Faux Musings

La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

 
I appreciate Francesca Caccini's remarkable opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina (1625) even more each time I hear it, the deceptively simple 80-minute work revealing more upon repeated listenings.

Choreographer Anna Mannsbridge and music director Stephen Stubbs have shaped a beautiful interpretation of this 400 year old work in this excellent new production at Cornish this weekend. Moreover, several of our Artist Diploma in Early Music students shine in convincing performances–Christine Knackstedt as Alcina and José Luis Muñoz as Melissa in particular–as well as Cornish faculty member Ross Hauck as Ruggiero.

Likewise, the design team of Montana Tippett (sets), Connie Yun (lights), and Cristine Meyers (costumes) succeed in fashioning a whimsical setting for the drama to unfold, all complemented by the wonderful supporting performances of a number of our undergraduate classical vocal students and the superb accompaniment of our early music faculty comprising the period instrument continuo ensemble propelling the action along. A most successful first outing for our early music program that contributes immeasurably to the 30+ year tradition of producing seldom-staged operas at Cornish.   

Ross Hauck, tenor, as Ruggiero and Christine Knacksetedt, mezzo soprano, as Alcina (top). José Luis Muñoz, countertenor, as Melissa (bottom) in La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina.

Photos courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts, Michelle Smith-Lewis, photographer.

Wozzeck

Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco, California

One could easily make the case for Wozzeck as the first acknowledged masterpiece of 20th Century opera, a point of demarcation sandwiched between two World Wars, that embodies as much an abandonment of the Romanticism and verismo style that characterized opera in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as any heralding in of a new aesthetic, an aesthetic of gritty realism and social commentary that emerged in the 1920s, the frailties of the human condition confronted by the cruelties of an increasingly mechanized society—futurism turned on its head.

John Duykers as the Captain and Bojan Knezevic as Wozzeck; photo by Steve DiBartolomeo, courtesy of Ensemble Parallèle.

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).

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.

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).

Barbarians at the Met

With all the buzz generated by the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD simulcasts to cinema screens around the world, it’s easy to see how other companies could become seduced into pursuing their own HD simulcast plans and miss the real stroke of genius in Peter Gelb’s first two years at the helm of that grand old dowager of Lincoln Center.

That’s not to take anything away from the experience of the Met’s HD simulcasts; if you haven’t attended a screening, you must. Viewing and listening to opera on a large digital cinema screen in a packed house full of opera fans is an experience nonpareil; it just might make an aficionado of the nonbeliever. Neither live performance nor recorded event, each simulcast straddles time and space, a virtual experience shared around the globe, more akin to sporting event than performing art, the intimacy heightened by the close-ups and the scale, yet experienced communally in a setting somewhere near the crossroads of cinema and theater. Why do we feel compelled to applaud? And who for? Us? Certainly not the performers located milliseconds, yet thousands of miles away.

The shared “virtual” experience has evolved beyond the amusing tale of Bill Gates’ and Melinda French’s courtship in the early 1990s when they attended simultaneous movie screenings in cities a thousand miles apart and then discussed them by phone afterward, to Cisco’s heralded, but still largely unaffordable TelePresence video conferencing. Perhaps, just as Edison’s mistaken belief that the future of the phonograph lay in recording business correspondence blinded him to the market potential of recorded music, Cisco may find that the Met’s version of “telepresence” at fifteen bucks a pop could be the unexpected harbinger of an emerging new entertainment medium. If nothing else, it makes the advent of Internet2 look a whole lot more attractive.

In any event, there are a host of lessons that can be gleaned from the Met’s experience these past few years; few involve HD simulcasts, all involve audiences. It’s audiences after all that are the lifeblood of performing arts organizations, and if the ever-increasing age of the average American performing arts audience in the late 1990s was any bell weather indicator, that lifeblood was starting to look pretty anemic.

Gelb’s background at Sony Classical was in marketing, not artists and repertoire, so it’s no surprise that he chose to focus on audience development first at the Met. The retired investment banker Ben Rosen, a former CEO of Compaq Corporation and a current board member of the Met, does a nice job of summarizing some of those changes and their impact at the Met.

Interestingly enough, none of the strategies Gelb has employed to widen the Met’s audience and make it more accessible are necessarily the exclusive province of the Met. Rather, his strategy would look familiar to any newly minted business school grad: tiered offerings tailored by media and market segment to reach the widest possible number of people at price points appropriate to each pocketbook.

To start Gelb simply returned the Met to its roots. After all, the Met was an innovator in the use of radio to broaden its audience when it started the Met radio broadcasts over 75 years ago. Gelb and the Met board secured long-term sponsorship for the broadcasts, then extended their reach even further through the use of the Internet to stream Met performances around the world at considerably less cost.

The advent of HD simulcasts created a new tiered offering, positioned between the traditional radio broadcasts and live performance, the simulcasts offered a heightened experience akin to live performance but with a convenience factor and at a price point designed to encourage the casual opera fan to take a chance on a performance. Close to their home, in the familiar setting of the local Cineplex, and at a price point just a few dollars more than the latest blockbuster movie release, what person wouldn’t take a chance?

After all, despite what the leaders of our symphony orchestras and opera companies might say, audience receptivity to experience new work is about price. At $10 a pop we’ll take a chance on that film by that director we’ve never heard of based solely upon the reviews. If the film is abysmal, we don’t swear off film forever; we’ll be back next weekend to try our chance with a different director. Not so with opera. I don’t know about you, but how much experimentation can you afford at $150 a ticket?

The Met’s HD simulcasts have allowed it to expand the audience for opera, enhance the prestige—or in marketing-speak “extend the brand”—of the institution, but also whet the appetite of viewers to attend a live performance. How many Met Opera radio listeners’ lifelong aspiration has been to finally attend a performance at Lincoln Center? And how many have? The advent of HD simulcasts changed that equation. Last year over 900,000 people attended a Met HD simulcast event—an audience roughly equal to the Met’s entire season attendance. Put another way, for an investment equal to approximately 1% of its annual operating budget, the Met doubled its audience reach.

If Gelb had stopped there, the verdict on the Met’s HD simulcasts would still be unmitigated success; however, he went one step further. Gelb and his team began to explore strategies for getting that new, much larger audience in the door, in short to convert the casual simulcast attendee into the devoted opera fan. Gelb recognized that by offering a limited number of premium seats as rush tickets at obscenely low prices he would attract new audience members; just as important, he’d generate excitement around a production. Everyone likes a deal, and especially to a younger audience raised on over-subscribed IPOs and sold-out concerts nothing creates excitement more than a ticket feeding frenzy.

In a way, this too was a return to older ways. “Standing-room-only,” “rush,” and “student” tickets had been a staple of opera houses from La Scala to the Met for years. Growing up in San Francisco in the Kurt Herbert Adler era, a standing-room-only rush ticket was the only way a student like me got through the doors of the War Memorial opera house. However, over the years, opera companies loss sight of that essential fact. After I moved to Chicago some twenty years ago I inquired at the Lyric Opera about rush tickets; I was quickly admonished by the woman on the phone—in a pitch and manner reminiscent of Margaret Dumont—that “Oh my, we would never think of such a thing.”

The message was clear: I was not welcome. The ticket price had been set not to enable artistic production, but as a barrier to entry, a way to fend off the barbarians at the gate and keep the unwashed hoi polloi at a distance from the captains (and wives) of industry. An ironic fate perhaps for a popular art form brought to our shores by Italian immigrants in search of a better life at the start of the last century.

Gelb and his staff’s final stroke of genius was an act of economic redistribution that, were it to occur in the political arena, might be labeled social reengineering. In short, he tinkered with ticket prices, specifically the prices of both the cheapest and the most expensive tickets within the hall. He lopped $10 off the lowest-priced seats and tacked the same onto the most expensive seats, a shift that was both revenue neutral and caused nary a stir among season ticket-holding patrons asked to shoulder the burden of further subsidizing the cheapest seats in the house. Because, after all, if you really have a quibble with the Met raising the price of your $340 per seat ticket by ten bucks, you really can’t afford them.

