Golijov’s music for Ainadamar was unfailingly appealing and often moving. Peabody Southwell extracted maximum value from “Desde me ventana,” for example. And the aria leading up to Lorca’s execution: vintage tango, contemporary world dance music, flamenco wailing. All very tangy and flavorful.
The problem was that this music had no context or characters. As in his earlier libretto for Howard Shore’s The Fly, David Henry Hwang alludes to significant events without dramatizing them. We get a parade of seven-decade-old clichés about Andalusia, martyrdom, poetry, the Republic, and Fascism.
The argument that these clichés are what’s inside the head of the ailing old lady protagonist merely raises the question why Margarita was chosen to be the protagonist in the first place. It’s not as though civil war, the murder of dissident writers, and political oppression by terror aren’t, unfortunately, all in the news right now. There’s got to be a more humane way to speak of these things.
The staging was not up to the usual LBO standard. The chorus of ladies of Granada spent all their time riding up and down on a riser waving their arms. It would have been nice if we could have heard them better. Frieder Weiss’s video projections were intermittently apt (the execution scene). The best effect—the heaven of chandeliers at the end—was undermined by having Margarita exit by sinking into the stage while bathed in synthetic blue disco lights. But then, there wasn’t any story for the staging to support.
[Image: Zubaran, St. Bonaventure, 1629]
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