Austin Lyric Opera
A memorable 'Flight,' grounded in life
April 12, 2011Life is a series of arrivals and departures. There’s one instance of each at either end, of course, but those are just standard issue. The ones in between -- the loves lost and found, the mapping and remapping of journeys, the discoveries of self and others -- are the ones that give each life its individual tonality and shape and meaning.
An airport waiting room is the stage for those metaphorical arrivals and departures in “Flight,” a wonderful 1998 opera by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April de Angelis. Austin Lyric Opera’s splendid production of “Flight” opened on April 9 in the Long Center and continues April 13 and 15 at 7:30 and April 17 at 3. (See austinlyricopera.org)
“Flight” is often very funny, sometimes to the point of burlesque, but it is also at times poignant and deep. Much of the first act is devoted to introductions.
We meet two passenger couples undergoing marital crises, a middle-aged lady who is there to meet the young fiancé she'd met on holiday, a pair of randy flight attendants, an immigration officer, the Controller in her mezzanine perch and a Refugee who is stranded in the airport without either money or papers. A character based loosely on Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who was stranded in Charles DeGaulle Airport for 18 years, the Refugee is the catalyst for much of the opera’s movement.
If the story-telling sometimes wants greater discipline, the librettist deserves unrestrained praise for making a collection of mostly ordinary lives seem compelling without resort to any dramatic device more cataclysmic than the grounding of flights by a thunderstorm. The smartly rhyming English text is consistently brilliant in its details.
Altough Mr. Dove is British, his music in "Flight" sounds very American. Much of it stands on the shoulders of John Adams (the composer of “Nixon in China,” not the second president of the United States) and Leonard Bernstein. Perhaps only an Englishman could have bred a successful hybrid of Mr. Adams’s patterned California Cool and Bernstein’s jazzy Manhattan Melodrama. One can also detect elements of Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy and maybe even Richard Wagner's Rhine Maidens.
But there’s much more to Mr. Dove’s music than a fusion of established idioms. Even where the music comes closest to Mr. Adams’s “minimalism,” Mr. Dove’s textures and color are much more opulent (the orchestra includes a whole kitchen’s worth of tuned percussion) and the lines more free. From moment to moment, the specific mix of harmony, color, rhythm and melody is molded closely to the specifics of character, situation and emotion. The compositional virtuosity attains astonishing heights in the ensemble passages, among the most complex and nuanced in all of opera. There are some very beautiful solo arias, as well.
The two most prominent roles are assigned to aptly stratospheric voices. The Refugee is a countertenor, not a common vocal category since the 18th century. The Controller is a coloratura soprano role that spends an alarming amount of time above the treble staff -- sometimes in sustained passages that look down on high C, far below. (By comparison, Mozart’s Queen of the Night would be like a night off.) Both roles were sung with effortless beauty by Nicholas Zammit and Nili Riemer, respectively. Mezzo-soprano Karin Mushegain, as the pregnant wife of a diplomat, was glorious in the aria with the evening's greatest emotional wallop, expressing regret at impending motherhood. (She changes her mind when she delivers the baby in Act III.)
But the whole cast was outstanding -- tenor Jason Karn and soprano Mela Dailey as the vacationing couple trying to rekindle their romance; mezzo Josepha Gayer as the middle-aged woman vainly waiting for her fiancé; the voluptuous mezzo Patricia Risley and the honeyed baritone Jonathan Beyer as the flight attendants who mistake the unnamed airport for Love Field; baritone Craig Verm as the diplomat; and bass Kristopher Irmiter as the immigration officer.
Conductor Richard Buckley gave the score sumptuous shape and unflagging momentum.
Stage director Kristine McIntyre, adeptly maneuvering between bawdy and serious as the text required, remounted her 2008 Pittsburgh Opera production, which included well observed costumes by Antonia West and studiedly banal airport decor by Carol Bailey.
Mike
Greenberg
