Operas for a new century

The Lincoln Center presents three new works, including Philip Glass' White Raven.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 22, 2001

[Photo: AP] The cast of The White Raven, commissioned by the Portuguese government to celebrate explorers of the 15th century, included Yuri Batukov, left, as the King and Ana Paula Russo as the Queen.

NEW YORK -- Nothing gets the cultural temperature rising like a new opera, even if the track record of such projects in recent years is woefully mixed. And when the opera is the latest from Philip Glass, you have the making of a genuine event.

So The White Raven was a big deal, the centerpiece of Lincoln Center Festival 2001, which also presented several concerts of other Glass works. In fact, since it was by Glass, the U.S. premiere probably drew as much attention from occasional operagoers as from people who can define coloratura. Purists hate his repetitive, trance-inducing music, but he has many fans outside the usual opera audience.

Glass' new opera bowled me over when I attended its final performance a week ago. But, in some ways, I suspect the impression it made won't be as lasting as that of two other new opera/musical theater works on the festival agenda. If these didn't have the immediate visceral punch, the sheer sexiness of an eagerly anticipated work from America's most famous living composer, each possessed a singular look and sound that stuck in the mind.

Edda: Viking Tales of Lust, Revenge and Family turns an ancient Norse saga of gods, heroes and giants into a haunting piece of musical theater, conceived by Benjamin Bagby, who also performed it with members of his medieval music ensemble, Sequentia. Luci Mie Traditrici (My Treacherous Eyes) is an opera about love and murder whose remarkable score by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino was about silence as much as sound (recalling, for me, a remark by Miles Davis that the way to listen to music is to listen to the rests between the notes).

The three new operas all took place during the opening week of the sixth annual summer festival at Lincoln Center, the performing arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side that is home to the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and New York City Ballet the rest of the year. The festival, which runs through next weekend, casts its net widely with other programming that ranges from a minifestival of plays by Harold Pinter (another master of silences in his spare, sculpted dialogue) to a series of concerts by African pop bands to La Scala Ballet's Giselle.

The White Raven had lots of things going for it, especially the sensational strangeness of the staging by Glass' longtime design collaborator, Robert Wilson. His veritable Jungian dreamscape of geometric shapes and quicksilver lighting featured two raven-headed figures with green hands, Siamese twins, a dragon and an elephant's foot, Dorothy and the Tin Man and Miss Universe (mezzo-soprano Janice Felty soaring down from the flies on a crescent moon).

As a strictly instrumental composer, Glass is given to what sometimes feels like mindless note spinning, if not outright self-plagiarism, which may be the curse of any truly original voice with no other sources to draw upon when inspiration flags. Where Schoenberg and Stravinsky sometimes took a change of pace with, say, transcriptions of Bach or Brahms, Glass is always himself.

Still, his instantly recognizable minimalist style -- the enigmatic minor thirds, the relentless rhythmic pulse, the endless ostinato -- is uncannily right for certain kinds of opera, dance and film. In The White Raven, the harmonies seemed more complex than in some of his recent works (i.e., the Third Symphony, with its frequent unison passages).

Twenty-five years after the premiere of his landmark opera, Einstein on the Beach, Glass is underrated as a composer for the voice. Last weekend, with Dennis Russell Davies expertly conducting the American Composers Orchestra, the score created a richly layered texture in which to set a superb cast's singing. A highlight was the dazzling quartet by Miss Universe and three Scientists (Ana Paula Russo, Maria Jonas, Douglas Perry) that brought down the curtain at intermission.

However, one thing the three-hour opera did not have was a story. Commissioned by Portugal's government to commemorate the years 1490 to 1500, a pivotal period of world exploration (Vasco da Gama is a character in the opera), it has a libretto in Portuguese by Luisa Costa Gomes. Also on hand was avant-garde choreographer Lucinda Childs, who played the Writer, a sort of narrator who appeared from time to time to deliver commentary in English.

But it would be folly to try to make sense of The White Raven's hodgepodge of verse, scientific treatise, newspaper headlines, journal entries and, in the pageantlike finale, a long list of Portuguese historical figures. Maybe this was a hit in Lisbon, where the opera debuted in 1998, but the lame ending was a distinct letdown in New York.

For such old-fashioned notions as plot, character and narrative point of view, festivalgoers had the other two works to contemplate, though neither could ever be accused of being conventional. Edda in particular was a heady brew of myth, music and stagecraft. There wasn't a horned helmet in sight, no small achievement for a work inspired by Viking culture. There was a breastplate, but it was blue-tinged and adorned with six breasts, worn by a goatish figure on towering heels with long, razor-sharp fingernails, the Seeress.

Bagby conceived Edda and did much research in Iceland on its ancient yarns and fables. They are elemental, often bloody tales about the creation of the world, the curse of gold on human behavior and a war between gods and giants, some of which show up in Wagner's Ring cycle. The stories felt contemporary, hitting the emotional hot buttons enumerated in its subtitle -- lust, revenge, family -- with dead-on accuracy.

With a cast of six, several of whom played fiddle, lyre and flute, Edda was sung in Icelandic. The modern realizations of this old music (no original scores exist) were both simple and complex at the same time, a combination of folk concert and ritualistic seance. Ping Chong's deft staging included an innovative solution to the perennial problem of supertitles. English translations were projected onto two panels onstage where the eye could follow them easily instead of having to snatch glances above the proscenium arch, as is customary in most opera houses.

Luci Mie Traditrici was another work that looked backward, based on the notorious story of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, the prince of Venosa, who murdered his wife and her lover in 1590. He also wrote some of the most arresting madrigals of his era.

In the opera, staged by choreographer Trisha Brown, the drama was depicted in starkly abstract fashion. All four characters -- the Duke (Paul Armin Edelmann), Duchess (Annette Stricker), Servant (John Bowen) and Guest (Lawrence Zazzo) -- were costumed in white on an essentially blank space except for rows of "shark's teeth," serrated strips that rose and fell. Performed from behind a scrim on a stage rimmed by blue light, the opera could be hard to follow -- it took me a while to tell the difference between the Servant and the doomed Guest. The singing was intense from beginning to end, with no wasted motion in the 75-minute work.

Sciarrino's orchestra writing was the most interesting thing about the opera. It was restrained, quiet music, characterized by an ever-shifting pattern of seemingly random notes, fragmented phrases and repeating thematic cells.

"We listen more when we are on the edge of silence," the composer said in a preperformance symposium.

Perhaps because of the music's intimacy, the 22 members of the Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kazushi Ono, were incorporated into the set, playing from a pit at stage right. It was tempting to watch the players deal with the demands of Sciarrino's score -- full of extended techniques and intricate little solos -- at the expense of following the drama.

Naturally, Lincoln Center had a point to make in grouping The White Raven, Edda and Luci Mie Traditrici together in the first week of the festival. Nigel Redden, the festival director, said at a luncheon for the Music Critics Association of North America that the programming was an effort to "expand the definition of what opera ought to be in the 21st century."

Each opera looked to stories from the past for themes that remain relevant today. All three were characterized by highly stylized movement and gesture, with Edda using techniques of American Sign Language as a motif, a far cry from opera's "stand and deliver" tradition.

One difference between The White Raven and the other two operas was telling. Both Edda and Luci Mie Traditrici are deeply emotional, each about the suffering that comes from love, from greed, from death. Glass' opera, on the other hand, was more of an intellectual construction, with its theme of exploration and discovery. For all its shimmering beauty, his music had a facile, assembly-line quality.

Opera has always been the most passionate art form, and the great opera of ideas has yet to be written.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.