San Diego Symphony to kick off season with a phantasmagoric Ravel opera

The San Diego Symphony receives a standing ovation in the renovated Jacobs Music Center File photo courtesy of the San Diego Symphony The San Diego Symphony has pulled out all the stops to kick off its seventh season under president and CEO Martha Gilmer and music director Rafael Payare Rather than campaign a mammoth symphony it s shrewdly chosen Maurice Ravel s phantasmagoric opera L enfant et les sortil ges The Child and the Spells which is years old this year Doing so not only lets the Symphony show its stuff with Ravel s iridescent result it opens the door for a vocal and multimedia spectacle led by a bona fide star mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard in the lead role of the tantrum-throwing child whose casualties teach him a memorable lesson Leonard s engagement is an inspired choice even beyond her celebrated voice and undeniable star power In she won a Grammy for this very part which capitalizes on her versatility as a dancer and actor But Leonard came down with COVID in August jeopardizing the arrangement Leonard canceled a performance due to a previous bout with COVID in Four years later singers still face professional risks from illness Sadly the way COVID affected the world is not something that we singers would be able to change if it were to happen again Leonard commented via email Sickness directly affects our ability to earn an income If we don t sing we do not get paid Performing is already a high-stress high-risk endeavor so we become a bit neurotic about our soundness Neurotic is not among the adjectives used to describe Leonard s storybook career Descended on her mother s side from an Argentine chess grandmaster she was raised in New York City studied at Joffrey Ballet School as a child and earned bachelor s and master s at Juilliard Within months of graduating she debuted at the Met at the unusually young age of twenty-five The New York Times gushed It is hard to make a splash in a pants role in a long opera on a night when Anna Netrebko is serenading but Ms Leonard did In the eighteen years since Leonard has performed at the world s top opera venues La Scala Wiener Staatsoper Covent Garden made her Hollywood debut in s Maestro and earned three Grammys a feat only a handful of mezzo sopranos Marilyn Horne Cecilia Bartoli Joyce DiDonato Michelle DeYoung can claim For mezzos pants roles like her Met debut and the naughty six-year-old boy she ll play this weekend come with the territory Leonard has donned trousers for at least eight such roles including the largest part iconic Cherubino in Mozart s Marriage of Figaro Of that role Leonard has explained He has become a character I can interpret in lots of different methods and who I m happy to perform differently every time Ravel s wicked kindergartner will be no exception Production tends to have an effect on the way you perform a role Leonard explained Sometimes the costumes change perception sometimes a director has such a different vision that you are forced to think of your character differently Leonard s default stance as a performer facing familiar roles is dynamism Performing is a living breathing and ever-changing art form she revealed The safest place to be is in the knowledge that it will inevitably be different night to night just like we are different day to day in our lives The psychological heart of L enfant et les sortil ges is the fraught relationship of Ravel s Child to the Mother he rebels against As the single mother of a now fifteen-year-old Leonard surely draws on personal insight There is nothing better for an actor and performer than life experience she reported I think largest part mothers would tell you they know what a tantrum looks like Haha The good the bad the ugly the painful all of it informs your work Then it s your job to communicate authentically and honestly The Symphony s opening-night bill which includes two rarely performed Debussy gems The Joyful Isle L isle Joyeuse orchestrated by Molinari and The Box of Toys La bo te joujoux orchestrated by Caplet will feature the Ravel in a semi-staged production conceived and directed by respected composer writer director Gerard McBurney Leonard rejects the idea that the now more common semi-staged performances are somehow less challenging than a fully staged operatic version I don t usually think semi-staged is easier as I like to be truly enveloped in the physical world of the opera she declared Usually it s easier to sing a concert version of a role once you ve done it fully in the theater You re bringing a more embodied understanding of the role But that s the beauty of theater to create worlds no matter what we have at our disposal Best known in the United States for his role in executing Gilmer s brainchild the Chicago Symphony s celebrated Beyond the Count series McBurney is also an admired orchestrator and musicologist No less than Dimitri Shostakovich s widow chose him to orchestrate her husband s unfinished opera Orango and McBurney s completion of Mussorgsky s Khovanshchina will be performed by the Metropolitan Opera in Via a video call from Edinburgh McBurney explained his approach to Ravel s L enfant When I m working with San Diego Symphony and Martha and Rafael I think Oh gee I have a role I can do something that s never been done he disclosed I sought to find a way to project this piece so that the San Diego audience would go Oh my that s gorgeous I required to come up with something which would sell the piece emotionally to that particular audience I mostly wished it to be fun To that end McBurney recruited New York-based theatrical lighting designer Paul Miller to illuminate Ravel s surreal setting household objects animals and nature interacting with an unruly boy and projection designer Mike Tutaj to complement images by artist and former political cartoonist Joe Fournier I ve done lots of shows with Mike Tutaj McBurney enthused I knew I needed a particular kind of charm for the fundamental imagery What if we get Joe Fournier who has a track record of doing beautiful images for children He s a painter he does beautiful artworks I m sure Joe could come up with several beautiful images and if we throw them on the back wall and around the space it ll be cute as anything and people will understand the story McBurney is acutely aware that for several seeing an opera requires coaxing If you bump into somebody in the street and say Come and listen to my opera they go Oh no I don t want to But if you tell the right story they will say Okay I ll give it a try and it can be beautiful he declared Part of that sell are the eight singers the Symphony recruited to drive Leonard s six-year-old hellion to his surprising epiphany including soprano Liv Redpath in the roles of the Fire the Princess and the Nightingale baritone Elliot Madore as the Grandfather Clock and the Black Cat and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Amman as Mama the Chinese Tea Cip and the Shepherd For her pivotal part Leonard welcomes hurdles even in this familiar role Not to say there aren t any challenges in this role there are invariably things that we look to sing better phrase better act better she explained But this is one of those roles where I truly get to enjoy the singers around me and I get a front-row seat There s nothing better than that Paul Bodine has been writing about music from classical to pop rock for over years for publications such as Classical Voice North America Times of San Diego Classical Music Daily Orange County Register and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Among the artists he s interviewed are Joshua Bell Herbert Blomstedt Sarah Chang Ivan Fischer Bruno Canino Christopher O Reilly Lindsay String Quartet David Benoit Laura Claycomb Jon Nakamatsu Paul Chihara the Ahn Trio Lucas Debargue and John Thiessen