In Season Opener, Opera Company of Middlebury Navigates the High Cs

Doug Anderson, the Opera Company of Middlebury‘s artistic director and founder, is at it again. With producer and stage manager Mary Longey and music director Filippo Ciabatti leading a 25-piece orchestra, Anderson will launch the company’s 21st season with Gaetano Donizetti’s comical romp La Fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). That’s the one where the tenor sings nine high Cs in a single aria, the famously challenging “Ah, mes amis.” (The opera is in French with English supertitles.)

Anderson, who typically holds auditions in New York City and snaps up promising singers before they become unaffordable, landed two rising stars for Daughter‘s leading roles: tenor Patrick Bessenbacher, who will sing Tonio, and soprano Sara LeMesh, singing Marie.

Anderson described Daughter as “effervescent.” “It’s really a rom-com,” he said. The choice contrasts with last year’s offerings of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio and Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied — both serious works about prisoners.

Daughter, which premiered in 1840, is officially set in the Tyrolean Alps during the Napoleonic Wars. (Anderson is well known for his creative transpositions of operas to different times and places, though he likes to keep those choices under wraps.) Marie, abandoned as a baby and adopted by a French regiment, falls in love with Tonio, a peasant — “literally, she falls off a cliff, and he catches her,” Anderson said with a chuckle. Tonio joins the regiment to gain their acceptance. But then Marie learns she is a noblewoman, a role for which her upbringing among soldiers has given her zero preparation. Comic plot turns and light, jaunty music follow.

This is Bessenbacher’s first time singing Tonio, he said during a phone call from his Brooklyn home. The Kansas-born tenor, 26, earned a master’s in vocal performance from the Juilliard School two years ago.

Since then, he has crossed paths a few times with his costar, LeMesh: two summers at Marlboro Music Festival, the famed Vermont chamber music fest; and last year at West Bay Opera in California, where they sang leading roles in Carlos Franzetti’s Corpus Evita. Bessenbacher, who has sung leads at Opera San José in California and the Florentine Opera in Wisconsin, will be at Marlboro again this summer.

Asked how he is preparing for the daunting Daughter aria, Bessenbacher said, “I’ve been practicing and experimenting with it for three months, so I think I have it in a good place.” One week into rehearsals, he is merely “marking” it — half-singing it — but “when we get to tech week, I’ll start really trying it out.” For performances, it’s “all about your trust in the preparation.”

But nailing “Ah, mes amis” doesn’t mean he can relax. “That aria is in the first act,” he said. “There’s a second-act aria, a trio, the finale. It’s not just that you need to sing the nine high Cs; you have to do it and then keep singing.”

Bessenbacher also pointed out that the character of Marie may not have a showstopper, but she sings a lot more than Tonio over the course of the opera. “I want everyone to know how fantastic a soprano Sara is,” he said.

Daughter‘s lively choral numbers are divided between the townspeople’s chorus and the regiment chorus. Four choral singers hail from the Youth Opera Company, led by Sarah Cullins, which merged with Opera Company of Middlebury last year. Youth Opera graduates George Lane, Wanda Sullivan and Jane Jensen-Waggoner are in the mixed chorus, and current participant Nathan Stefani will sing as a soldier in the regiment chorus as well as in the mixed chorus.

Anderson says he has been “fussing over” the cast’s comic timing and attitude. “I’m of the opinion that comic opera should be laugh-out-loud funny,” he said. This production, he promises, is “deliciously” so.

This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2024.

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