San Francisco Classical Voice

You might never guess it from his mixed notices of late, but once upon a time Gian Carlo Menotti, who observes his 91st birthday in July, was a trailblazer of sorts. That time, however, was a half century ago; and the madrigal opera, The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, or: The Three Sundays of the Poet, as revived this month with crisp efficiency by Robert Geary's San Francisco Chamber Singers, wears its years poorly. Instead of uniting opera and dance, the 1956 piece sends off those two creative endeavors to neutral corners like prizefighters at the sound of the bell.

Introduced in 1956 at New York City Ballet, where John Butler served as choreographer, the work lacks the melodic distinction, the unswerving moral rigor and the sheer irresistibility of the piece it seems to shadow, the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht ballet-opera The Seven Deadly Sins. Typically, Menotti set his own libretto, a verse fable in which the three mythological beasts of the title symbolize both the three ages of man and the ludicrous postures to which the terminally chic elements of society aspire. As a purveyor of searing social commentary, the composer has always been more promise than achievement. Here, however, he attempts to align himself with the tradition of madrigal opera, finding his inspiration in Orazio Vecchi's 1597 comedy Amfiparnasso. It is a dubious fit.

In Menotti's scheme, six instrumental interludes (dispatched by a nine-member chamber ensemble) spice the sung introduction and 12 madrigals. Nothing that occurred Sunday evening at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley suggested that dance was necessary to the scheme; apparently, the composer had his doubts, too. The 19 members of the choir, all masked, performed to the left of the altar, with singers sporadically emerging for solo assignments. Geary conducted the chamber orchestra, placed on the right, while in the middle three dancers (Renee Myers, Jason Hancock, Oscar Trujillo) choreographed by Fabrice Lemire, danced and mimed the poet and his menagerie, donning horns and other paraphernalia.

The temperature never rose to the boiling point. Geary's singers projected Menotti's awkward prosody with consummate sensitivity to stresses, but without much theatrical fervor. The composer blessed the wind-dominant chamber players with the most substantial thematic material, almost Gallic in its insouciance, and they relished the assignment. The dancers made the most of their limited spatial possibilities, but The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore falls afoul of its libretto and of its creator's desire to please without leaving a bitter aftertaste.

The concise first half of the program offered a pair of recent a cappella works by Americans who sound thoroughly immersed in the choral tradition. Tom Flaherty's A Timbered Choir sets three poems by Wendell Berry whose motto might be "Give me the simple life." The poet finds solace and inspiration in nature and deems the urban existence soulless. These Luddite lyrics are complemented by Flaherty's open harmonies, an affinity for Berry's stresses and a muted dynamic scheme, to which Geary's splendid ensemble responded with uncommon dedication to the composer's markings. The attempts at onomatopoeia (chirping and warbling) in "Best of any song/is bird song'' are notably successful; the blend of male voices was pure velvet in "I was wakened from my dream.''

In Sonnets of Love and Chaos, Stacy Garrop subjects the much subjected Edna St. Vincent Millay to devices (unpitched notes for the women, extended melisma) that do nothing to clarify the verse ("What lips my lips have kissed'' and "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines''). The writing is expertly placed for voices, yet the piece wavers between an intellectual conceit and postmodern bathos. No faulting the performance.

(Allan Ulrich reviewed music for 21 years for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the Bay Area correspondent for Opera and contributes to a number of American and foreign publications, on-line and off.)

©2002 Allan Ulrich, all rights reserved