| OPERA REVIEW "Deadly" Bon-Bons June 28, 2002
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By Michelle Dulak Nine operas in 75 minutes? That was the claim made on Contemporary Opera Marin's website for one of its two programs last week. On Friday the program took even less time than that. Whether these are really "operas" is an open question (well, actually, not very open). But anyone who came to the College of Marin Friday to hear this micro-marathon would have had fun.
The program centered on a set of seven "mini-operas" on the Seven Deadly Sins, all of them written for a party for four higher-ups in the English National Opera about ten years ago. It's a starry panoply of modern British composers, all right — Robin Holloway and Colin and David Matthews, among others — but context and time constraints obviously made for light and fluffy music, more sung skit than opera. Seldom has so much modernist hair been let down in so little space.
I suppose, given the festive occasion, the composers were reluctant to put too much sting into their renditions, but even so it was rather disappointing to see such half-hearted attacks on what I suppose we can call the Heptagram of Evil. "Avarice" (Holloway) opened the program, and was a sort of would-be cabaret song, sung alarmingly under pitch by Mark D. Lew. David Matthews' "Pride" featured a televangelist (ooh, what a bravely-chosen target! especially as the species doesn't really exist in Britain). "Envy" (Alec Roth) was a litany of desirable things, with the kind of text that just naturally rhymes "to be specific" with "South Pacific," and was redeemed only by Margo Schembre's frenetic delivery and an uncannily appropriate jagged, ants-in-the-pants piano part.
Some sins fared better. "Sloth" got Colin Matthews, in a magnificent short parody of Everywoman trying to get out of bed in the morning. The singer was Pilar Kuhn, and the "words" were credited in the program to Charles Hart, though there weren't any (lots of snores, snorts, and assorted vocalizations, yes!). "Lust" got a full-blown mini-farce titled "Aspects of Lust" (Jeremy Sams), beginning with the Three Ladies and the unconscious Tamino from Zauberflöte in unauthorized English translation (the kind that rhymes "pec" with "heck"), and veering through several centuries with repeated visits to the lamer sort of English madrigal ("To My Ladye's Nape," &c.), until the Ladies imperiously cut the show off. The two best treatments were "Greed" (Jonathan Dove) and "Anger" (Julian Grant). The latter was a hoot. At center stage was a diva (Kelly Powers, in regulation Diva Dress) running through her repertoire; stage right were a pair of critics (Steven Bronfenbrenner and Michael Crozier) listening, at first both praising her to the skies, then differing more and more about her merits until by the end they're about to come to blows. She's been singing all the time, moving to heavier and heavier roles (a few "Hojotojos" towards the end), and finally she's too loud for the critics to hear their own argument, so they turn to her together and yell, "Shut up!" Cute, and just pointed enough to prick a little. Dove's "Greed" was the only one of the seven that dared pathos. The scene is some Third-World tourist site, with three crass First-World aesthetes looking over the wares of a native woman. They paw over the stuff on her table, and the only thing they admire is a little clay pitcher with a blue decoration on it. She explains that her mother made it, and the blue line is the sacred water, and they do the Educated Ever-So-Slightly-Guilt-Ridden Western Tourist Round Dance ("How authentic!" "How ethnic!"). She sings movingly of her sick child; they offer her ten dollars, then twenty. Which she takes. And then (this is the kicker), the moment they are out of sight, she reaches under her table and brings out an exact duplicate of the pitcher she's just sold, and puts it on the table just where the last one was. Bitter stuff, that. And truer than the rest of the bunch.
Why both "Avarice" and "Greed" in the 7, and no "Gluttony"? No idea — though Gluttony got an outing of sorts in one of the two operas preceding the 7, Stephen Oliver's "Cinderella: or, the Vindication of Sloth." The conceit of this mini-opera is that Cinderella doesn't go to the Ball after all, preferring to spend the evening in an armchair munching chips, so she lends the precious Glass Slipper to one of the wicked stepsisters. All sorts of mayhem ensues, from which only the lazy Cinderella is spared. A message we couch potatoes can take fervently to heart. The other opera, which opened the show, was "First Love, Last Orders, A Pub Opera," by Barry Russell, an intermittently winsome pickup drama. That Paul Smith has managed to put such a show together on what must be a perilously small budget is a marvel. The singing ranged from amateur-musical level to quite strong, and the playing (the Deadly Sins were for string quartet and piano, while the winds predominated in the two "prequels") had that frenetic-but-concentrated quality that comes from having your director sitting a few feet away at the piano and sending all his musical signals by means of frantic motions of the chin.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.) ©2002 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |