Kent Devereaux

Owen Wingrave

Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago, Illinois

Under Brian Dickie’s leadership, Chicago Opera Theater has afforded Chicago audiences the rare opportunity to experience a wealth of Benjamin Britten’s works over the past seven years. Starting in 2002 with The Rape of Lucretia, and in subsequent years with The Turn of the Screw (2003), Death in Venice (2004), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (2005). In that time, Chicago Opera Theater (COT) has mounted more productions penned by Britten than any other composer save Mozart.

Dickie’s programming choices have made sense, given his previous experience at the Canadian Opera Company and Glyndebourne, and the company’s early history under the late Alan Stone; after all Chicago Opera Theater had established its reputation by carving out a niche producing “opera sung in English” while other companies insisted on presenting performances in their original language but had yet to adopt supertitles. With the widespread adoption of supertitles since by opera companies worldwide, Chicago Opera Theater under Dickie abandoned its “English-only” fiat, and sought instead to plow fertile new middle-ground with a flourishing of productions of seldom-staged works by Handel and Britten, and a clever re-contextualization of its original mission: who can accuse the company of abandoning its mission of presenting “opera sung in English” when over half the operas mounted by COT in the past decade were written in English?

Dickie’s strategy since assuming the helm at COT of programming seldom-performed works of modest scale plucked from Baroque and 20th Century repertoire has allowed the company to garner praise and create a new identity at the margins of what has traditionally defined the operatic repertoire in America. It has also permitted COT to successfully transition its legacy subscriber base, all the while engaging and growing a new audience for opera drawn more by a sense of adventure and curiosity than some elusive and ephemeral star-power exerted by the latest diva du jour.

In choosing to focus on Britten, Dickie has wisely eschewed the larger, well-known works like Billy Budd and Peter Grimes of a scale beyond the means of a small company like COT, and instead has focused on mounting Britten’s more modest, and in many ways, more accessible “chamber operas.” After staging five new productions of Britten’s chamber operas, I cannot imagine that plans aren’t already afoot to mount additional new productions in future years of Britten’s remaining works including Albert Herring, Curlew River, and the other church parables. 

Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave shares the somewhat odd distinction with Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors of being one of the few operas commissioned specifically for the medium of television. Menotti recast the Biblical story of the birth of the Christ child for NBC at the dawn of television in 1951; Britten, a lifelong committed pacifist, received his commission from the BBC in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, and saw in the Henry James story, set at the close of 19th Century at the height of British imperialism, a tale that resonated well with both his beliefs and the time. In short Britten wanted to make a political as well as artistic statement and television proved the perfect medium for that message.

Originally scored for full orchestra, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden working with Britten’s estate commissioned a reduced orchestration of Owen Wingrave completed by David Matthews in 2007. The reduced number of forces—only fourteen players—called for in this new orchestration allowed Chicago Opera Theater to mount this new production; then Dickie pulled off something of a coup in securing Steuart Bedford, the conductor at the opera’s premiere production at Aldeburgh in 1970, to pilot this new production.

The opening motif of Owen Wingrave portends the haunting tale about to unfold. Britten’s musical language in his later years combines the intense lyricism and gift for setting the English language with the probing angularity and unresolved nature of his expanded interest in twelve-tone methods. Reminiscent of Ives’ haunting trumpet motive from The Unanswered Question, Britten’s opening brass motif at once hints at the unsettling nature of the story, and the unresolved questions that defined the times.

Britten’s operas, large or small, exhibit that rare quality that allows a singer to soar or retreat based upon the demands of their character, not due to any need to engage with the orchestra in a struggle to be heard. The almost total absence of any consistent homophonic texture, the free interplay between support and counterpoint giving passage to voice, all make Britten’s music eminently singable and continually inventive in its orchestration. Britten introduces musical motifs in one context then skillfully reintroduces them at a later point in varied instrumentation for heightened effect or repeated emphasis—all skillfully articulated by Bedford and the excellent fourteen-member chamber ensemble.

Director Ken Cazan and scenic designer Peter Harrison have wisely chosen to steer clear of too literal an interpretation; James’ short story is marked by its own time, pregnant with allusions to ghostly hauntings—the unspeakable past casting a pallor over Paramore, the Wingrave family estate. Elements of set pieces and furniture roll into place, the stage largely a sea of darkness upon a black floor, the extreme social constraints and Owen’s isolation and alienation from his fragmented family accentuated by the stark lighting and physical stage separation. I don’t agree with all of Cazan’s choices—the rather glib direction of the “downstairs” house staff and the misguided attempt at humor and mimicry of the cavalry by the British soldiers entering and exiting the stage are just two obvious examples—but overall, it’s solid if not quite inspirational direction. Likewise, Harrison’s use of the grand staircase as a unifying scenic design element comes across more as labored theatrical conceit than inspired concept.

