Venerdì 20 e sabato 21 febbraio, al Teatro Politeama, all’interno del programma della stagione concertistica 2014-2015 dell’Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, si terranno due concerti che vedranno protagonista un direttore d’orchestra di fama internazionale, il sicilianoSalvatore Percacciolo. Durante i due concerti verranno eseguiti brani di tre compositori: Giovanni Bottesini e gli austriaci Christoph Willibald Gluck e Franz Joseph Haydn; quest’ultimo padre del “classicismo viennese” insieme a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart e Ludwig van Beethoven.
Salvatore Percacciolo
Dopo aver iniziato a soli 4 anni a suonare il pianoforte, il maestro Percacciolo, si è iscritto al conservatorio di Messina per proseguire gli studi in composizione al conservatorio di Palermo. Successivamente ha completato gli studi in direzione d’orchestra a Firenze con Piero Bellugi e a Helsinki con Jorma Panula. Inoltre, lo scorso anno, ha partecipato ad una selezione internazionale ed è stato scelto dal maestro Lorin Maazel per ricoprire il ruolo di conductor fellow al Castleton Festival in Virginia. Durante il festival, ha sostituito Maazel, venuto a mancare proprio in quel periodo, nel Don Giovanni di Mozart. Anche l’edizione del festival di quest’anno, sotto la direzione artistica della famiglia di Maazel, vedrà la presenza del maestro Percacciolo che dirigerà un concerto sinfonico e un dittico che comprende un’opera in prima assoluta mondiale di Derek Wang e “L’Heure espagnole” di Maurice Ravel.
“Nonostante le mie esibizioni in giro per il mondo- ha affermato il maestro Salvatore Percacciolo- da siciliano tornare a Palermo è sempre una grandissima emozione. L’Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, inoltre, mi fa ricordare quando studiavo al conservatorio qui a Palermo e ogni venerdì sera andavo ad assistere ai loro concerti. Negli ultimi anni, questa gloriosa istituzione, è stata investita da una forte crisi risultato di una politica italiana anti-culturale. A tal proposito faccio un appello a tutti i giovani siciliani, e non solo, per invitarli a riempire sempre più i teatri e le sale da concerto di questa meravigliosa terra e per iniziare una vera e propria rivoluzione culturale partendo dalla musica, linguaggio universale ricco di grandi emozioni, gioie e dolori espresse senza la necessità di utilizzare Google Translator.”
The highly anticipated first entrance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to deliver what has become her signature off-the-bench talk, “Law in Opera,” begins off-stage left where a slight, frail shadow gets projected on the walls by the flashlight helping her on stage, then it grows to become enormous, thrilling, filling the wall and throwing the audience into wildly enthusiastic applause. This is the Ginsburg Effect. It was very much in evidence yesterday at the Castleton Festival tent. Judging by a full and exciting docket of programming – an afternoon talk, a play, a chamber concert, pre-show music/cabaret, and an evening bill of two comic operas – I am happy to report that Castleton Festival is alive and well as it enters its first full season without Maestro Lorin Maazel at its helm. Maazel died last summer on Sunday this very week. Stepping up as Artistic Director is his wife, the accomplished actress and director Dietlinde Turban Maazel. Some other remarkable “star” talents are assisting with the transition. 
Enter the incomparable, notorious RBG, or, as we have come to speak affectionately of her, “the little Justice.” There’s nothing little or trivial about the Justice’s insights into the world of opera. Ginsburg introduces scenes from operatic repertoire that she has chosen in order to point out legal characters and issues that proliferate in the plots. Behind her demurred elegance, the Justice wields evidence of misaligned legalities with a deadly accurate foil, skewering both the characters in the operas and the current interpreters of our constitution who would choose “literal” v. “purposive” and “strict” rather than “sensible” readings of the law. In the opera Carmen, the young gypsy “negotiates a sort of plea bargain” to stay out of jail by singing the famous seduction aria “Habanera.” Following the scene, steamily performed by Taryn Holback and Daniel Noone, the Justice responds with soft-voiced enthusiasm, “A great beginning, don’t you agree?”
