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We've been thinking quite a bit about Richard Strauss lately, and especially his curious decision to stage a love scene between a woman and a decapitated head. Which got us thinking about the striptease that same woman performs for her stepfather. Diverse musical paths
cross in HOT’s ‘Salome’By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comWhich, for some reason, got us thinking about the private lives of the stars of Hawaii Opera Theatre's "Salome," opening tonight, and just how twisted they might be. Sadly, during last week's panel discussion of the opera at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, little evidence of past depravity was uncovered. The only twists we found were in the tortured and surprising paths one takes to the operatic stage these days.
The lights dim and the curtain rises on Narraboth, King Herod's captain of the guards, who sings of his infatuation with the siren Salome and whose "love of music comes from my parents."
"My mom, being of German stock, had my older sister at 40, me at 42, another at 43 and another at 44. Pick a cabbage, drop a baby. Both my parents were born in 1923, so the music around the house was always older music -- Lawrence Welk every Saturday."
Oh wait. That's not Narraboth, the strident military man whose lust for Salome leads him to stab himself. That's Jim Cornelison, the tenor playing him.
Presented by Hawaii Opera Theatre 'Salome'
When: 8 p.m. tonight, 4 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Neal Blaisdell Concert Hall, 777 Ward Ave.
Cost: $27 to $95; discounts for students
Call: 596-7858
"I was a pianist in college, but then one day someone told me, 'You're not a very good pianist, but you do have a good voice.' I'd never seen an opera at that time."
Enter the Page, servant to Herod's wife Herodias, whose MBA from the University of Chicago has not helped her mezzo-soprano career. She warns Narraboth of the treacherous Salome, calling her a "pale, dead woman."
"Through a lot of therapy I discovered that what I really wanted to do was sing," reveals the Page, Dorothy Byrne. "I was in my early 30s. I didn't even know I could sing. When I went for my first voice lesson, I prepared "My Country 'Tis of Thee" -- it's all I had!"
Enter the First Soldier, who is aroused by an uproar in the nearby banquet hall, and who comes from a family of church singers.
"That's the first music I started singing," says Phillip Skinner. "Today both my brothers are in church music, and I'm the black sheep, the one doing 'Salome.' "
Enter the Second Soldier, who comes to Judea via Brooklyn and who's "always sung. I think the first words I ever spoke were sung. It was the theme from 'Batman.'" Leon Williams didn't know much about opera then, and in fact returned home after college to make his way as a chorister. "But then I started entering competitions and winning them as a soloist. It turns out, I guess, that I was supposed to be a soloist," he laughs.
Just then the voice of John the Baptist is heard offstage, the hapless prophet having been imprisoned for criticizing Herodias' decision to marry her ex-husband's brother. Much later we will see his head on a platter, but at present he's just another ex-string player.
"I started off as a cellist, actually, at a conservatory, and was just taking voice lessons on the side to fulfill electives," says David Okerlund in his booming baritone. "I was also taking hormone therapy at the time to help my voice develop -- just kidding!"
From the depths of the cistern John sings of "another who is greater than I," meaning the Messiah, though the Biblically challenged might think he's referring to one of opera's greatest characters, Salome. The seducer of countless men in her day and hundreds of artists in the intervening centuries, her most recent conquest was HOT artistic director Henry Akina, who succumbed to Salome's wiles while attending her sister's wedding.
"I owe it to my sister," says Kristine Ciesinski, speaking of her opera career in general and not just the meeting with Akina. "She's also an opera singer, and as a child I always wanted to do everything she did." To her father, a gym teacher, she owes her love of sports, which "serves me very well in 'Salome.' You need stamina, physical as well as vocal, for this role."
Salome's onstage parents aren't nearly so encouraging. That would be Herodias (Ruthild Engert, whose formerly "tiny little voice" once inspired a former teacher to counsel her to "go home and have children") and stepdad Herod (Kenneth Riegel, a lifelong singer who remembers being heartbroken upon discovering that he couldn't be a boy soprano forever).
But somehow they all made it to the stage, their collective story forming a moral that appears to apply equally to the lives of both on- and off-stage figures: In the end, destiny always seems to win.
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