UW Music Offers Sunday Matinee Of Deadly Sins, Wanton Nuns

We want to make it clear right away that this is a student performance. We enjoyed the chance to see these two pieces, but mostly we went to hear a variety of young singers. What they lack in technical skill, they can sometimes make up for in drive and commitment. Sometimes.

Seven Deadly Sins is a Brecht/Weill collaboration, and it stars Anna and her sister Anna (Lucy Weber and Signe Mortensen), setting out from Louisiana to make their fortune in the world. Anna is the pragmatic, hard-choices one; her sister Anna is more artistic, dreamy, willful. They send their earnings back home to feed a parisitic family (Jeremy Irland, Justin Beal, James Sheider, Ryan Bede).

Claudia Zahn directs without keen insight into how to stage the episodic "morality" tale, or how to deal with Anna's bifurcation into an adaptive and naive self. (They fight and roll around on the floor.) Weill's music is lively, a pastiche of popular styles, but conductor Julia Tai found the through-line of melancholy on which it all hangs. If Brecht was eager to disillusion us, Weill knew that the experience of disillusionment was deeply bittersweet.

You'd have to be granite-hearted not to love Puccini's Sister Angelica (okay, Suor Angelica, opera snobs). After seven years in a convent, the mysterious Sister Angelica has a visitor bringing news from her "old" life. But first, since it's a verismo one-acter, we get about 15 minutes of convent life, the interplay between the nuns; it's not exactly gritty realism but it allows Puccini cover while setting up the music he'll tear your heart out with later.

Our Friday night Angelica, Joo-Young Jung, has a completely lovely voice but it's not suited to the demands of the role; we were impressed by the emotional fervor she demonstrated. You gotta have fervor with your Puccini or it's deadly dull. Sunday, Angelica will be sung by Mariatana del Rosario.

Andrew Siefert directs, and he makes a stab at introducing the nuns (that's the problem with nuns in habits, they all look alike), but their gatherings come across as more of a book club meet-up than that of a cloistered convent. At points we just closed our eyes and let the the Puccini wash over us.

Weill: 7 Deadly Sins/Puccini: Sister Angelica
UW School of Music
Sunday, November 12, 3:00pm
Meany Theater, UW Campus
Tickets: $25/$15 students & seniors
206-543-4880