Musically, Dickie has assembled a wonderfully gifted cast of primarily young, relatively unknown singers who all turn in remarkable performances. The uniformly strong cast begins with baritone Matthew Worth as Owen Wingrave, tenor Brian Anderson as Lechmere and bass-baritone Matt Boehler as Mr. Coyle. Equally strong are Rebecca Caine as Mrs. Coyle, Jennifer Johnson as Kate Julian and the wonderful tenor Robin Leggate as Sir Philip Wingrave. What a joy to experience an opera that combines those rarest of elements: a composer like Britten with a mastery of setting text to music, and a cast able to deliver on what the composer intended as well as project in such a way to altogether obviate the need for supertitles. If only more opera could be as direct and as successful.

***

Photos by Liz Lauren courtesy of Chicago Opera Theater. Top: Sir Philip Wingrave (Robin Leggate), Kate Julian (Jennifer Johnson), Miss Wingrave (Mary Jane Johnson), Mrs. Julian (Brenda Harris), Lechmere (Brian Anderson), Mrs. Coyle (Rebecca Caine), Spencer Coyle (Matt Boehler) and Owen Wingrave (Matthew Worth). Bottom: Boy (Mason Baker), father (Blake Montgomery), and Owen Wingrave (Matthew Worth).

Compagnie Marie Chouinard

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois

Orpheus and Eurydice by the adventurous Québécois dance troupe Compagnie Marie Chouinard opens with a series of stunning, evocative images, an arresting tableau of visual theatre that conjures demons as well as the divine, the erotic along with the evocative, fittingly marked with the signature of a frozen northland, not some steamy, tropical Elysian fields or fiery underworld. Fur boots against naked flesh, the sounds of geese passing overhead, white fur hats, and the silhouetted image of nude dancers in high-heeled clogs and strap-on prosthetic penises walking, posing, embracing like an erotic version of Matisse’s dancers or the skewed title sequence of a 1960s James Bond flick.

Marie Chouinard plays the clown as well as the choreographer in this tale; clowning that shares more with Beckett than Bozo; a tale that borrows as much from contemporary times as a mythological past. With ten dancers, two computer-controlled movable lights, and a battery of wireless body mics Compagnie Marie Chouinard transforms a bare stage into an evocative examination of the Orpheus myth, a clever dance perfectly timed to music and lighting cues—a shrinking circle of light, simple props, faintly intelligible vocalizations, a trace, a hint, of a myth, retold, replayed, transformed a thousand times, an old story that has left its indelible mark upon our psyche. The images draw us in: tableaus, vignettes, couples, trios, quartets combining costume with movement, humor with poignant observation, as if leafing through a sketch book of quirky pen and ink illustrations. And always that sense of loss, the receding image, looking back, and grasping at nothing.

Chouinard ‘s work fares less well with the ensemble pieces in the second half of the program. The simple isolated gestures and humorous asides lose their poignancy in larger, cacophonous ensemble settings and amidst the blare of Tibetan long horns and amplified stage sounds. The evocative nature of the imagery that proved so alluring becomes lost upon a crowded stage. At best, the disarray evokes Miró’s Harlequin's Carnival; however I can’t but help feel the loss of Orpheus as well as Eurydice, both the humor and the poetics that proved so seductive at first. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly the point.

Photo by Michael Slobodian, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Drums Along the Pacific

The big news this week is the four-day festival of the music of John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison that faculty members Paul Taub, Matt Kocmieroski, and Jarrad Powell have organized at Cornish. It's a wonderful series of concerts that Paul, Jarrad, and Matt have put together featuring performances by the Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet, the Seattle Chamber Players, and Gamelan Pacifica as well as guest artists John Duykers and Stephen Drury. The festival has received excellent press coverage; Michael Upchurch wrote a lovely piece that appeared in the Seattle Times this past Sunday. There's also a very nice overview of the festival that appears in the March/April issue of Chamber Music. Complete festival details are available online.

The Return of Ulysses

Pacific Operaworks, Seattle, Washington

Pacific Operaworks’ luminous debut production at the Moore Theatre this past weekend, a flawlessly executed restaging of William Kentridge’s and Handspring Puppet Company’s production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, solidly establishes Stephen Stubbs’ scrappy new Seattle opera company as a potent new force for intelligently produced opera on the left coast. With smart musical direction, excellent attention to detail, and some superb casting choices Stubbs has fashioned an interpretation that succeeds in balancing historical “authenticity” with dramatic effect.

