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Children's Chorus's Enchanting 'Nightingale'

By Joan Reinthaler
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, May 16, 2005; C04

"The Nightingale," a children's choral opera that had its Washington premiere Saturday at Lisner Auditorium, is a delight. Composer Imant Raminsh, librettist James Tucker, and Joan Gregoryk and her splendid Children's Chorus of Washington have collaborated to produce a work that might aspire to a place in the repertoire alongside Britten's "Noah's Flood" or Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel."

In this telling of the Hans Christian Andersen story, the role of the delicate nightingale whose singing so captivates the Emperor of China is given to about half the chorus and one enchanting dancer (Malinda Reese, in this production), and the music this nightingale sings is simple but almost ecstatic. The rest of the chorus play courtiers who narrate and comment, a contingent of cows and another of frogs that, it turns out, are definitely not nightingales. The few children's solo roles, the Chief Counselor and the Kitchen Maid, who direct the action, were beautifully sung by Megan Perez and Katherine Caughlan. Ethan Ableman pantomimed the bejeweled mechanical Nightingale (a present from the Emperor of Japan) with devastating artificiality. The two adult soloists, Robert W. Tudor as the Emperor and Robert Baker as Death, who is sent packing by the real nightingale, handled their assignments ably.

This was a thoroughly professional production in every respect. The set, designed by Tony Cisek, was simple -- risers; a throne area; a platform, accessed by a ladder, that served as the nightingale's tree; and a fabric backdrop and hangings that took on a variety of moods and colors with changes in lighting. Catherine Flye's stage direction was purposeful and unfussy, and the stage, full of 80 kids, never looked crowded or disorganized.

Gregoryk, who led a well-rehearsed 15-piece instrumental ensemble, paced the opera's 11 scenes (which flow comfortably from one to the next without interruption) quickly but without any sense of haste; after initial jitters, the ensemble between singers and instruments went smoothly.

The first half of the concert featured the Treble Chorus, the junior arm of the CCW program, in a set of folk settings and songs written for young voices, and it was in this part of the evening that Gregoryk's genius was most evident. She has these 50 kids singing accurately and lightly and with exemplary diction. But above all, they concentrated. During the entire 50 minutes they were onstage, not one fidgeted and not one took an eye off her. Impressive!

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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