Sean Chee
There’s nothing new or uncommon about presenting multiple opera in a single efficiency. It was as soon as conventional to insert a comic book intermezzo between the Acts of an opera seria, and in the present day most firms will current one-Act operas on a double or triple invoice to piece collectively a full night’s leisure.
However I used to be startled and a bit skeptical once I heard of Yuval Sharon’s choice to premiere a brand-new opera, George E. Lewis’s The Comet, on the identical stage, on the identical time, as Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. How would it not work? Would it work?
Brief reply: sure. As a result of I’m silly and delay reserving my press ticket till the final attainable second, I couldn’t make it into the opening night time of the New York premiere on the American Trendy Opera Firm’s Working AMOC* competition at Lincoln Heart, however the remaining matinee efficiency final Saturday, interleaving and overlapping alternating scenes from the 2 operas, was an exhilarating, startling, deeply transferring expertise.
Seats have been so scarce due to the character of the staging. As an alternative of putting the viewers in the home, with eyelines targeted on a single airplane of motion, Sharon packed us all in, elbow-to-elbow, on the stage of Koch Theatre, in order that we may sit on both facet of a rotating set, with a fancy Artwork Deco restaurant on one facet and a stylized Roman tub on the opposite.
The vanity of this manufacturing loosely evokes W.E.B. Du Bois, the writer of the quick story on which The Comet relies, and his idea of “double consciousness.” Du Bois noticed that in America’s racially enforced social hierarchy, the Black topic should, by necessity, see from two factors of view: their very own, and that of the dominant racial class. Sharon borrows the time period in his latest treatise, A New Philosophy of Opera, which argues that the power of the shape derives not from tidy hierarchies of textual content, music, staging and efficiency, however from the unusual and sophisticated methods wherein the completely different dimensions of the shape complement and subvert one another.
In Poppea, the sordid goings-on within the court docket of Emperor Nero (Anthony Roth Costanzo)—treason, adultery, blackmail, suicide—develop into a play of summary beliefs. Advantage (Amanda Lynn Bottoms), Fortune (Whitney Morrison), and Love (Joelle Lamarre) seem in an allegorical prologue to assert mastery over human occasions, with Amore/Cupid claiming that the story we’re about to see proves that Love conquers all. Nicely, positive sufficient, the drama that unfolds within the masterfullibretto of Giovanni Francesco Busenello solely offers out unhealthy luck and punishes advantage, however the adore it presents of their place is the debased cupidity of egocentric love between a pair of conniving monsters. Perversely, Monteverdi units the story to a few of the prettiest music within the operatic repertoire, in order that the greedy Poppea’s (Kearstin Piper Brown) remaining ascent to the throne by some means turns into the pleased ending that it pretends to be.
Sharon takes his cues for this facet of the piece from that deceptively summary, tidy floor, all the way down to the gleaming white of the toga-like costumes by Oana Botez and of the tiled set by Mimi Lien. Even the rejection of cause, when Nero rebukes his conscience within the individual of his counselor, the thinker Seneca (Evan Hughes), performs out in summary symbols, the Emperor triumphantly scattering the items of their sport of chess.
Lawrence Sumulong
In classical drama—which the primary operas, corresponding to Poppea, have been expressly designed to emulate—all acts of violence happen offstage, with the lifeless our bodies revealed after the very fact, and this staging toys with that custom. After Nero orders Seneca to kill himself, the viewers is handled, briefly, to the grotesque, Loss of life of Marat–like tableau of the thinker slumped in his tub, his vermilion stage blood spilling throughout the white tiles, however earlier than the stage can rotate a second time, each drop of pink has been mopped up, and the physique has disappeared as if sucked down the drain.
In the meantime, on the flipside of this subversive drama of barely repressed violence, a literal horror story is unfolding in full view. A comet, its path intersecting with the orbit of the Earth, has apparently worn out almost all human life with a stream of poisonous fuel, and Jim Davis (Davóne Tines)—a Black man working in a demeaning job as financial institution messenger—has emerged from a subterranean vault, lined in filth, to search out himself the one residing man in New York. Monteverdi’s facetious prologue, taking part in out within the background, takes on one more side, as we’re invited to contemplate the perverse flip of Fortune that would kill a person’s complete world, however (fortunate him!) enable him to sit down in a restaurant that by no means would have served him yesterday.
He’s quickly joined by Julia (Kiera Duffy), a wealthy, white younger woman who survived the calamity as a result of she had sealed herself in a downstairs darkroom to develop final night time’s photographs of that spectacular comet. A coddled member of the leisure class, she is immediately alone in a world the place cash received’t purchase her meals and shelter, and the place whiteness affords her no benefit.
In The Comet, there isn’t any one to scrub up the mess. Jim and Julia should haul the corpses out of the restaurant by themselves, and the particles they knock over in battle or frustration litters the stage as they go on. The singers even acted in several dramatic registers, with the Comet solid giving naturalistic performances as an alternative of flagrantly dishonest full-face in the direction of the viewers and doing melodramatic opera fingers just like the singers of Poppea. The Comet set and costumes have been period-accurate, contrasted to the extremely stylized Rome and Romans on the reverse.
Lawrence Sumulong
In fact, some compromises needed to be made to suit each items right into a single presentation, most importantly: time. The Comet is 45 minutes of music, and Poppea runs about 4 occasions that lengthy, which signifies that the Monteverdi needed to be slashed all the way down to a highlights album with a view to match on the identical 90-minute invoice, whereas the pacing of the brand new opera needed to be shattered utterly. That is the kind of liberty I’d normally abhor—and, to be trustworthy, I’d nonetheless like to see The Comet by itself phrases, to see the way it works when every second follows straight on from the subsequent with out interruption—however right here, it’s surprisingly efficient. When The Comet interrupts Poppea, it fragments the piece right into a sequence of summary musical episodes, and when Poppea interrupts The Comet, it stretches the piece out to one thing like actual time, heightening the dramatic technique of every staging, and the alternating bites of cool, refreshing Monteverdi and hot-’n’-spicy Lewis cleanse the palate for what’s to come back.
Clearly, two items have been composed in vastly completely different musical languages, as nicely. Lewis is a grasp of chaos and dissonance, his scores dense with frenetic gestures, in an eclectic language able to accommodating the alien sounds of excessive modernism in addition to deep pulls from Black musical traditions, whereas Monteverdi is, nicely, Monteverdi.
However this divergence appeared to make the pairing extra, not much less, efficient, because the Seventeenth-century rating proved lucid sufficient to chop by way of the noise, and the Twenty first-century rating is noisy sufficient to accommodate another music you layer on prime of it. The eclecticism of his musical milieu typically has the sense of a radio dial being flipped between stations, in order that the shifts to Monteverdi had the sense that he was merely tuning in to a wierd new frequency. (In a single intelligent second of the manufacturing, Julia, standing subsequent to the restaurant’s wi-fi set, begins dancing alongside to a full of life quantity from Poppea, as if in her grief and shock she imagines she will hear it taking part in over the lifeless airwaves.) Even the extremely tremendous pit orchestras dovetailed conveniently, since one in every of them was a continuo band from the 1600s, and one in every of them—deftly led by way of the bafflingly complicated rating by Marc Lowenstein—was a brand new music ensemble on fashionable devices.
Lawrence Sumulong
At a turning level in each items, The Comet punctures by way of to the opposite facet of the metadrama. For one transcendent second, Julia sees Jim not as a “Negro,” however as a person, as her protector, and because the Adam of a brand new human race. The opera stops, and as an alternative of adapting Du Bois’ prose into verse, the piece presents it as spoken narration. As an alternative of accompanying Monteverdi, the harpsichord (Elliot Figg) offers an outrageously virtuosic prolonged solo. And Jim and Julia step by way of the set to emerge on the opposite facet, adorned with crowns befitting an emperor and his empress.
Then every thing collapses. In a remaining, bitter denouement, we be taught that solely (“solely”) New York has been killed by the comet. Julia’s father (additionally Costanzo) has simply come again from taking a spin within the nation. At first shocked to search out his daughter sheltering with a Black man, he lastly tosses Jim some charity by means of thanks: “In case you want a job, name!” (That hole gesture, rhyming thematically with the characters’ makes an attempt to tune in lifeless radios and rattle lifeless phone cradles earlier than lastly capturing rescue flares from the roof, feels fantastically insincere.) The racial and financial distinctions of the surface world have rushed again into the vacuum. Lastly, Jim’s spouse Nellie (Lamarre) seems. Miraculously, she too has survived—however she holds their lifeless toddler in her arms.
Lewis’s scores are sometimes troublesome for me to parse intellectually. Paradoxically, it may be his densest works that I admire probably the most readily, corresponding to his large one-movement Minds in Flux for giant orchestra with reside electronics, the place the sheer overload of knowledge involves tackle a extra clearly understandable kind of macro-compositional high quality, like a Julie Mehretu portray. (Full disclosure: I used to be working for Lewis’s writer after we determined to publish him, and when this opera was commissioned, and thus have accomplished a good quantity to advertise his music, however I don’t work for them anymore and am thus completely neutral. Additionally, PLEASE HIRE ME, someone.)
Sean Chee
Right here, nonetheless, my favourite moments have been the lyrical numbers. Jim’s commingling despair and reduction at discovering himself free and alone in a lifeless world develop into a compelling blues, and Nellie’s spiritual-like lullaby for his or her lifeless baby is heartbreaking. In an particularly refined second of musical drama, Julia has a wierd, fairly aria, reflecting on her cosseted expertise as a younger girl of privilege, that turns her right into a delicate, attention-grabbing, and well-rounded character, fairly than some damsel in misery or post-apocalyptic Karen.
A lot of the credit score is because of librettist Douglas Kearney, who has turned in one of the crucial elegantly crafted new libretti I’ve heard in fairly some time. His textual content distills Du Bois’s story all the way down to a unified drama, preserving a few of the most elegant language, penning new materials, and switching register masterfully between lyricism and drama. Take these traces from Jim’s opening quantity, sung whereas he pours himself coupes of champagne in a restaurant strewn with lifeless our bodies:
Rot’s not rotten if it’s obtained in oaken casks
Destiny lets others drink that liquor
I simply take a look at the flask
Right this moment I fill my glass with whisky, wine, champagne and tears
however yesterday they might not have served me right here.
The final line comes straight from Du Bois, however Kearney manages to search out the blues in it and weaves it right into a music that manages to overlay emotional weight, intricate wordplay, and wry wit on prime of persuasive characterization.
It was admirably sung, as nicely. In his larger registers, Tines’s darkish tone can tackle a hooting, bellowing high quality, however his vocal energy and musicianship may hardly be faulted in what should be an extremely difficult sing, and the identical may be stated of Duffy’s brilliant, beautiful coloratura instrument.
I’ve to confess that the Poppea prologue had me nervous concerning the singers in that half of the piece—Bottoms and Morrison, of their roles as bickering abstractions, sounded harsh and ugly and even a bit sharp. One is tempted accountable the normally good sound designer Mark Gray, whose amplification was mandatory given the bizarre 360° staging, and whose latest work on Antony & Cleopatra was far beneath his ordinary gold normal.
Sean Chee
But when so, each he and the Poppea solid gave me far fewer causes to complain because the piece went on, settling into pitch and giving performances as beautiful as they have been persuasive. In A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon singles out singers like Leontyne Worth and Waltraud Meier for whom vocalism, musical interpretation, and dramatic efficiency all converge to remodel the singer into her character.
He contains amongst their quantity Whitney Morrison, whose hapless Ottavia on this double opera delivers a heartrending“Addio, Roma!” simply as Jim and Julia discover themselves expelled from their macabre Eden. However the identical could possibly be stated of each singer on this staging, who foregrounded textual content and drama all through to vanish into their roles—at the same time as a few of them performed a number of roles, both doubling components in Poppea or splitting between the 2 operas, as Costanzo alternates between his ethereal efficiency of the sybaritic Nero right into a down-to-earth flip as Julia’s bourgeois dad.
Doublings upon doublings: Sharon offers the Baroque opera the final phrase in Comet/Poppea however turns the prettiest music in Monteverdi’s oeuvre from a duo right into a quartet. In his program notice, Lewis factors to a pressure of Afro-pessimism in Du Bois’ story, however in his opera, the great thing about Nellie’s lullaby hints at the potential of some non secular transcendence. Sharon doubles down by making “Pur ti miro” a crushing coda to the twin work, one which underlines that chance in addition to throwing the bleakness of Jim and Nellie’s state of affairs into stark reduction by the ironic loveliness of the music. Each members of each {couples} left standing on the finish of the operas, Nellie and Jim in addition to Poppea and Nero, pledge their love for one another, buying and selling traces in English and in Italian.
Lawrence Sumulong
That is the one second within the in any other case bulletproof Comet/Poppea libretti the place the textual content lets us down. The clunky English singing translation has Jim and Nellie telling one another “Sure, sure, sure, sure!” which, in American, is one thing you’re much less more likely to say whenever you’re pledging your devotion than whenever you’re attempting to get someone off the telephone. However the dramatic and vocal dedication of the singers smoothed over this blemish to supply a deeply transferring ending to the piece.
The Comet/Poppea is an experimental work, and good scientists know that we will be taught nearly as a lot from the failure of an experiment as its success. If I had hated the piece, it nonetheless would have despatched me dwelling with quite a bit to consider. The abundance of visible, sonic, and mental riches would alone have been value these moments when the unusual storytelling started to pull, when it grew to become not possible to give attention to the person scores, and even when the stage turntable appeared to malfunction (it stopped turning a few occasions, and on the off likelihood that these pauses have been intentional, they appeared… poorly timed).
However this was a rousing success. I don’t suppose I’ll ever be as moved by the demise of Seneca as I used to be on this staging of Poppea, or as crammed with dread by one other staging—ought to I ever get the prospect to see one—of The Comet. Sharon is kind of the star within the opera world lately, with a Tristan arising on the subsequent Met season, and a Ring to comply with quickly thereafter. If he’s able to attaining with these items even a fraction of what he was free to do with this staging, they’re positive to be nothing in need of revelatory.