CASTLETON FESTIVAL June 28 – August 2 7 Castleton Meadows Lane Castleton, VA Details and Tickets ———————The justice next introduces the famous quintet from Marriage of Figaro, describing the librettist/composer (Mozart) as a “rock artist at the top of his form.” Legally, the barber, (sung beautifully by Jorge Belloni-Rosario,) narrowly escapes a forced marriage through the almost accidental discovery that the woman in question is sua madre. Throughout the afternoon’s program, we discover that the Justice is not only entertaining but schooling us on the law and legal institutions, including la droit du seigneur (right of feudal lords to “break in” all the young ladies in their fiefdom) and the perniciousness of feudalism. By ending with the scene fromPirates of Penzance, in which the hapless Frederic may be indentured as a pirate for most of his life on a technicality (his leap year birthday) and a strict reading of the law, the Justice has clearly made her case. Opera shows how the law can run amok and lead to tragedy or absurdity but does it so beautifully and often ends with a scene of great reconciliation. The Little Justice assures us that in the Judicial Branch of our government at least, if sadly not our legislative, the a tone of mutual respect is set, and reconciliation celebrates our great institutional processes. 
The scenes were performed on Saturday by the young artists of the CATS, the signature training program of Castleton Festival which attracts young singers, instrumentalists, conductors, and other artists in an intensive mentoring program by some of the world’s most accomplished artists throughout the four weeks of the festival. Opera (and other music-theatre) of tomorrow is in good hands. The entre-performances break may be one of the best reasons for a pilgrimage to Castleton. Whether you plan online to partake in the festival’s weekend “fine dining” offerings or bring and supplement your own picnic, the rolling green hills, studded as they are with midsummer rolls of hay, is more restorative than a day at the spa. I always include in my break to take a short walk towards the Theatre House to visit the animals, Dietlinde’s menagerie of beasties that include some randy goats, donkeys, ponies, a pig, a zebra and its equally wild companion and original “zonkey.” Maria Tucci, star of stage and screen, directed both operas on the evening’s bill. Conductor Salvatore Percacciolo won me over completely last season when he courageously stepped in and most successfully took up the baton for Maazel and conducted Don Giovanni. He wowed me again last night. Both Tucci and Percacciolo bring such verve to ignite the comic spirit of both Maurice Ravel’s rarely performed L’Heure Espagnole and the world premiere of Derrick Wang’s Scalia/Ginsburg. 
L’Heure Espagnole was unknown to me before this production. It’s a chamber work of absolute confection without the goo, and the company went for a truly funny and over-the-top interpretation. Kate Allen is delightful as Concepción, the sultry, languorous and much-ignored wife of a busy Toledo clockmaker. Her singing seems effortless. This singer-actress has displayed a marvelous range at Castleton, from her faithful, tormented Suzuki in last year’s Madame Butterfly to this contemporary free-wheeling woman, conveying both the character’s restlessness and her sparkling curiosity. When the clockmaker leaves to attend to the town’s official clocks, the bored housewife amuses herself with passersby. Tyler Nelson, who was arresting last year as the ultra-serious Ottavio in Don Giovanni, here pulls out all the stops in a comic role that reminds me of the dandy Dalí played as a young Nathan Lane. In this role, his vocal agility is matched by an astounding and hysterically funny physical inventiveness. He arrives on a bicycle with an extravagant bouquet, pivots, flops, pounces up on a desk like a cat, and blind-staggers when he’s pushed under a tablecloth. This poet-song writer, distracted at every turn, swoons over his own prolific eloquence, but it turn out in other love matters he either lacks the focus or the stamina. Concepción next succumbs to the powerful ardor of the banker Don Iñigo Gomez but not before she puts him off and he gets himself stuck in a grandfather clock. Tyler Simpson is an accomplished bass-baritone who also returns from last year’s success as Leporello in Castleton’s acclaimed Don Giovanni. He can make his characters at once buffoonish and sympathetic as he does here and with his clear, confident voice and dramatic sensibilities. Meanwhile, Concepción is getting desperate and running ragged, hiding her various suitors. “One lover lacks style, the other can’t get to the point!” she sings in French. Ben Bloomfield plays Ramiro, the mule driver, the third and most unlikely lover. But Concepción discovers in his show of physical strength matched by good-humored attentiveness to her whims that he offers what neither words nor money can buy. Cris Fricso has to play the preoccupied and therefore cuckolded husband but he does so with grace and good humor. It’s all classic comic business – lovers hiding and popping out unexpectedly, amorous advances pushed off by a beautiful woman, scurrying up and down stairs – which Tucci and her delightful band of singer-actors milk for all its worth. Percacciolo keeps the orchestra racing along, including punctuations of clocks ticking. All builds to a happy quintet and delightful end. L’articolo completo su http://dctheatrescene.com/2015/07/14/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-a-highlight-at-castleton-festival/
