Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of American composer Carlisle Floyd, two performances of his opera “Susannah” are being staged Friday, Jan. 23, and Sunday, Jan. 25, by student singers from Loyola University’s Opera Theatre.
Floyd’s 1955 masterwork takes the biblical story of a young girl falsely accused of adultery in the Book of Daniel and adapts its premise to a mid-20th-century setting in the American South.
Its popularity has grown steadily over the past 70 years, and “Susannah” is reported to be the second-most frequently performed English-language opera, surpassed only by the Gershwin Brothers’ “Porgy and Bess.”
This two-act opera has a local connection in that the lead male role of the Rev. Olin Blitch was performed many times by the late New Orleans bass-baritone Norman Treigle, who had a close working relationship with Floyd.
The title role was premiered by Phyllis Curtain at Florida State University, where Floyd was teaching at the time. Treigle’s opera singer daughter, Phyllis Susannah Treigle, was named after her and the opera’s eponymous title.
Although Norman Treigle didn’t debut the role when the opera premiered, he sang the male lead frequently for New York City Opera and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad in the years that followed. This included a performance at the 1958 World’s Fair in Belgium. He was accompanied by Curtain in most of those performances, including the opera’s New Orleans premiere in 1962 directed by Floyd.
The New Orleans premiere of “Susannah” was recorded on a reel-to-reel tape, which was later rerecorded onto a commercially available CD in the 1990s.
On Friday, the title role is being sung by Faith Adams, and the Sunday performance will headline Anna Kate Yeager. Loyola alumnus Matthew Curran is Olin Blitch in both performances. Sixteen other roles are being sung by students in the Loyola Opera Theatre Program.
The singers in both performances will be appearing in period costumes, accompanied by a 27-piece live orchestra made up primarily by Loyola faculty members, many of whom are instrumentalists in the locally based Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Dreux Montegut is the conductor for both performances.
Other principals in the production team include Carol Rausch, director of the Loyola College of Music and Media, coordinating the musical preparation. Irini Kyriakidou-Hymel is the stage director, and Taylor Tumulty as choreographer/stage manager. Lighting design is by Diane Baas, costumes are by Kaci Thomassi of the Loyola Theatre Department and Allison Voth is the diction coach. Props and set pieces are courtesy of the New Orleans Opera Association.
Both productions will take place in the Louis J. Roussel Performance Hall on the Loyola campus on St. Charles Avenue at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday.
Each performance will be about 2 hours and 15 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission.
Before each performance, there will be panel discussions headed by Christopher Ray, executive director of the Floyd Centennial Committee who studied piano and conducting with Floyd at FSU.
Other panel participants include Phyllis Treigle, Carol Rausch and Brian Morgan, author of a 2006 biography of Norman Treigle titled “Strange Child of Chaos.”
Visit cmm.loyno.edu for tickets, which start at $36, with student and senior discounts available.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
