Local firm selected for Puccini/Coppola world premiere
The Daily Mail
Aug. 24, 2009

For several years, the Inter-Cities Performing Arts, Inc. company has staged musical performances at the Altamura Center for Arts and Cultures, in Round Top. This fall, the company will perform the world premiere of “La Coupe et Les Levres (The Cup and the Lips),” a transformation by conductor and composer Anton Coppola of Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Edgar.”

Company and Altamura Center co-founder Carmela Altamura announced the performance Sunday during a “150th Anniversary Tribute to Giacomo Puccini” concert of the composer’s arias.

“I was just overjoyed and felt a tremor of great responsibility,” she said of the partnership between her company and Coppola. “No one living has seen a premiere of a Puccini opera. It is an historic event.”

The murder mystery will open appropriately on Oct. 31, 2009 at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College.

Last year, Anton Coppola decided to rework the libretto and touch the operatic score to transform the opera, which reportedly had been a disappointment to Puccini, into a new work.

The final product, Coppola said, is a supposition or conjecture on what Puccini would have wanted. He explained that the title referred to happiness and the idea that something may happen after a cup is raised but before it touches the mouth.

Franco Alfano set a precedent for making his mark on Puccini’s music by completing “Turandot” after the composer’s death in 1924, at the age of 65.

The performance will feature this year’s winners of the upcoming Altamura/Enrico Caruso International Voice Competition and will be directed by Michael Philip Davis.

Davis, Coppola and several past competition winners presented a staging of Puccini’s “Il Trittico: Gianni Schicchi” Sunday, along with an aria from each of the composer’s other operas.

Although “Gianni Schicchi” was originally set in 1299, the cast wore modern clothes and played in a modern bedroom.

“As you can see, it is no longer 1299; it is 2009,” Coppola told the audience before raising his baton.

Coppola said that although he has conducted Puccini’s music several times, each performance is unique.

“We are not machines,” he said.

And, he said, he always learns from the performers with whom he works.

The opera’s director, Michael Philip Davis, who has spent a significant amount of time in his family’s Columbia County home, met Coppola while attending the Manhattan School of Music. Although he has worked with Coppola on other projects and has directed Puccini before, Davis said directing this show has been different.

“Everyone learns when you work with Maesro Coppola,” he said.

The afternoon ended a summer workshop featuring classes instructed by Altaumra and Camille Coppola, no relation to the conductor, and her husband John, of the New Rochelle Opera.

The group spent two weeks practicing in New York City before coming to Round Top last week. Performers lived together at the Altamura Center in the days leading up to the performance.

Altamura described to the audience that the company is run like an Italian opera, in the back, or dining room in this case, she said, indicating the rest of the house behind the stage.

Davis said the intimacy of the space allowed him work out details with the cast. Detail, he said, is very important to a comedy.

And an hour before curtain, the cast ate lasagna, meat, salad and fruit around two tables and in the kitchen, speaking in English and Italian with the Altamuras and each other. After eating, cast members disappeared to other parts of the building, their vocal warm-up routines audible in the kitchen. Davis advised one tenor on intonation of a specific musical passage after attending to another performer and dressing the stage.

Carmela Altamura said both Sunday’s performance and the upcoming premiere was a special honor for Greene County. Various local organizations and residents have provided a lot of support for the company. Greene County residents will have an opportunity to watch an abridged version of Johann Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus,” in English, at the Altamura Center on Aug. 30.

“Arts have held a place from the very beginning,” she said, adding that on stage, performers represent the meaning of what it means to be human.

“If actors were excellent or transformed into their characters, the audience will leave different than they came in,” she said.