Barihunk duo in Oper Köln's "Street Scene"

Timothy McDevitt as Harry Easter (right)

Barihunk Timothy McDevitt will be singing the role of the sleazy boss Harry Easter and fellow barihunk James McOran-Campbell will sing the alcoholic husband George Jones in Kurt Weill's Street Scene at Oper Köln.  The production is a co-production with the Teatro Real and Opéra de Monte-Carlo. The Madrid performance featured barihunk Paulo Szot, hunkentenor Joel Prieto and soprano Patricia Racette.

The current production in Cologne features Kyle Albertson and Oliver Zwerg as Frank Maurrant, Jack Swanson as Sam Kaplan and Allison Oakes as Anna Maurrant. Performance run from April 28 through May 16 and tickets and additional cast information is available online.

In 2010, McDevitt won the Lys Symonette Prize at the Lotte Lenya Competition for his outstanding extraordinary artistic promise. Lenya was the widow of Kurt Weill and competitors are judged on their ability to interpret Weill's music.

An overview of Street Scene from the Madrid production:

Street Scene is an American opera with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes, which was written in 1946. It was the composer's first opera composed during his American exile years and is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Elmer Rice.  Weill referred to the piece as an "American opera." intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the first Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after its Broadway premiere in 1947.

The story tells of a series of anonymous lives in a big city from a brutally realistic viewpoint. The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, including Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was." It also has jazz and blues influences in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House". Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped In a Ribbon and Tied In a Bow," "Wouldn't You Like To Be On Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed," an extended song-and-dance sequence.

James McOran-Campbell (photo: Jane Hobson)

After his run in Street Scene, McDevitt moves on to the music of Leonard Bernstein, when he performs Maximillian in Candide on June 20th with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin with tenor Alex Shrader and soprano Erin Morley. He sticks with Bernstein for his Mass with the Chicago Symphony on July 20th under the baton of Marin Alsop at Ravinia.

James McOran-Campbell will sing Dr. Falke in a re-imagined version of Strauss' Die Fledermaus with Baseless Fabric Theatre in London from August 1-14.

Bo Skovhus to perform double-bill of operatic rarities

Bo Skovhus in Reimann's Lear

One of our most popular posts with readers was entitled "Lauri Vasar Strips Down for Il Prigioniero," which prompted us to put up a follow up post with additional photos of the barihunk in his scivvies. So imagine our excitement when we found out that über-barihunk Bo Skovhus would be performing the piece with Oper Köln in March and April 2015.

Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero is a 7-part, 50-minute opera which was first broadcast by the Italian radio station RAI on December 1, 1949. The work is based on the short story La torture par l'espérance ("Torture by Hope") from the collection Nouveaux contes cruels by the French writer Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and from La Légende d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak by Charles de Coster. Some of the musical material is based on Dallapiccola's 1938 choral work Canti di prigionia.


Despite the taxing nature of the role, Skovhus will return after intermission to sing an equally demanding role, that of the bass solo in Bernd Alois Zimmerman's Ekklesiastische Aktion: Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht das geschah unter der Sonne ("I turned and saw all the injustice there was under the sun")

Bo Skovhus and Silvana Dussmann in The Merry Widow: 

The 35-minute piece is scored for two speakers, bass soloist, and large orchestra, with text based on the words of the Preacher in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. The work also requires enormous physical stamina, as it includes the stamping of feet, gesturing, jumping and performing in various yoga-like poses.

The piece was commissioned by the city of Kiel for the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Ekklesiastische Aktion was Zimmermann's final composition before he killed himself and the music quotes Bach's, "Es ist genug" (It is enough). That section is played fortissimo by trumpets and trombones in a jolting expression of mortality.

Bo Skovhus is currently singing the role of Graf Danilo in Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) at Oper Köln. Tickets and additional cast information for both shows are available online.

David Adam Moore & Xavier Rivera

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