May 6, 2010
NEW YORK -- New York City Opera is struggling in a financial abyss, but managing to hang on. Its annual Vox series, two days of unstaged excerpts from ten operas-in-progress, is reflective of its continued commitment to the new, the young and the emerging – composers as well as artists. Now presented in New York University's Skirball Center, this literally dressed-down event involves score stands, microphones, video introductions and orchestra members in jeans and sneakers.
Vox is a like a horse race where listeners try to predict which operas, singers or conductors will be part of City Opera's future. Organized and tightened up from their Symphony Space days, the productions -- this year winnowed from 99 submissions -- are a hybrid, more performance than workshop. Friday's five-hour evening (April 30) had possibilities.
The composers were mostly from New York, but the operas -- some taken from true stories -- take place in foreign settings: Mexico, China, France, Switzerland and the African desert. Only one was set in the United States.
Daniel Crozier's "With Blood, With Ink" (libretto by Peter M. Krask) was one of several offerings about parts of the self. A talented 17th-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, loves another woman; as punishment, she is forced by the church to swear an oath in blood renouncing her life's literary work. Her onstage dying self strives to connect with her younger self to be made whole, but doesn't succeed till the end. (Oddly, no one dies, but that could change.)
Three well-matched sopranos sang a lyrical trio in the contemporary ecstatic vein: Crozier has heard "Rosenkavalier." Andrew Drost, as the tyrannical priest, showed a clear articulate tenor that surges forth like a flawless tennis serve: we'll hear from him again. The intelligent, reliable baritone Stephen Bryant sang the cameo role of the Archbishop. Traditional orchestration with updated percussion spiced a couple of Wagnerian interludes. The City Opera women's chorus sang Latin chants in whole tones -- the only time the supertitles screen was used. (Blame the budget.)
Described by its composer and librettist Du Yun, the industrial landscape of "Zolle" (Italian for "chunk of earth") suggests that emotional uncertainty is universal: "Torn from her roots in rural China, a dead soul wanders through the shadowy space between memory and reality, tracing her identity through the land she once walked."
Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, whose credits include both Baroque and contemporary styles, vocalized extreme-range sounds augmented by stylized gestures, yelps, yips, moans and wheezes into a walkie-talkie. A small ensemble's wailing saxophone, heavy and atmospheric, was joined by a low, mournful violin. Hila Plitmann was a pale-voiced narrator, and Irish-type tenor Brian Anderson spun a final duet with Chinn, as her character was coming to grips with being dead. Uninviting to the casual ear, "Zolle" will have a self-selecting audience; City Opera won't be revisiting it any time soon.
True story: Isabelle Eberhardt left a comfortable life in Geneva to become a nomad on horseback, and drowned in a North African desert flash flood in 1904, at age 27. "Song from the Uproar," by the generously gifted Missy Mazzoli (think Nico Muhly, Jennifer Higdon), is "about transforming yourself into a true, honest version of the self you wish to be." In rich up-to-the-minute tonality, Mazzoli's lush orchestra--plus electronic keyboard—and phrasing sweeps like Ellen Zwilich's, but it's sweeter. (Ariana Chris as Isabelle's mother is the one to watch.)
Black-and-white film images from Isabelle's early life float and vanish. The divided chorus is on either side of the stage. The segments took about 20 minutes; a piece doesn't have to be long to be good.
In "A Star Across the Ocean," by Scott Davenport Richards, an American family visits the Paris of Gershwin and Josephine Baker. Chuck Cooper, in an aria that riffs irritably on “Ol' Man River,” was a Paul Robeson figure in gravitas and rolling bass voice.
Some arias throughout the evening seemed disproportionately long, but that emanates from "excerpt" and "in process." Leniency is called for.
David T. Little refers to his dark, ominous "Dog Days" as "twisted Americana": government is starving us, turning families into lower forms with no morals. For one family, the paradigm is a man in a dog suit (shown in a video) who, as things get worse, is eventually shot and eaten because it no longer matters whether he's really a dog. A string ensemble backed by a combo with electric bass and snare drums rumbled repeated motifs.
Little has a good sense of the voice's strength and the beauty of duets: the eloquent force of Chris and Drost, as the sons, again hit the mark. The young daughter enjoys her emaciated look as a model, and sings in short gasps. As her exasperated mother, Lisa Vroman showed typical elegance and authority. The score reaches out, but the angry plot belies it, and the back wall turned red, like a warning.
Conductors did excellent work with the unfinished scores, and it is heartening to imagine them on City Opera's podium. Not all of these operas are going to make it, but some will, and freshness is what City Opera has always been about.
