I was running slightly late when I arrived at New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church on Elizabeth Street yesterday for the second presentation of Piccolo’s biggest work in this year’s Spotlight Concert Series, Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio. It was still raining, of course, but that didn’t seem to have stopped Piccolites from turning out in droves for the concert version of the ‘other’ Mozart opera in this year’s festival. Abduction is the first opera Piccolo has presented in quite a few years (perhaps ever), and the 1200 seats of the big church in Mazyck-Wraggboro were very nearly full. Piccolo matriarch Ellen Dressler Moryl had made much of her hopes that the event would pull in a strong contingent of the area’s East-Side community, but looking around the expansive room, every face I saw in the audience was white but one.
In any event, the performance was a concert verion of the German opera — without the expensive staging, costumes, sets, technical equipment, etc. — and so the principal singers were in tuxedos and gowns. When they entered for a scene they came in from one of the side vestibules and took up a spot in front of the altar and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, which was jammed onto the tiny dais like frat brothers in a telephone booth. (In fact, it didn’t appear that the whole orchestra was even up there, more like three-fifths).
But the singers — Gregory Cross at Belmonte, LeRoy Lehr as Osmin, Gregory Lorenz as Pedrillo, Patrice Boyd as Constanze, and Jong Mee Lee as Blonde — sang their hearts out, giving nearly as dramatic a performance as they probably would have in costume in a full production. Lehr’s Osmin ran away with most of the scenes he was in, but it’s likely that’s just the nature of the role (think of the Viseer in Disney’s Alladdin.)
Big props to Piccolo and Moryl for tackling such an ambitious production — which featured the Metropolitan Opera’s Gregory Buchalter conducting the CSO and SCETV’s Beryl Dakers providing narration.