Of course the full impact of Gelb’s changes have yet to be assessed; however, I have no doubt that the effect on reenergizing the Met’s audience will be profound. Other performing arts institutions would do well to incorporate many of these same strategies. Taken together they represent the most significant new developments in performing arts marketing since the late Lyric Opera publicist Danny Newman invented the idea of subscription series over fifty years ago.

Amistad

Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston, South Carolina

Few new operas get a second chance, which is ironic because if history is any gauge it’s frequently the revised version of an opera that eventually garners staying power in the repertoire; a chance for the composer to fine-tune thematic elements, strengthen character development, trim extraneous music, and revisit orchestration with an ear toward perfecting the balance between singer and orchestra—the opera world’s equivalent of the out-of-town, Off Broadway run.

Anthony (Tony) Davis’ fourth opera Amistad premiered to measured praise at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997; although a long-time supporter of Tony’s music, I, like most critics, found the work lacking both musical and theatrical focus, and clocking in at over three hours, too long to sustain the audience’s engagement. Now, over a decade later, Amistad gets its second chance, in a revised version, forty-five minutes shorter, produced at this year’s Spoleto Festival.

Unlike the premiere, directed by George C. Wolfe upon the Lyric’s massive proscenium stage, this inaugural production at Charleston’s newly renovated Memminger Auditorium, unfolds on an elongated ellipse of a stage thrust diagonally into the auditorium like a ship aground. The audience rises in raked seats port and starboard, the floor covered in a sea of painted silhouettes, slaves packed tightly for journey on the middle passage in the hull below. Beyond the bow, a flight of stairs ascend into the far auditorium corner; aft, a half-dozen, over-stuffed leather chairs set against a wall of walnut-stained panel doors capped with a cornice and balcony above; a walkway hangs from the rafters suspended above center-stage. Spoleto music director Emmanuel Villaume conducts an extended chamber orchestra set obliquely off to one side of the stage.

Davis extends the conventional chamber orchestra instrumentation through the inclusion of a jazz drummer (Gerry Hemingway) and woodwind soloist (J. D. Parran), an approach he’s taken in his earlier opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Under the Double Moon, and Tania, often times extending, or blending, European classical and American jazz chamber music genres in equal measure. His signature style, a mixture of fluctuating meters, fluid, angular melodies scored for unison strings and interspersed with stylistic jazz motifs for solo brass, woodwinds or percussion is apparent from the opening bars. Like an abstract expressionist painter, Davis creates a sonic canvas composed of continuous motion, and fluid, interwoven orchestral lines, a rhythmic drive underlying all his music. Shapes and gestures emerge and recede, the bar constantly shifting, marked in odd time signatures and compound meters.

However, this fluid abstraction quickly assumes a disconcerting sameness, and we become inured to the gestures. Like a painter applying colors in equal proportion, Davis creates a sea of melodic elements with no evocative affect, a wash of textured expressionism, an ebb and flow of steady, sustained orchestral counterpoint. Occasionally, Davis allows the music to pause, and lush, extended jazz harmonies, scored for strings or in combination with winds emerge. However, he never permits the music to float, or for the ensemble to open up into extended instrumental passages.

Davis composes for the voice like an instrument in a chamber ensemble, always solo, never supported, and often in counterpoint to the other instruments—a valid compositional choice perhaps, but one with catastrophic effects for intelligibility and emotional impact. The thrust stage, and corresponding intimacy of audience to stage, would seem to favor the voice; however, I found myself frequently struggling to hear the principal singers. What’s more when Davis composes for voice in counterpoint, he tends to favor similar or adjacent vocal ranges, further inhibiting intelligibility. Consequently, we lose the opportunity to hang on a phrase or find ourselves transported by a melody, the voice supported through doubling or accompanied with instrumental backing. Rather, singers engage in a constant tussle with the orchestra, and we resign ourselves to reading supertitles, one level of abstraction removed, and emotionally disengaged, from the music.

