El gato con botas (Puss in Boots) at the Gotham Chamber Opera

On December 12, 2014, we were at a performance at New York’s Museo del Barrio of Xavier Montsalvatge’s El gato con botas produced by the Gotham Chamber Opera. Gotham was founded in 2001 by its artistic director and conductor, Neal Goren. The company fills an important and neglected niche in the repertoire: the small-scale rarity from the Baroque to the present that can only be gratefully framed by an intimate venue. In fact, Gotham has no home of its own. It moves from site to site, choosing a context that suits the subject of the work. In the past thirteen years, Gotham has offered Haydn’s Il Mondo della luna at the Hayden Planetarium, Daniel Catán’s La hija de Rappaccini in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This fall, Gotham mounted a double bill of operas by Bohuslav Martinů, Alexandre bis and Comedy on the Bridge, and this spring, the company will return to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 27-29 for The Tempest Songbook, a compilation of music of Henry Purcell and Kaija Saariaho.

Xavier Monsalvatge was a Catalan composer born in 1912; he died in 2002. New York concert-goers will be most familiar with his haunting lullaby, “Canción de cuna ,” so often programmed by recitalists, and so memorably by Victoria de los Angeles and Montserrat Caballé. Here is Teresa Berganza’s utterly beguiling 1964 version. At the time of this composition, close to the date of the 1948 Barcelona premiere of El gato, Montsalvatge’s work was strongly reflective of West Indian/Cuban influences.


The 2014 El gato con botas is a revival of Gotham’s very successful 2010 production at the New Victory Theater. Moisés Kaufman (director of The Laramie Project and I Am My Own Wife) and his Tectonic Theater Project, collaborated with the Blind Summit Theatre to achieve a seamless joining of puppets and live performers. The most memorable scene featured an ogre capable of rearranging the parts of his body. In a clear echo of Das Rheingold, where Wotan and Loge trick Alberich into transforming himself into a toad, Puss captures the giant monster he has goaded into becoming a rat. The puppets, some manipulated by a team of puppeteers as in Japanese Bunraku theater (a technique adopted by the Metropolitan’s 2006 Madama Butterfly), some strapped to the singers’ bodies, were the ideal solution for the fairy tale source, “Puss in Boots.” This short excerpt was film in Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu during the 2011-12 season. Here there are no puppets. The singers and dancers are dressed in animal costumes.

Rosina, High and Low

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Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, presented in New York in 1825, was the first opera in Italian to be heard in the city, just nine years after its Rome world premiere. That November night at the Park Theatre on Park Row the audience included Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of Le Nozze di Figaro, among other Mozart operas. Le Nozze was seen this season in the Met’s “Live in HD” series and was the subject of a recent OperaPost. Il Barbiere di Siviglia will be simulcast on November 22. Both operas are based on comedies by the 18^th-century French playwright Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Il Barbiere has rarely been absent from the Met since its very first season, 1883-84, Le Nozze since 1939-40.

We focus here on Rosina, the lead female character of Il Barbiere, and a rare example of a role in the core repertoire that has been attributed to either the high or low voice. Rossini wrote Rosina for Geltrude Righetti, the contralto who also created Angelina in his La Cenerentola. But despite the composer’s intentions, throughout the 19^th century and much of the 20^th the part has been held hostage by sopranos who have had few qualms about raising the key of some passages, singing the higher octave of others, and interpolating high notes where none were indicated. In 2006-07, for example, coloratura soprano Diana Damrau was the season’s first Rosina; mezzo Joyce DiDonato took over later and can be seen in the video of the simulcast. Here they are in the familiar “Una voce poco fà,” They are both terrific.

Whether performed by high soprano or mezzo soprano, Rosina is a showcase for prodigious dexterity. The opera’s scenario incudes a singing lesson for which Rossini provided an aria, “Contro un cor.” It became common practice, however, for sopranos to depart from the score and substitute pieces that better showed off their virtuosity. In 1883, the “Letter Scene” simply stole the show. One reviewer of the Met’s first performance gave his notice over to Marcella Sembrich’s mini-concert during which the Rosina selected the difficult Proch variations and two German songs, all of which post-date the character’s playlist. In the course of her sixty-four subsequent Met Rosinas, a record still unbroken, Sembrich sometimes sang Bellini, sometimes Chopin or Johann Strauss. In the 1920s, Amelita Galli-Curci picked a bel canto aria, not necessarily by Rossini, and followed it religiously with “Home Sweet Home,” the latter chosen to privilege the singer’s legendary legato and creamy timbre. This is Galli-Curci’s 1927 recording of the old standard.

The Met’s first experiment with a mezzo Rosina, a single performance by Jennie Tourel in 1945, left reviewers cold. In the new production of February 1954, the audience at last heard Rossini’s own aria in the “Lesson Scene,” but it was sung by coloratura Roberta Peters. Two months later Rosina was restored to her earthier, mezzo self. The rapturously received Victoria de los Angeles made an irrefutable case for the lower voice. And mezzos Teresa Berganza and Marilyn Horne ultimately ended the hegemony of the high coloratura. Since then, mezzos have taken the advantage, two to one. This Saturday’s Rosina will be mezzo Isabel Leonard. 

In point of fact, male roles dominate Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Nonetheless, the jocular baritone, the dulcet-toned tenorino, the scene-stealing basso buffo and basso profondo have often played second banana, served up with great gobs of shaving soap, to Rosina, high or low.  The production that will be heard and seen this Saturday was new in 2006-07. Wittily staged by Bartlett Sher, its cast formed a remarkable ensemble for which bel canto embellishment was a sign of joy rather than an excuse for vocal calisthenics. The other role that requires extensive embellishment is that of Count Almaviva. His “Cessa di più resistere,” restored at the Met only in recent decades, is a long aria that tests the display of fioritura and the legato of cantilena and crowns the comic climax. Here is how this coming Saturday’s Almaviva, Lawrence Brownlee, sang it in concert in 2005.