April 22-28, 2004

opera

Quite a Catch

gunning for success: Baritone Nathan Gunn, seen here in OCP's Cosi Fan Tutte, tries out a new role in the company's The Pearl Fishers.

A Bizet romance rounds out OCP's season, with baritone Nathan Gunn a shining pearl.

by David Shengold

Opera Company of Philadelphia’s season promises a great finale, their first-ever production of Georges Bizet’s tunefully alluring Pearl Fishers. The future composer of Carmen was only 24 when he wrote this delightful 1863 work, which tells us little about either pearls or fishermen but prefigures those 1940s Road To … movies with two Friendly Guys competing for a Pretty Girl in An Exotic Clime. Director Kay Walker Castaldo and designer Boyd Ostroff gave Verdi’s somber Trovatore kind of a "beach-vacation" aesthetic this fall, so they should really score with Bizet’s Sri Lankan forest glades and ocean cliffs. The opera’s gorgeously perfumed music works a special magic. Anyone who’s ever watched an opera gala has probably heard a tenor and baritone blend voices in the catchy "Au fond du temple saint," but there’s an equally enchanting duet for tenor and soprano, a dramatic one for her and the baritone, plus terrific solo scenes for all three leads and a rousing trio to end the evening.

The Pearl Fishers is not an "East meets West and dies" Orientalist fantasy like Lakme or Madama Butterfly; all of the characters are, in fact, Sri Lankan. It needs a trio of expert young singers at home in the seductive (but surprisingly hard to master) charms of French style. OCP has put together a leading team that any opera house in the world would envy, all young American artists who have had great success here before: Mary Dunleavy (as the priestess Leila), William Burden (as the hunter Nadir) and Nathan Gunn (as tribal chieftain Zurga). All three have marked major career milestones in Paris and shine in French music. Plus, neither the "pretty girl" nor the "friendly guys" part will be a stretch, since Dunleavy looks great onstage and off (as do the two guys, for that matter); and as baritone and tenor have been frequent co-stars all over the country since early in their careers, they and their families have become close friends.

The Princeton-based Burden has proved a frequent hit at OCP (and returns for two new parts next season), but Nathan Gunn has been a rarer visitor to the Academy, suiting up for Mozart's Così fan tutte in 1996 and again last year. Catch him here in Philly while you can: He's kept very busy at the Metropolitan Opera and the leading companies of Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and London. Though he does sing La Boheme and Barber of Seville, he's enjoyed special acclaim for difficult parts in nonstandard works like Gluck's Iphigénie an Tauride, Prokofiev's War and Peace and Britten's Rape of Lucretia and Billy Budd -- a title role in which he sets the world standard.

He and his pianist wife, Julie Jordan Gunn, met at the University of Illinois and still reside in Champaign, managing to practice and explore new repertory around a busy naptime and babysitter schedule for their five kids. "Children bring an element of focus into one's life: When we have a window, we really work," Gunn laughs. The Gunns are acclaimed joint recitalists (they were among the first to perform in Perelman, in a superb Schubert evening for the Chamber Music Society in March 2002) and have a particular interest in American song. Gunn points out that American music has usually employed a high-baritone protagonist in both pop and classical (citing Crosby, Sinatra, Broadway's John Raitt and the early classical "crossover" baritone John Charles Thomas as influences). From his early days of study with his revered teacher, William Miller, he's made American song -- traditional, contemporary and popular -- a genuine specialty, as his American Anthem CD on EMI confirms. But for the moment, Gallic lyricism's got Gunn's full atttention: Philly's Pearl Fishers marks not only a reunion with two admired colleagues but a career first for this thoughtful and engaging world-class singer. (d_shengold@citypaper.net)

The Pearl Fishers runs April 23-May 9, $5-$155, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Academy of Music, Broad and Locust sts., 215-732-8400.