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg married a same-sex couple in May, she proudly proclaimed that she did so “by the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United States.” A month later, when the court acknowledged that same-sex marriage was indeed a constitutional right, Justice Antonin Scalia angrily dissented. A constitutional literalist, he called the 5-4 decision “a judicial putsch” that “threatened American democracy.” After this historic head-to-head, the two justices headed off to a Washington party, where Scalia, a frustrated opera singer, reportedly belted with great gusto Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,'” much to Ginsburg’s delight. That Ruth and Nino can be SCOTUS chums appears to bewilder Washington to no end. Then again, the justices share two things unexpected in our present political discourse. However much Ginsburg and Scalia may argue over interpretation, they operate on the principle that devotion to constitutional rights, not self-interest, serves society. Equally exotic in government, where art patronage has become anathema, the justices are opera buffs. Presumably, they argue about that too. This time, Ginsburg is said to be the stickler for literal convention, while Scalia has claimed he is more open-minded about modern approaches to staging. A commonplace in opera, of course, is that by penetrating psyches, music exposes the deeper bonds and inherent inner conflicts that cause enemies to become friends or friends, enemies. So it makes sense that the justices should now have their own buddy opera. Derrick Wang’s “Scalia/Ginsburg” had its premiere Saturday at the Castleton Festival, begun by conductor Lorin Maazel on his Virginia farm 70 miles west of Washington, D.C. The affectionate, hour-long one-act comic opera shared a double bill with Ravel’s “L’heure Espagnole,” and it was streamed live, which is how I viewed it. Two other things these justices share — a sense of humor and an attraction to the limelight — proved useful to Wang. An ambitious young composer who holds law and music degrees, he wrote a funny, sentimental rhymed libretto with hundreds of footnotes citing legal and operatic precedents and showed it to Scalia and Ginsburg. They’ve attended Washington National Opera together for more than two decades and have even performed together onstage with the company as supernumeraries. Wang’s was operatic bait they could hardly resist. The Supreme Court may not really be one big happy family, but Wang’s most significant accomplishment in “Scalia/Ginsburg” is his compassion for both characters. However much the justices may like each other, the vast majority of us who care about the issues and the country have use for only one of them. Saturday’s crowd at Castleton was clearly in the Ginsburg camp, applauding whenever the soprano portraying her made a biting point. Ginsburg was, moreover, in the audience, whereas Scalia was in Rome (I hope at the opera). And yet, even from a quite primitive stream with wretched sound and many computer glitches, you could sense from the laughter and the applause a kind of astonished sympathy for Scalia, whose surface bluster was revealed to be compensation for human vulnerability. But “Scalia/Ginsberg” is a lost opportunity for using opera as a means to gain profound understanding. The score is a jokey pastiche of famous bits from popular operas with little original music. Wang has an impressive facility for unlikely transitions, but after a while that began to seem too artificial, as though getting along simply meant superficial inoffensiveness instead of thinking something through and coming up with something new. The opera opens with Scalia carrying on in a clever Handelian rage aria, whereupon he is commanded by the Commentator to investigate why the justice is so unrelenting in his dissenting. As in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Scalia is made to undergo three trials. But Ginsburg forces her way in, feistily contradicting all Scalia says but in total defense of her friend’s right to say it. She insists on going through the trials with him. One opera after another is referenced (as Wang points out in pedantic detail in his footnotes — the libretto was published in the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts). The justices discover how much they really care for each other. With nods to “West Side Story,” they sing together: “We are different. We are one.” They pass their trials and are afforded the ability each night after court adjourns to remove their robes and become alter-ego opera stars. It is all sweet and touching. Soprano Ellen Wieser and tenor John Overholt are convincing both as flexible, comic opera singers and justices with inner lives, although there isn’t much Adam Cioffari could be expected to do given the thankless role of the Commentator and the ridiculous heavenly costume. Actress Maria Tucci’s straightforward production didn’t do much to remove “Scalia/Ginsburg” from seeming more like a revue or a situation comedy than an opera. Maybe if Scalia had been on hand, he could have dissented on the side of operatic adventure.
Salvatore Percacciolo, a young Italian protégé of the late Maazel, conducted a lively performance.
The sweetness and caring and considered devotion to ideals are in such short supply in Washington these days that in the end “Scalia/Ginsburg” feels like a gift. Earlier in the day, Ginsburg presented a program (also streamed) called “Law in Opera,” in which she used her dry wit to introduce opera scenes that revolved around judicial issues and were sung by talented young singers. She concluded by praising the Supreme Court for not demonstrating “the animosity that currently moves the other branches of our government.” Could we please make it a constitutional requirement that no one can be sworn into office in the White House or Congress without having first seen “Scalia/Ginsburg”? mark.swed@latimes.com
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