FOR MANY, OPERA AND PUCCINI ARE ONE (TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN KNOWS THE APPEAL)

By JAMES JORDEN

From left, the tenor Sean Panikkar and the soprano Talise Trevigne in Giacomo Puccini’s first opera, “Le Villi.”CreditCory Weaver

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — When the news broke a few weeks ago that the family of Luciano Pavarotti had asked Donald J. Trump to stop playing that tenor’s recording of the aria “Nessun dorma,” from Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Turandot,” at campaign rallies, I’ll admit, I was befuddled: “Wait ... Donald Trump listens to opera?”

Putting aside for the moment the obvious possibility that the lyrics attracted Mr. Trump’s campaign to the piece — the final word of which is “vincerò” (“I will win”) — there might be a more subtle explanation. Perhaps what the campaign was embracing was not opera, per se, but Puccini, and Puccini alone.

After all, for many people, the two are synonymous.

This year’s Bard Music Festival, two weekends of performances and discussion at Bard College here, is devoted to “Puccini and His World.” The first programs, last weekend, focused on the contrasts between Puccini and contemporaries like Pietro Mascagni and Alfredo Catalani. Composers abounded during the verismo era of Italian opera, from around 1890 to 1920, but none achieved the enormous international success of Puccini, who remains arguably the world’s most popular opera composer.

How did Puccini become identified, for so many, with opera itself? He was a superb melodist and had a knack for emotionally compelling stories. But his seemingly universal appeal may be his gift for making the music seem to spring to life unmediated. It’s like Steve Jobs’s dream of a perfect operating system: always running in the background, but never impinging on the user experience.

Puccini’s technique is so nearly invisible that it resists analysis. As heard in last weekend’s first concert, conducted by the music director (and Bard College president) Leon Botstein, the three-chord motif that opens and closes the final act of “Manon Lescaut” evokes a visceral sense of dread: you feel as if you’re looking death in the face. And yet the chords aren’t dissonant, and the relationship between them is hardly radical.

Is it the orchestration, with the harmonies clumped together in the middle of the range and bare octaves at the extremes of treble and bass? Or is it something else? With Puccini you don’t need to know; you hardly want to. All you perceive is despair made palpable.

The emotional transparency that set Puccini apart from his contemporaries was demonstrated again and again over the weekend. The first program contrasted the “Lescaut” duet, sung with throbbing power by the soprano Melody Moore and the tenor Russell Thomas, with excerpts from Catalani’s “Loreley” and Arrigo Boito’s “Nerone.” Both those works are carefully crafted and warmly melodic, but there’s a formality to their repetitions and variations. When you think about them, they’re enjoyable, but they lack the unfiltered wallop of “Lescaut.”

Puccinian immediacy holds even outside his signature genre. The second Bard program, “Sons of Bach, Sons of Palestrina,” offered examples of chamber music from the era. While Respighi’s Piano Quintet in F minor is far more carefully crafted than Puccini’s brief quartet “Crisantemi,” it was in the latter work that the Daedalus Quartet really reveled, creating a shimmering soundscape of almost liquid sorrow.

Similarly, the song cycle “Quattro Rispetti” highlighted Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s talent for creating melancholy miniatures without a wasted note, sung sensitively by the soprano Cecilia Violetta López, with Brian Zeger on piano. But when the same performers returned with a set of jokey Puccini salon songs, it was as if a ray of sunshine suddenly energized those in the audience, who giggled at the text’s silly puns and audibly sighed at the quotations from familiar arias.

Ms. López, with her flirtatious charm and intriguingly dusky voice, was also the highlight of the fourth program, “The Search for a Successor: Opera After Verdi.” Her sparkling performances of numbers from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “La Bohème” (yes, there was another “La Bohème”) and Umberto Giordano’s “Madame Sans-Gêne” indicated she might well have a future in this kind of personality-driven repertoire.

Yet even here, Puccini’s arias had the greatest effect, as Ms. López’s voice flitted across the ecstatic high notes of the quartet from “La Rondine” and drooped, almost colorless, into the bitonal wooziness of “Amici fiori” from “Suor Angelica.”

A companion piece to “Angelica,” the one-act thriller “Il Tabarro,” was the centerpiece of the festival’s third concert and the weekend’s one real disappointment. The relentless suspense of this seamy tale of adultery and murder among the Paris working class fell victim to Mr. Botstein’s arid, inflexible conducting of his American Symphony Orchestra, leaving Puccini’s obsessive rhythms and hypnotically repeated motifs sounding merely monotonous. What’s worse, the veteran baritone Louis Otey’s flinty voice imploded just before his climactic aria, and the love duets between the soprano Kelly Kaduce and the tenor Michael Wade Lee collapsed into a noisy battle of vibratos.

The final concert offered more pleasure, featuring Puccini’s first opera, “Le Villi,” a clunky adaptation of the “Giselle” legend, paired with “La Navarraise,” dripping with sex and violence, set by the French composer Jules Massenet at the height of his career.

Massenet holds all the dramatic cards here, so you’d expect his opera to overshadow Puccini’s. And yet, even with the high-voltage performance of the mezzo-soprano Nora Sourouzian in the title role — she’s a young woman so desperate for a dowry that she hires herself out as an assassin — “La Navarraise” sounded utterly conventional in its reliance on big sweeping tunes and martial sound effects.

“Le Villi,” though, fascinated nonstop, from the scintillating introduction to the soprano’s opening love song, through the obsessively self-lacerating aria for the sinful tenor. Talise Trevigne and Sean Panikkar were the full-voiced leading pair, both capable of sudden ravishing pianissimo phrases to match Puccini’s dreamy orchestrations.

This opera ends with the soprano, now a ghost, forcing the unfaithful tenor to dance himself to death. It’s not a situation many of us have witnessed firsthand, and yet the composer — somehow — makes it feel not only moving but also intensely real.

Score a “vincerò” for Puccini, then — with another sure to follow next weekend, when the emerging director R. B. Schlather tackles the composer’s unfinished final work, “Turandot,” complete with Mr. Trump’s favorite aria.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/arts/music/for-many-opera-and-puccini-are-one-trumps-campaign-knows-the-appeal-puccini-and-his-world-bard-music-festival.html?ribbon-ad-idx=2&rref=arts/music&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Music&pgtype=article