
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg doesn’t bother with performing because she’s too busy communicating. She doesn’t have time to be a star, because she’s telling you something urgently necessary to know about longing, and hilarity, and stillness.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra performs without a conductor, but that doesn’t mean no one is in charge. NSS is the music director and 1st violinist, but it was obvious last Saturday that her enthusiasm radiated in ripples of delight across the stage, and into the audience. It was a thrilling ensemble performance: 100% enthusiasm and conviction and concentration. And it was the rarest kind of performance—rare in any genre of music—one that manages to dispense with the rituals and focus on the music.
The first half of the program consisted of instrumental pieces from operatic composers. All were newly arranged to fit the New Century’s forces, which didn’t matter a bit. The Prestissimo of Verdi’s quartet was a romp, the Cavalleria intermezzo (a favorite ever since Raging Bull) really ached, and the Meditation from Thaïs brought down the house. But it was the performance of the Fledermaus overture that really floored me. I thought I knew all I needed to know about this over-familiar trifle. “I know, but listen,” NSS was broadcasting, “Isn’t it terrific that we all know all these tunes? Isn’t this a tremendous sound? Listen!” I listened and learned. The beauty and expressivity of her violin playing was accompanied and amplified by her eyes, her gestures, her posture: an expressive totality. An audience of the deaf would be able to follow the music.

After the old favorites of the first half, came an unheard novelty—Donizetti’s one-act farce Rita. It was a sequence of freestanding character arias—“I’m on top of the world!” “I’m in the dumps!” “I hate you!” “I hate you but I’m going to get you to do what I want!” etc.—connected very loosely by dialog. It didn’t make sense and it didn’t matter. It occasioned marvelously vivid and exciting singing and instrumental music.
It helped that the singers—Thomas Glenn, Maria Valdes, Efraín Solis (pictured above)—had voices comfortable with Donizetti’s fiendishly difficult frivolities. And they were adept clowns, too. With 0.0001% of the resources, their performance had approximately 1000 times the wit of L.A. Opera’s last Falstaff.
If Rita is a fair specimen of the one-act operas that lie forgotten in the music libraries of Italy, there’s a whole world that needs to be explored pronto. May I take this opportunity to request that somebody—the oligarchs who built Sochi?—subsidize the task of unearthing them all and bringing them all back to the stage? I can’t think of a more worthwhile project.