Report from St. Louis
An 'Alice in Wonderland' for our time
July 3, 2012Hearing and seeing Unsuk Chin’s opera “Alice in Wonderland” in its magical staging by Opera Theatre of St. Louis, I was reminded of Aaron Copland’s comment about the reason he composed music -- to make a “permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.”
The American premiere of “Alice in Wonderland” was the apex of an OTSL festival season that also included a powerful and tightly focused production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and a provocative staging of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen.” I missed Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte,” the fourth production in the OTSL festival season, but I heard good reports of it from colleagues attending the annual conference of the Music Critics Association of North America. (The Ferrando was tenor David Portillo, a product of the UTSA undergraduate vocal program. Some may recall his attractive Sam Kaplan in a student production of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene.”)
OTSL has a unique place in the American opera landscape. Most major companies generally perform in proscenium theaters. The St. Louis company performs on a thrust stage, with seating arrayed on three sides of the action. Thus OTSL has little choice but to create its own sets. The smallish house, seating only about 900, places less of a premium on big voices than on careful attention to theatrical nuance. The company performs all its operas in English.
Ms. Chin and David Henry Hwang wrote the libretto for “Alice in Wonderland,” based on Lewis Carroll’s classics. In seven scenes, two interludes and an epilogue, the text recalls iconic characters and situations from Carroll’s originals, but the opera renders them more as dream than as fantasy.
We live in an increasingly multicultural and (setting aside the moral revanchism into which the Republican party has lately sunk) non-ideological age. Time and place are less controlling of culture than they once were. The Korean-born composer’s music suits the age. The score is fully modern in its means and language, but the use of the orchestra also recalls the concrete quality of much traditional East Asian music, which values sound as a thing in itself. Ms. Chin draws freely from music history: The March Hare discourses on the mathematical concept of commutativity in baroque-style recitative accompanied by harpsichord, and the Dormouse expostulates in hip-hop style.
The orchestral sounds are colorful, amazingly varied and admirably fitted to the theatrical moment. If her vocal lines do not always follow the stresses and rhythms of the text, much of the singing is deliciously witty, and there are passages of great loveliness, as well: Alice sings a touching lullaby to a baby who turns into a pig, “Sleep tight, my ugly baby.”
At OTSL’s request, Ms. Chin reduced the orchestration from the extreme demands of the 2007 premiere in Munich. I have heard the original version only in a YouTube video of the full Munich production, but the reworking never sounded stripped-down. Conductor Michael Christie maintained a high level of energy and clarity throughout.
“Alice” calls for a very large cast, which the company filled in large measure by relying on present and former members of its Gerdine Young Artist program -- an impressive group, on the whole. Chief among that group was the Alice of soprano Ashley Emerson, physically small enough to impersonate a child and equipped with a smallish but lively and attractive instrument. Notable among the populace of her dreamworld were the strong, gleaming soprano of Tracy Dahl as the Cheshire Cat; the aptly imperious soprano of Julie Makerov as the Queen of Hearts; the convincing hip-hop singing and movements of tenor Matthew DiBattista as the Dormouse; and the splendid countertenor David Trudgen as both the White Rabbit and the March Hare.
The physical production was so enchanting, imaginative and enterprising that it could give Federico Fellini a run for his money. The creative team must have had a blast putting it all together. And it definitely was a team. All of the dreamlike effects and characterizations -- the levitating laying cards, the video descent into the rabbit hole, Alice growing and shrinking, the caterpillar’s dance -- required multidisciplinary creativity. (That’s another way in which this production suited our cross-fertilizing age.) The credits: Stage director James Robinson, set designer Allen Moyer, costume designer James Schuette, video designer Greg Emetaz, lighting designer Christopher Akerlind, wig and makeup designer Ashley Ryan and choreographer Seán Curran.
