In a pretty coincidence, the 61rst engagement of Little Women-and its first in Israel-takes place this month in Tel Aviv during the 61rst year of the country’s existence, and the International Vocal Arts Institute, led by the Metropolitan’s legendary vocal coach Joan Dornemann, has been gracious enough to invite me over for the event. Director Larry Edelson and conductor Brian deMaris both collaborated on Rhoda Levine’s lustrous Glimmerglass/ City Opera co-production which toured Japan three years ago: the singers, hailing from the Ukraine, South Africa, Canada, and Australia as well as Israel and the U.S., have been drilling since the 3rd, and I have arrived in time to contribute a bit to the last week of their rehearsals. Sunday was the whirlwind day: two sessions with the orchestra starting at 10:00 a.m., a stage-orchestra rehearsal with the full cast, and then a concert-lecture for an invited audience, in which I unpacked the piece a bit and our singers gave samples of the performance they’ll be giving starting July 31.
A marathon, then, but one worth running. The lecture was terrific fun: before an alert and attentive audience, our cast made a splendid case for Beth’s and Brooke’s arias, as well as the final quartet. We’ve had to work more intensely in the orchestral readings. The Israeli Chamber Orchestra is a strong ensemble of distinctly Russian character, but their orchestra manager tells Brian that not only is Little Women the first American opera they’ve played, it’s their first work ever by a composer who’s not dead. (Yet!) So all that five-eight and color painting and whole- and half-tone geysers erupting through otherwise calm meadows of F-major tripped some of these players’ crazy-modern-music alarms. It helped, then, to explain, why those choices were made, which a conductor can do convincingly but a composer can do unimpeachably: it helped, too, to have some of our singers during the first half of Act One-pages underwritten to the point of haiku-sing with the ensemble before the Sitzprobe, so that what looked like acres of rest in the part could be correctly heard as the vocal picture to the orchestra’s frame. It remains, however, a disconcerting eccentricity of Israeli orchestras that, in rehearsal, their members often bicker amongst themselves about how best to solve, say, this or that bowing issue, while the fuming conductor waits and waits: Brian had reproached himself for failing to impose appropriate discipline until I told him that John told me that he’d had the exact same experience with the Israel Philharmonic when they’d rehearsed his Pied Piper Fantasy in 1984.
So, withal, it’s going well. There’s enough time (if not a moment to waste) to polish the performance for Thursday: meanwhile, Tel Aviv’s cool white buildings gleam above the foaming Mediterranean. I’m hoping tomorrow to tour a bit of the Bauhaus district before the dress begins at eleven.