It starts with Stubbs’ and stage director Kentridge’s decision to place the period instrument musical ensemble on stage amidst the action, not in a pit out of site, a choice that, at once, establishes a connection between musician and audience, enhanced further by the intimacy of the auditorium. In many ways the Moore Theatre, an early twentieth century Vaudeville house with a seating capacity of 1,384, fits the historically appropriate dimensions of a European opera house; more so than the bloated barns erected in the 1920s and 30s that have come to pass for opera houses in America and unduly hampered the genre’s development ever since. With instrumentalists and singers in plain view and in close proximity, the exchange between musician and audience takes on the tone of a conversation, a recitation, not a heroic proclamation, a quality enhanced by the interplay between each singer and their puppet doppelgänger.

Puppets, you say? Yes, puppets, after the fashion of the Japanese Bunraku, exquisitely crafted and deftly manipulated by Adrian Kohler, Basil Jones and Handspring Puppet Company. The singers may provide the voice, but the puppets provide the action—downstage center atop movable tables, or upstage, amidst the set and musicians, throughout the production. The singers shadow each puppet, and embodying the voice but not the entirety of each character, combine with the projected imagery of Kentridge’s charcoal and pencil cell animations to create a composite impression that blurs the distinction between singer and actor, live action and film, realism and legend.

Kentridge’s films, rear projected upstage behind a set fashioned after a surgical theater from the Age of Enlightenment, embark upon a journey altogether different than that of Ulysses—a journey of the body, of medicine, of traces, of what might have been and what has yet to be, a psychological journey informed by Kentridge’s imagistic associations, a vision at once dark and foreboding yet fanciful and full of whimsy.

The singers, especially tenor Ross Hauck as Ulisse, mezzo Laura Pudwell as Penelope, soprano Cyndia Sieden as Amore and Minerva, and Jason McStoots as Giove and Eumete, delivered superb performances. Mezzo Sarah Mattox as Fortuna, Douglas Williams as Tempo, Nettune, and Antinoo, tenor James Brown as Pisandro, and tenor Zachary Wilder as Telemaco and Anfinomo, rounded out the uniformly strong cast. Stubbs on chitarrone and lute led the top-notch period instrument musical ensemble featuring Maxine Eilander on baroque harp, Margriet Tindemans on viola da gamba, Elizabeth Brown on archlute, David Morris on cello and lirone, and Ingrid Matthews and Tekla Cunningham on baroque violin and viola.

The Allure of Music

Applications to music schools are up across the nation Howard Reich writes in a front-page story in today’s Chicago Tribune. Up over 50% at Indiana University and DePaul University from 2000 to 2008, and at Columbia College Chicago music applications and enrollment have soared 37% from a year ago. The situation here at Cornish is no different: applications to the music program are up 26% over last year. The obvious question is: why?

Maybe this is evidence of a growing acceptance of musical pursuits among a wider population, a recognition that in this mediated information age creative expression must be valued just as highly as the hard sciences, and for both individuals and society to flourish we must continue to develop what Richard Florida has called “the creative class.” Or maybe it’s just the manifestation of a millennial generation showered with praise and coming of age in a time of relative peace and stability, whose supportive baby boomer parents, and ever-widening horizons, ever-more-interconnected global world encompasses the view that the mediated experiences of music, film, and video games are just the most tangible expression of an era. Maybe music has become the “safe” degree.

Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung

Seattle Opera, Seattle, Washington

Robert Lepage’s imaginative, cinematic staging of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung, originally commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in 1994, finally made it to Seattle Opera this past week. One hopes that Seattle audiences won’t have to wait fifteen more years to experience another such bold and satisfying directorial interpretation of two modern musical offerings.

The singers—bass-baritone John Relyea as Bluebeard and mezzo Malgorzata Walewska as Judith in Bluebeard’s Castle and soprano Susan Marie Pierson as The Woman in Erwartung—are consistently strong, and the performances, at once believable, affecting, and largely free of the usual operatic acting mannerisms. Likewise, conductor Evan Rogister and the Seattle Opera Orchestra interpreted each score with a confidence and verve that brings the music effortlessly to life—Bartok’s rich, enveloping woodwind voicings unfolding from the pit, Schoenberg’s lush string textures wafting through McCaw Hall; rarely have I heard two modernist works sound as lyrical.

However, the real star of this production was Lepage and his artistic team’s ability to fully visualize for the stage two intense psychological dramas. Each opera poses directorial challenges; challenges fully met by Lepage. His theatrical conceit for each work is drawn from the scores and superbly realized, not superimposed in the manner of regietheater. Both works set within a gigantic gilt frame reminiscent of Gustav Klimt, the steep stage rake, the exaggerated forced perspective creating a self-contained box within which each drama unfolds. Lepage extends the cast with the remarkable contributions of three supernumeraries—Jordan Gasparik, Mark Johnson, and Noam Markus—unsung, unspoken roles that blur the line between performer and scenic elements. Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy’s perfectly executed projection and media designs complete the effect.