NEW YORK -- New York City Opera is struggling in a financial abyss, but managing to hang on. Its annual Vox series, two days of unstaged excerpts from ten operas-in-progress, is reflective of its continued commitment to the new, the young and the emerging – composers as well as artists. Now presented in New York University's Skirball Center, this literally dressed-down event involves score stands, microphones, video introductions and orchestra members in jeans and sneakers.
Vox is a like a horse race where listeners try to predict which operas, singers or conductors will be part of City Opera's future. Organized and tightened up from their Symphony Space days, the productions -- this year winnowed from 99 submissions -- are a hybrid, more performance than workshop. Friday's five-hour evening (April 30) had possibilities.
The composers were mostly from New York, but the operas -- some taken from true stories -- take place in foreign settings: Mexico, China, France, Switzerland and the African desert. Only one was set in the United States.
Daniel Crozier's "With Blood, With Ink" (libretto by Peter M. Krask) was one of several offerings about parts of the self. A talented 17th-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, loves another woman; as punishment, she is forced by the church to swear an oath in blood renouncing her life's literary work. Her onstage dying self strives to connect with her younger self to be made whole, but doesn't succeed till the end. (Oddly, no one dies, but that could change.)
Three well-matched sopranos sang a lyrical trio in the contemporary ecstatic vein: Crozier has heard "Rosenkavalier." Andrew Drost, as the tyrannical priest, showed a clear articulate tenor that surges forth like a flawless tennis serve: we'll hear from him again. The intelligent, reliable baritone Stephen Bryant sang the cameo role of the Archbishop. Traditional orchestration with updated percussion spiced a couple of Wagnerian interludes. The City Opera women's chorus sang Latin chants in whole tones -- the only time the supertitles screen was used. (Blame the budget.)
Described by its composer and librettist Du Yun, the industrial landscape of "Zolle" (Italian for "chunk of earth") suggests that emotional uncertainty is universal: "Torn from her roots in rural China, a dead soul wanders through the shadowy space between memory and reality, tracing her identity through the land she once walked."
Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, whose credits include both Baroque and contemporary styles, vocalized extreme-range sounds augmented by stylized gestures, yelps, yips, moans and wheezes into a walkie-talkie. A small ensemble's wailing saxophone, heavy and atmospheric, was joined by a low, mournful violin. Hila Plitmann was a pale-voiced narrator, and Irish-type tenor Brian Anderson spun a final duet with Chinn, as her character was coming to grips with being dead. Uninviting to the casual ear, "Zolle" will have a self-selecting audience; City Opera won't be revisiting it any time soon.
True story: Isabelle Eberhardt left a comfortable life in Geneva to become a nomad on horseback, and drowned in a North African desert flash flood in 1904, at age 27. "Song from the Uproar," by the generously gifted Missy Mazzoli (think Nico Muhly, Jennifer Higdon), is "about transforming yourself into a true, honest version of the self you wish to be." In rich up-to-the-minute tonality, Mazzoli's lush orchestra--plus electronic keyboard—and phrasing sweeps like Ellen Zwilich's, but it's sweeter. (Ariana Chris as Isabelle's mother is the one to watch.)
Black-and-white film images from Isabelle's early life float and vanish. The divided chorus is on either side of the stage. The segments took about 20 minutes; a piece doesn't have to be long to be good.
In "A Star Across the Ocean," by Scott Davenport Richards, an American family visits the Paris of Gershwin and Josephine Baker. Chuck Cooper, in an aria that riffs irritably on “Ol' Man River,” was a Paul Robeson figure in gravitas and rolling bass voice.
Some arias throughout the evening seemed disproportionately long, but that emanates from "excerpt" and "in process." Leniency is called for.
David T. Little refers to his dark, ominous "Dog Days" as "twisted Americana": government is starving us, turning families into lower forms with no morals. For one family, the paradigm is a man in a dog suit (shown in a video) who, as things get worse, is eventually shot and eaten because it no longer matters whether he's really a dog. A string ensemble backed by a combo with electric bass and snare drums rumbled repeated motifs.
Little has a good sense of the voice's strength and the beauty of duets: the eloquent force of Chris and Drost, as the sons, again hit the mark. The young daughter enjoys her emaciated look as a model, and sings in short gasps. As her exasperated mother, Lisa Vroman showed typical elegance and authority. The score reaches out, but the angry plot belies it, and the back wall turned red, like a warning.
Conductors did excellent work with the unfinished scores, and it is heartening to imagine them on City Opera's podium. Not all of these operas are going to make it, but some will, and freshness is what City Opera has always been about.