“Sweeney Todd” had less to divert the eye, but its scenic gestures (by designer Riccardo Hernandez) and staging (by Ron Daniels) were taut and to the point. Bass-baritone Rod Gilfrey brought majestic power and an ideal blend of menace and melancholy to the title role. Bass-baritone Timothy Nolen was perfectly cast as the lecherous Judge Turpin. Mezzo-soprano Karen Ziemba’s Mrs. Lovett wanted a pinch more saltiness, but she was otherwise a splendid complement to Mr. Gilfrey. Soprano Deana Breiwick (Joanna) and baritone Nathaniel Hackmann (Anthony Hope) made a highly attractive pair of young lovers. Mezzo-soprano Suzanne Mentzer was chillingly effective as the Beggar Woman, Todd’s long-lost wife. The excellent conductor was Stephen Lord.
“Carmen” was most interesting for its staging concept. Stage director Stephen Barlow and set and costume designer Paul Edwards moved the action forward to the 1940s, during the authoritarian Franco regime in Spain. Apart from a few details, the palette was monochrome, as in a black-and-white film. Video “opening credits” furthered the movie allusion. The smugglers did not trade in ordinary contraband, but in North African refugees. That innovation served to make the smugglers more than usually sinister and dangerous, but it was probably ahistorical: Spain suffered from out-migration during the Franco years and had no immigration law to violate until 1985.
Musically, the production was hit and miss. Conductor Carlos Izcaray’s pacing was often too slow, and sometimes rhythmically loose-limbed. Mezzo-soprano Kendall Gladen brought a ripe, rich, sultry instrument to the title role. It was good that she did not turn Carmen into a caricature of seductiveness, but neither was she fully convincing. As Don José, tenor Adam Diegel sang attractively if somewhat blandly in Act I, but he wanted refinement in more dramatic material later on. Baritone Aleksey Bogdanov’s Escamillo wasn’t commanding enough vocally or theatrically. The Micaela of soprano Corinne Winters was fully realized and gleamingly sung.
Concurrently with the opera festival, the Pulitzer Foundation presented a mid-June series of chamber concerts in the foundation’s gallery, a spare and elegant design by architect Tadao Ando. The programs reprised some of the works presented during the first 10 years of contemporary concerts at the Pulitzer. Most of the musicians were drawn from the roster of the St. Louis Symphony, whose music director, David Robertson, offered trenchant remarks about each work.
June 14 brought George Crumb’s devastating “Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land,” a 1970 work for amplified string quartet doubling on percussion instruments; and Frederic Rzewski’s sprawling “The People United Will Never be Defeated,” a 1975 work for piano.
The latter comprised 36 variations on a Chilean leftist movement song by Sergio Ortega; half the number would have been more than enough, despite pianist Peter Hendeson’s virtuosic and tireless musicianship. The pianist’s own improvisation (an option in the score) just before the end was the most interesting music in the work’s nearly hour-long span.
Crumb’s work, one of the higher peaks of the 20th century, was full of the violence, anger, anguish and dissonance that characterized the late 1960s and the Vietnam War. The music was very much of its time, but it sounded equally fresh and (alas) relevant in ours. The convicted and rhythmically astute performance was by violinists Peter Otto and Eva Kozma, violist Morris Jacob and cellist Bjorn Ranheim.
The centerpiece of the June 17 concert was a welcome opportunity to hear some of Unsuk Chin’s music away from the opera house. Her “Fantaisie mecanique” required only five players (trumpeter Joshua MacCluer, trombonist Timothy Myers, pianist Nina Ferrigno and percussionists William James and Eric Beach) but Mr. Robertson conducted to help navigate the work’s extreme rhythmic complexities. Composed in 1994 and revised three years later, the music feels improvised and, at times, almost chaotic, yet a sense of organic structure and consistency emerges from each of its movements. As in “Alice,” the sound palette is very large -- tuned percussion includes vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, xylophone and Steinspiel, in which the struck bars are stones.
Mr. Henderson returned with Ms. Ferrigno to play Olivier Messiaen’s exquisite “Visions de l’Amen,” a set of nine expressions of Catholic devotion, at once deeply spiritual and sensuous. The program opened with Franco Donatoni’s often playful, sometimes obsessive, constantly surprising and always delightful “La souris sans sourire,” for string quartet, The excellent players were violinists Jooyeon Kong and Emily Ho, violist Shannon Farrell Williams and cellist Melissa Brooks.
Mike Greenberg