That said Act I of Amistad does have its musical high points, especially the aria (“They wanted a girl” and “The past is a fading daylight”) and antiphonal music for chorus that concludes the first act, an absolutely stunning coup de theatre combining African American spirituals, jazz, and New England Protestant hymns in the best tradition of Charles Ives; likewise, the aria for John Adams (“This cannot stand”) as well as the melodic, almost Coplandesque passages for strings, solo trumpet, and clarinet that Davis reprises in Act II.

Unfortunately, Amistad suffers more from fundamental dramaturgical, not musical, problems, an almost obsessive need to “tell” the story instead of unfolding a moment and letting the music reveal the full psychological dimensions of each principal character. In large measure Act II consists of short episodes, each one failing to reveal enough about the individual characters for us to develop a strong identification, either musical or emotional, with any of them except the ever-present Trickster God, played to perfection by Michael Forest. And do we really need four accounts of the mutiny when each successive telling fails to provide us any new perspective?

In the end, despite a stellar cast including bass baritone Gregg Baker as Cinque and soprano Janinah Burnett as Margru, Amistad instructs more than inspires. Davis plays it safe and opts for prose when this high seas tale calls for poetry. If only Davis allowed his trickster muse to take him into uncharted waters, he might find we’d willingly follow him there.

Above: Janinah Burnett (Margru), Herbert Perry (Burnah), Norman Shankle (Kaleh), Mary Elizabeth Williams (Goddess of the Waters), and Crystal Charles (Captive). Below: Gregg Baker (Cinque) and Fikile Mvinjelwa (Antonio). Photos by William Struhs, courtesy of the Spoleto Festival USA.

A Flowering Tree

Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago, Illinois

Given the weighty historical moments at the center of John Adams’ three previous operas, the simple Tamil folktale that forms the basis of A Flowering Tree may come as a surprise. An opera in two acts, composed to a libretto by Adams and his long-time collaborator director Peter Sellars, A Flowering Tree tells the Cinderella-like story of a poor girl bestowed the magical ability to transform herself into a flowering tree, a prince who witnesses her transformation and falls in love, and an “evil”, or perhaps just plain absent-minded, sister who manages to complicate matters with appropriate dramatic effect.

Commissioned by the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, and premiered there in November of 2006, Adams and Sellars have created a wonderful, lyrical, and at times magical, new work, an antidote to the prevailing sexual politics of opera, a feminist doppelganger to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.

Satyagraha

Metropolitan Opera, New York, New York

Philip Glass’ Satyagraha finally bowed at the Met this month in a stunning production created by director Phelim McDermott and associate director and set designer Julian Crouch of the British group Improbable, beautifully sung by Robert Croft in the lead role of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The production debuted last year at the English National Opera, and to my tastes, is one of the most successful productions of contemporary opera in recent memory.

Satyagraha has fared better than most contemporary opera in eliciting unusually strong, affective interpretations—first Constance DeJong’s and Robert Israel’s visually stunning premiere production for Hans De Roo’s De Nederlandse Operastichting at the Rotterdamse Schouwburg in 1980, then Achim Freyer’s arresting interpretation for the Staatsoper Stuttgart under Dennis Russell Davies’ baton in 1981. Each production posed a divergent, but equally valid interpretation. No doubt the conceptual orientation of Glass’ meditation on Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and the development of his philosophy of nonviolent action leaves the opera open to creative interpretation. Not bound to the conventions of narrative exposition and musical dialog, Satyagraha has inspired visual poetry in each successive production equal to, if not the better than, Glass’ evocative music.

Glass’ brilliant idea of setting passages from the ancient Indian text the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit to music rather than constructing a traditional libretto grounded in psychological narrative frees the artists and the audience to bring new meaning to the work. Most of all, as evident in the range of expressiveness on display in these performances, it allows for singers to anchor their performances in actions, not words, and to engage with each other in a way seldom seen when operating within the constraints of traditional mimetic acting.