by Lou Harry
Indianapolis Business Journal

The sole on-stage character in Dominick Argento’s one-act opera “A Water Bird Talk” isn’t given a name. He’s just “The Lecturer,” an anonymous gent whose off-stage wife has somehow made him the guest speaker at a ladies’ social club event.

The Lecturer’s subject: water birds (although he would have preferred to speak of spiders). And he’s got some notes and slides to share.

But the Lecturer shares more than his knowledge of our feathered friends. He shares his discomfort. He shares his awkwardness. And, when his wife temporarily leaves her vantage point offstage, he shares his deep sadness about the state of his home life.

Read the rest of the review at IBJ.com

by Jay Harvey, Indianapolis Star

The popular image of opera as something large-scale and grandiose doesn’t tell the whole story.

Chamber opera manages to convey many of the thrills of its magnified cousin, but with the advantage of musical and emotional intimacy.

Indianapolis Opera’s current production of Lee Hoiby’s “Bon Appetit!” and Dominick Argento’s “A Water Bird Talk” take the genre down to practically the onstage minimum.

Only one singer in each show carries the dramatic and musical burden, though both are supported by apt, colorful orchestration.

“Bon Appetit!” captures the ebullience of Julia Child’s cooking show in its lively early days. Emily Lodine portrays America’s own camera-ready French chef, who’s assisted by a pair of tidy but sometimes a little unrestrained sous-chefs in preparing a chocolate cake.

In the second performance Saturday night, Lodine followed Hoiby’s nimble setting of Child’s own words (adapted by Mark Shulgasser) with exquisite timing and understated drollery. She swayed between insouciance and detailed warnings as the cake took shape. When puffs of flour escaped the pans and floated to the floor, Child praised her “self-cleaning kitchen” as her dutiful assistants swiftly took care of the spillage.

With members of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra supplying light-textured accompaniment under the baton of James Caraher, Lodine reflected the down-to-earth zest Child was noted for. If “Bon Appetit!” could be said to have had a dramatic climax, it was the jovial contest between the mixer and the wire whisk, resulting in a tasty tie.

“A Water Bird Talk” posed a greater test of the potential of one-singer opera. Argento’s orchestral palette here is considerably more variegated than Hoiby’s; it has to be, because the character of the Lecturer is going through a soul-searing conflict about the meaning of his life. The monologue is laced with wit and anguish, and requires virtuoso vocal security to deliver.

Robert Orth turned in a first-class impersonation of an amateur expert on his subject lecturing to a ladies’ club — a man tormented by unhappiness into digressions of Wagnerian scope. His miserable marriage is the source of most of these wanderings. Orth’s versatile baritone was supplemented by a turn at the piano, where the Lecturer lovingly reproduces bird calls, then is moved by the thought of his anti-musical wife to launch into the stirring old hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation.”

A screen behind Orth was filled with a selection of Audubon slides of waterfowl, including the pied-billed grebe, whose woebegone existence the Lecturer readily identifies with. It also incorporated thevideo designs of Barry Steele, most movingly when Orth-as-Lecturer appears to soar against a blue sky flecked with clouds, free at last from earthbound woes.

Le Gateau au Chocolat ‘Eminence Brune’

ROBERT ORTH is the best baritone in his price range. A man of average looks and more than adequate vocal skills, he has somehow made the difficult climb from Chicago Opera Theater (his first operatic engagement) to Opera Grand Rapids (his most recent). It has often been said of him, “He has clawed his way to the middle.” A high baritone, he has been referred to as “half man, half tenor.” But it’s Mr. Orth’s abilities as an actor, not as a singer, that have put him in demand to sing Figaro in THE BARBER OF SEVILLE in such cities as Syracuse, Toledo, Corning, and Wilmington. Critics have often commented on his “windmill arms,” his “toothy smile,” and his general tendency to “overact.” Nevertheless, audiences have tolerated him in roles from Morales in CARMEN to Mr. Gobineau in THE MEDIUM. The Metropolitan Opera may not be interested in him. (“We don’t think you’d hear him in our large theater.”) But he is a regular in Indianapolis and Memphis, where the big stars seldom shine. Last year Mr. Orth created the role of Harvey Milk in the opera HARVEY MILK, based on the life of the famous dead homosexual. Though a few critics did not like the opera, most noticed that Mr. Orth tried really hard. A devoted family man, he is away from his wife and children for 7 to 8 months each year. So it’s probably just as well that he has no work for 3 months this summer. But next January he will spend his 50th birthday freezing in Calgary, Alberta, and after that he will make a triumphant return to Grand Rapids, Michigan. His career may be nearly over, but he refuses to give in, a trooper to the end.