October. L.A. Opera’s production of Bizet’s Pearl Fishers was set in a neo-realist shantytown flooded by global warming, populated by idlers in color-coordinated rags. The famous male duet "Au fond du temple saint" made less of an impression than Javier Camarena’s soliloquy, “À cette voix quel trouble agitait tout mon être?”
Halloween. L.A. Opera’s annual movie event at the Ace featured Philip Glass’s re-scored Belle et la Béte live, with the Philip Glass Ensemble. I don’t understand why Glass did this. Loving the movie would seem to imply not wanting to muck it up. Georges Auric’s quietly ecstatic original score seems unsurpassable. Moreover, Glass’s score erased the actors’ voices, eliminating a huge part of the movie’s charm. Cocteau was attuned to music and the visuals of his movie are accompanied by a careful composition of the actors’ voices. I remembered Jean Marais’s rasp, and despaired. And the farouche whispers of Josette Day, the contrapuntal screeching of Mila Parély and Nane Germon, Marcel André’s melancholy bass grumbling, …. In the Glass version, all the male voices sounded the same; all the female voices sounded the same. I didn’t even realize there were four singers till the bows at the end. The evening was redeemed by the after-party. A big, big shout-out to the brilliant young lady who came as one of Cocteau’s animated arm-chandeliers.
November. The director Thaddeus Strassberger framed Nabucco with an on-stage audience of very grand ladies with their military escorts, with the costumes and manners of the Austrian authorities of Milan at the time of the 1852 premiere. In keeping with the theme, the sets and costumes were clever reimaginings of 19th century stage modes. Strassberger might have taken a hint from Visconti’s Senso (above). Whatever he was thinking, the conceit framed the story of separated lovers within the narrative context of an evil Queen, and crazy King, plus the larger political context. It was hard not to take this as a timely lesson in how to survive a crazy leader. Every detail of the action was vividly re-invented. When the time came for the chorus to sing the opera’s signature tune, “Va, pensiero,” the sets had spun around, and it was as if we were backstage, with the all the performers, watching the chorus – along with the dancers and stagehands - sing, “Oh my country, so beautiful, so lost.” Even at as the performers took their bows there was an ingenious gesture, as they unfurled banners and flags calling for unity against tyranny, to the scandal of the authorities watching on-stage. Verdi our contemporary.
February. Dudamel and Elkhanah Pulitzer and the L.A. Phil did Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971) at Disney Hall. It's hard to imagine a better production of this strange collage. A fable of a Celebrant whose vision is misunderstood by his audience. Their blindness leads to doubt, and then violent rejection – causing him to have a breakdown. Having reached bottom, it ends with a glimmer of hope for reconciliation. Which is to say, it’s about a symphony conductor …. There’s a lot of Sondheim in this (same year as “Follies”), but there’s a lot of Bernstein in Sondheim. The ballads and icily ironic choruses are well done. There’s also a lot of Varèse, Mahler, Britten, Berlioz and Stravinsky in the music. And the text appropriates not only liturgy, but Godspell, Auden, Eliot and Joan Baez. The high point was “Meditation #1”. Pulitzer staged it perfectly: a recuperative moment after the frenzy that preceded it. The Celebrant led one of the dancers onto the altar where she waved her hand over the huddled Street Chorus. She descended and they supported her in the air. It was the visualization of grace.
Later in February, the Disney Hall stage presented another piece from the same era, one without a speck of redemption. Salvatore Martirano’s L's G.A. (1967) for reciter (Ron Athey), tape, and film (Ron Nameth). Not outrage, but exasperated disgust at the corruption of words and ideas. A chilling disconnect between lovely sound of manipulated gongs and ghastly images of mummies and skulls, as Athey heroically howled the Gettysburg Address through a gas mask.
And then last Wednesday, back at Dorothy Chandler, for Gluck’s revised 1774 Paris version of his Orpheus and Eurydice. Fifteen years ago L.A. Opera presented the original version in a production by Lucinda Childs. That production was my first experience of opera as something that matters. During the first act of this new production, I felt that something like that tremendous experience was happening again. Orpheus (Maxim Mironov) and the Chorus (the Master Chorale) – who together do 90% of the singing – were radiant. But then it was sabotaged by the dances: inappropriate, empty gesticulating. Something else is required for the music that George Bernard Shaw described as a depiction of a world where, “virtue and effort are transcended: there is no need to be good or to strive upward any more: one has arrived, and all those accursed hygienics of the soul are done with and forgotten.”