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OPERA REVIEW
January 21, 2003
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By Jules Langert
In timely accord with the political activism of the moment, Contemporary Opera Marin is presenting an evening of four brief theater pieces with relevance and attitude, billed as Operas of Social Protest. Performances run through January. Best of all and funniest of the lot is Shostakovich's Rayok, last on the program, which contains twenty-five minutes of hilarious parody based on a meeting of the USSR Congress of Composers held in 1967, which Shostakovich attended. In an atmosphere of dogged seriousness, and surrounded by a chorus of compliant “functionaries,” the dour, self-important Chairman and three leading Critics (all baritones) give us the Party line on what constitutes good music.
One critic, mellifluously comical Louis Weiner, warbles lyrically about grace, elegance, and the classical style, as the chorus joins in, voicing their robotic approval. A second critic, Michael Valcour, endlessly repeating a few formulaic mantras, begins to sound like a deranged Soviet Gertrude Stein, or a recorded message gone haywire. The final singer, Mark D. Lew, works himself into a narcissistic frenzy about the great Russian composers of the past, and then breaks into a stiff-legged, spastic dance, arms flailing like a marionette's, with the chorus doing their own accompanying version. This meeting is deemed a success, and everyone is thanked for their participation, in a rousing Soviet-style finale.
Much of the fun lies in the gloomily earnest formality of the cast, wearing dark suits and workers' outfits, while singing and doing the craziest things. Shostakovich's music is steadfastly rudimentary and tonal, to match the sentiments expressed, but then it goes briefly out of kilter, giving a bizarre twist to everything. The company's artistic director, pianist Paul Smith, plays the not-so-subtly-subversive score, and stage director Rick Wallace provides the movement and wacky choreography.
The evening starts with Harry Partch's Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions for narrator-guitarist and three singers. Partch said that the texts he used were graffiti he found at a roadside stop near Barstow, California, in the desert. The narrator speaks each of the simple messages while strumming his guitar, and then a cast member enters, singing the same words and acting out the situation. This slight but charming work benefits from guitarist-narrator John Schneider's approach to his role as balladeer, conjuring brief moments from the lives of eight young people on the move. Like a story by Sherwood Anderson or Steinbeck, or a song by Ives, Partch's deceptively simple settings capture a bit of reality, presenting it to us in a fresh and original way. The first half of the program ends with Two Suffragette Songs, arranged for women's chorus. Eleven demurely clad ladies take the stage, costumed in period dresses, portraying gentle, but determined warriors for women's rights. Their combination of shyness, idealism. and burgeoning feminist zeal has us rooting for them, especially in the second song, “The Ragtime Suffragette,” by Harry Williams and Nat D. Ayer. This is an exuberantly delightful piece of music, played with gusto and suitably graceful aplomb by pianist Debra Chambliss, also wearing a period costume. From the opening line of the refrain “Oh, those Suffragettes!”, we are completely caught up in the stirring giddiness of it all. Peter Maxwell Davies' The Yellow Cake Review is the evening's only disappointment. A protest against the opening of a uranium mine in Orkney, composed and staged as a cabaret review, it is overlong, full of clichéd ironies, and has a bland, generic score. Singer Carole Klein and Actress Sharron Drake project their voices well enough on the small stage, but are too reticent in their portrayals; they need to dramatize the material and make more of their roles. But even with a complete revitalization, this work misfires both as entertainment and as agit-prop. Oddly enough, however, according to the program notes, it won the day in Orkney and helped prevent the mine from opening! Operas of Social Protest will be performed again on January 24 and 25 at 7:30, and January 26 at 3:17, timed to coincide with the Superbowl. All performances are at the College of Marin.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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