The modernist predilection for simultaneity and temporal discontinuities that so defined the modernist aesthetic and found its perfect embodiment in film has also bedeviled the performing arts, and opera in particular, due to the sheer physical realities of the medium. The basic temporal grammar of modernism—flashback, flash-forward, simultaneity, temporal displacement and manipulation—not to mention endemic questions of subjectivity may have their roots in modernist artists fascination with the abstract “purity” of music, but found little succor in that most plastic of arts, scenography. “All art,” may as the 19th Century English art critic Walter Pater wrote, “aspire to the condition of music," but the physical realities of transforming a stage may well temper that aspiration (cf. Grendel). In his staging of Bartok’s Bluebeard and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, as well as his more recent production of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust at the Met, LePage makes a compelling case for incorporating the latest in technology, as well as good old-fashioned illusion, to achieve a new fluidity—a satisfying marriage of music and theatrical conception never before imaginable.

Bartok’s Bluebeard (1911-17) is a remarkable work, as much for the sheer beauty of the music, fragments of which appear in his much later Concerto for Orchestra and other works, as for the psychological ground it tackles. Like Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Webern’s Lulu (1935), Bluebeard explicitly rejected the verismo conventions of the period, and instead thoroughly embraces a radical psychological and metaphorical approach to drama.

Antony and Cleopatra

New York City Opera, Carnegie Hall, New York City, New York

The anecdotal lore surrounding the disaster that befell the premiere of Samuel Barber’s third opera Antony and Cleopatra at the Met has become legendary. A massive three-act opera, based on Shakespeare’s play, by America’s preeminent opera composer at the time commissioned to commemorate the grand opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new home at Lincoln Center: one wonders given the auspicious nature of the occasion and the commensurately elevated anticipation surrounding the opera’s premiere, whether any work could live up to expectations. So outsized were the expectations, even Verdi and Puccini may have begged off the commission had they been alive at the time; then again, we can thank the Suez Canal for Aida.

Much has been written regarding the travails that befell the opera’s premiere—the inadequate rehearsal time, the missed lighting cues, the failed stage machinery, as well as the caustic barbs of critics upon hearing the work. In retrospect, however, the most unfortunate consequence of that ill-fated premiere may have been that it robbed Barber and us of successive works. So devastating an experience the premiere proved to be, Antony and Cleopatra became the last opera Barber would ever write. Instead, he spent the better part of the last fifteen years of his life constantly revising the work, cutting the overall length of the three-act opera by an hour, refashioning the libretto with the assistance of his old friend composer Gian Carlo Menotti, and inserting two new arias, sorely lacking in the opera’s original incarnation, set to lines lifted from Shakespeare sonnets.

In a larger sense perhaps regardless of the outcome of the premiere, the fate of Antony and Cleopatra was preordained, it’s failure merely emblematic of the times—the first cracks in the Great Society, a utopian vision that encompassed everything from Disneyland to Pat Boone and that had defined itself through America’s military and technological prowess. The world had changed between the time Barber first garnered success with his earlier, Pulitzer prizewinning opera Vanessa (1958) and the premiere of Antony and Cleopatra (1966). Barber’s style of late tonal romanticism had fallen out of favor amidst a sea of rising modernism in the late 1950 and early 60s; opera stood out like an over-padded armchair in a room full of Barcelona chairs. After all, name another American opera—or European opera for that matter—from the 1960s that has found its way into the operatic repertoire. Rather, amidst a decade defined both by its populism and its fascination with modernist innovation, opera seemed decidedly out of place, an elitist anachronism.

That’s too bad, because in retrospect Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra deserves a place in the American opera canon, and the New York City Opera’s excellent concert presentation at Carnegie Hall this week made a convincing case for exactly that. For in the end, Barber’s revised version of Antony and Cleopatra first staged at the Spoleto Festival in 1983, two years after Barber’s death, and subsequently released on New World Records in 1984, is at least an equal to his Vanessa and in many ways kin to that other late romantic tearjerker from the late 1950s, Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957).

Although Barber’s revised score still divides the opera into three acts, the New York City Opera wisely chose to present the work in two acts, after the fashion of both the New World recording and the last fully staged production mounted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1991. After all, how can one continue after Antony and Cleopatra’s sensuous duet (“Oh take, oh take those lips away”)?

The problems that still plague the opera—even after Barber’s many revisions—remain largely with the awkward nature of the libretto. The bard’s words make their own music, and don’t bend easily to a composer’s will. It’s no secret that opera composers since Purcell have struggled to set Shakespeare’s words to music, often times with scant success. You are hard pressed to become engrossed in the music or the action when the libretto plays such a heavy hand: lines such as “leave thy lascivious wassails,” as Caesar sings (Act I), or “traduced for levity” as Enobarbus does (Act II) may compel one to forgo the handkerchief and reach for a dictionary instead with all celerity (Act III).