Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House, which I visited in mid-August for the closing days of the Aspen Music Festival, tells the varied history of this Colorado mountain town. The opera house is a stately Romanesque structure designed by Willoughby J. Edbrooke, an architect whose work visitors to Washington, D.C., will recognize from the palatial Old Post Office building. Yet despite the cosmopolitan pedigree, Wheeler’s three stories clad in rusticated pink sandstone and the house’s location here among the pine forests of the Rocky Mountains lend it the air of a Wild West artifact, and when it was opened in 1889, it played host to genteel silver magnates and rough-and-tumble mountain men alike.
Silver mines made Aspen prosperous, but only for a few brief years: when the federal government stopped its silver-purchase program in 1893, the town collapsed. And so the Wheeler Opera House and much of the town was shuttered from 1912 until around 1949, when the Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke and the Bauhaus architect Herbert Beyer began to revitalize Aspen as an intellectual retreat and ski resort.
Inside Wheeler, I heard a performance of Mozart’s perennial classic Le nozze di Figaro. It was on this very stage several decades ago that Renée Fleming sang one of her first major roles as the Countess in Figaro—and she returned this year as an artistic director for the Aspen Opera Theater, which oversaw this production together with Aspen’s VocalARTS education program.
Performing were vocal students, roughly in their early to late twenties, some of whom had auditioned specifically to perform these roles, and many of whom are on the verge of significant careers.
Our Figaro was played by the Brazilian bass Vinícius Costa, whom we first meet measuring the space for a new bed in anticipation of his wedding night. Costa’s voice was rich in the lower registers but suffered some hiccups getting off the ground. “Se vuol ballare” is, of course, Figaro’s first great aria as he throws down the gauntlet in his struggle with Count Almaviva, his lecherous employer. Everyone holds his breath for Figaro’s concluding cries of “le suonerò, sì!,” each greater than the next. Sadly, Costa held his breath as well, swallowing the last high-F note that should be a showstopper. Luckily, he improved after, and his “Non più andrai” came off without a hitch.
Costa, who cuts a tall and lanky figure onstage, came off a bit stiff as an actor, though he did have the audience in stitches during the hilarious aria “Tutto è disposto.” “Open your eyes,/ you incautious and stupid men,” Figaro warns us, caught up in the trap that Countess Almaviva and his fiancée, Susanna, have set for him: “Look at these women/ Look what they are!” Costa shined a flashlight into the eyes of the audience members—men at one moment, women at another—to drive his lesson home.
One really must have an excellent Susanna, and the Polish American soprano Magdalena Kuźma delivered with a dainty, mischievous characterization and a polished, ringing tone, shining in her late showpiece aria, “Giunse alfin il momento—Deh, vieni, non tadar.” The American soprano Caitlin Gotimer was her partner in crime, the Countess, and she sang a lovely “Porgi, amor” and “Dove sono,” though her vibrato seemed a tad fast.
Playing the Count was the imposing Mexican American baritone Trevor Haumschilt-Rocha, whose acting imparted appropriate bravado but also just a touch of pathos, especially in the lovely reconciliation scene with his wife at the end. He held back somewhat on the penultimate cry of “e giubilar mi fa!” in his main aria “Hai già vinta”—some singers, by contrast, swing for the fences here.
The Japanese American mezzo-soprano Sophia Maekawa was impish and delightful in the pants role of Cherubino, a boy helplessly infatuated with every pretty woman who crosses his path. Her voice was pleasant, supple, and buttery.
Of the secondary roles, I was immediately impressed by the Korean bass-baritone Sunghoon Han as Dr. Bartolo. I heard a large instrument, sweeping in range and clarion-clear in the high notes. His “La vendetta” was a highlight of the opera. Han’s countryman Jaemyeong Lee, a tenor, was also impressive as Don Basilio, singing with an Italianate, bel canto, heart-on-his-sleeve fervor.
The staging, directed by Sara Erde, was refreshingly simple and largely traditional, swapping eighteenth-century frills for Edwardian suits and dresses, an acceptable compromise. The composer Matthew Aucoin conducted an able orchestra of teachers and students, and chose to restore some of the common cuts one sees made—namely “In quegl’anni, in cui val poco,” a non sequitur aria from Don Basilio in which he remembers a time he clothed himself in the hide of a donkey and thwarted a predator’s advances because of the rank smell. Coming as it does near the climax of the final act, this aria risks dragging the delightfully contrived and complicated plot to a standstill, but it does offer the tenor a chance to flex his chops, and for that we can be grateful.
