Search - Long Spring Arts Orchestra, Victoria Bond, conductor :: The Old Maid and the Thief

A one-aria opera, not worth the effort

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 09/25/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Gian Carlo Menotti carved out a small but lucrative niche for himself between Puccini and Broadway, and while he worked the vein of opera-for-the-people well in the Forties and Fifties, his music hasn't worn well. To remain populist, he resorted to bald simplicity, even banalaity, and the dressing of Puccini-light that he poured over the surface, though occasionally tasty, contains no nourishment. If, like me, you were intrigued by "What a curse for a woman is a timid man," the maid's aria so beautifully recorded by Dawn Upshaw a decade ago, you'll be tempted to hear the rest of "The Old Maid and the Thief," expecting to find similar gems.



Sadly, there aren't any. The socre is veyr thin, even by the standards of radio opera. The orchestral part rarely departs from the vocal line and often hugs it note for note. The musical idiom is chirpy neoclassicism, a style richly worked by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Poulenc, but Menotti ranks nowhere near those composers. As a librettist he's tied to cliches, setting banalaities like "What awful weather" (repeated four times) and "What a lovely voice" (three times), when he's not randomly attaching notes to quotidian conversation. It's a wonder that "What a curse" emerges at all from the ssurrounding lowlands.



This recording feels like a good community-arts effort, with adequate playing and singing all around. Albany has provided good sound. In the end, "The Old Maid and the Thief" got what it desderved, a decently made souvenir for the curious."