sensuality. Wadsworth's lyrical dissonance adds mystery to his strangely attractive music.

In Friday's opening performance, soprano Andrea Edith Moore sang Venus with warm, bright tone, powerful in climactic passages and mellow in her lament. Tim Sparks' firmly produced tenor easily negotiated Adonis' unusual lines and lengthy vocalise. Conductor Alfred Sturgis kept rhythms taut and moods consistent.

Director Geoff Zeger used the stage well, especially in the placement of the chorus. Because of the work's static nature, two dancers were added as further embodiment of the story's action. Carmen Borders and Erick Uphoff were the perfect evocation of beauty and youth as depicted in Bolyn Willis' highly erotic choreography.

But Zeger's decision to have Moore and Sparks enact the same story on opposite sides from the dancers (or sometimes directly in front of them) forced the audience to divide its attention, putting the singers at a disadvantage.

A humorous 'Bear'

William Walton's 1967 one-act, "The Bear," based on a Chekhov farce, centers on a farmer's visit to a recent widow to demand payment for a debt left by her husband. Their quarreling leads to begrudging admiration and finally a marriage proposal. Walton supplies hilarious vocal moments and humorous orchestral commentary.

A fine pair of singer-actors inhabited the roles. Marcia Ragonetti mined every nuance of character, vocally and physically, for widow Popova's faux mourning and silly pretension. Jason Sarten blustered and bellowed as farmer Smirnov, joining Ragonetti in a hysterical slo-mo dream sequence. Both had excellent diction, a trait not present in Stefanos Koroneos' overly flighty servant, Luka. Director Don Rierson's sense of farce added just the right silliness, mirrored in Sturgis' merry way with the score.

Randolph Umberger's set designs -- classical columns and drapes for "Venus" and Victorian splendor for "Bear" -- glowed under Chenault Spence's subtle lighting. David Serxner's costumes were richly distinctive, save for the too-plain, unflattering attire for Venus and Adonis.

Quibbles aside, these performances attest to the new level that Long Leaf Opera is maintaining for its first summer festival, boding well for a substantial future.