Art & Context Interview with Mendi + Keith Obadike

In addition to being friends Mendi + Keith Obadike are among my favorite contemporary artists. At one of their online sites, BlackArtNet, has been part of my blogroll for a decade now, and I have had the pleasure of writing about them critically in a paper set to appear later this spring. Collaborators and partners in life and art, and true multidisciplinary visionaries, Mendi+Keith have created a series of iconic artworks and performances across a range of platforms for over a decade and a half.

Recently, at Art & Context, Erin Sickler interviewed them about their work and lives, and the interview is full of insights on their practice, their aesthetics, and their goals.

Here are some quotes:

We moved through many zones to arrive at this sound centered practice that we have today. When we began we wanted to find our own way for music, language, and media to work together. We thought we might make a new kind of opera. We started talking about this around 1993, but we were already heavily involved in separate practices. Informed by a lot of experimental music and video work from the 60s & 70s and our experience with computers, we started seriously working online in the mid 90s. Working online was a simple way for us to combine our work in music, art and literature in one accessible frame. We were not living in New York at the time, so it was also a way for us present our projects to a large audience little or no institutional support. As we learned the language and nuances of the early world wide web, we began to explore all of the ways one might perform in this new space. We did live streams, animated gifs, text-based email projects, and sound pieces. All of those lessons (about communicating scale, giving a sense of register/tone, and projecting your energy in media) informed and enabled the work we would later do in brick and mortar spaces.

And:

In the 1990s we began calling the technologies of race (among other things) “social filters,” to think through the ways that technological and social dynamics on Internet and in digital culture were grounded in older cultural patterns. While racial discourse is of course implicated in our projects about social filters, we have always been interested to think about who gets to belong and who does not and what the barriers are to belonging. Race is one of the many technologies that delimit this belonging, but because our work is sometimes allegorical, there are also other issues explored in the work. That said, we’re often using the resources offered by African diasporic thinkers -- Igbo, African-American and other African writers.

And finally:

We think in times like these it becomes even more important to choose your media and limit your intake carefully. The flow of bad news can be overwhelming if you forget to step out of the stream. We stay focused because we know we are here to do this work. We know what art can do, and we are empowered by the lasting energy of the folks who came before us.

Do read the entire interview too, and don't miss them if they are speaking, performing or part of an exhibition near you.

Here are three videos featuring their work, including 2015's "Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]," at the New School for Social Research.

Mendi + Keith Obadike's "4 Electric Ghosts" (2009)

Mendi + Keith Obadike's "The Earth (for Audre Lorde and Marlon Riggs)," Obadike Studio (Side A: "If the Heavens Don't Hear (A Roller Skating Jam for Marian Anderson)" + remix by Gordon Voidwell, and Side B: "The Earth Will Hear (for Audre Lorde and Marlon Riggs)"

Baden-Baden 1927 at Gotham Chamber Opera

The set, designed by Georg Baselitz
and Court Wilson

In 1927, two years before the US Stock Market crash, on the eve of the Great Depression and the eventual fall of Germany's democratic republican government, the organizers of the German Chamber Music Festival invited four young composers each to present a Zeitoper (opera of the current moment/time). Two were German: Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith; one was Austrian, Ernst Toch; and the fourth, Darius Milhaud, was French. Additionally, Weill, Toch and Milhaud were Jewish composers coming of age in the moment just before National Socialist fascism began infecting the body politic of Germany, and later that of Austria. Three of them also constituted a distinct strand of the contemporary European musical avant-garde: Weill incorporated cabaret tunes, other forms of popular music, and English texts, often inflected by his left-leaning convictions; Hindemith played with structure and daring content, especially in his initial trio of operas; and Milhaud drew from and wove jazz idioms into his scores.

From Mahagonny-Songspiel
(Photo by Richard Termine)

So the future was then, in Baden-Baden. Each of the selected composers brought to the festival's spectators a brief, pared-down operatic work he felt reflected the times. Kurt Weill staged his Mahagonny-Songspiel, a loosely linked six-song prequel to his masterpiece with Bertolt Brecht, Der Aufstieg und der Fall des Stadts Mahagonny (The Rise and the Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Paul Hindemith, who had become a young master of the Zeitoper format, presented his palindromic Hin und zurück (There and Back), which was in many ways a preparatory step for his larger three-act Neues vom Tage several years alter. Darius Milhaud, one of the key figures in Les Six, the French Modernist musical collective, offered a violent monodrama, L'enlèvement d'Europe (The Abduction of Europa); and Ernst Toch, who had begun to develop his own polyphonic style, presented the seemingly light confection Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse (The Princess and the Pea).
Thanks to the Gotham Chamber Opera, now in its 12th season, today's opera lovers got a chance to hear all four operas in one evening, as spectators might have in that German spa town in July of 1927. The New York versions, directed by Scotsman Paul Curran, however, which ran from October 23-29, were staged in a distinctly up-to-date fashion, with production design by German artist Georg Baselitz and Court Watson, hinging the theme of "What Is Art?", a question as relevant in the Modernist ferment of the 1920s as it is in our post-post-modern moment. Yet this underlying theme, as it played out in the staging, did not lend itself well to all of the works. On the other hand, the opera company cast--led by star soprano Helen Donath, with soprano Maeve Höglund, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera, tenors Daniel Montenegro and Matthew Tuell, baritone Michael Mayes and bass John Cheek--and the orchestra, led by conductor Neal Goren, did a superb job of bringing each of the works to life musically. My opera companion noted the textural richness the small orchestra captured in each work, and the pianists accompanying the orchestra for the Hindemith piece played with untrammeled contrapuntal fury, giving listeners the sense of a scene exploding forth into being. (I could easily sit through those opening bars again and again.)

From Hin und zurück
(Photo by Richard Termine)

Milhaud's opera, one of his trio of Opéras-minutes and only 8 minutes long, was perhaps the best suited to the theme and set, as the work's singers, appearing as gallery attendees admiring the set's immense canvas featuring a Baselitz-style image, slid from their silent appreciation to a recounting of the musical work's events. Milhaud's lush but tiny score was over before it began, with a dead body as its exclamation point. Toch's literal retelling of the story "The Princess and the Pea," and its dramatic and musical whimsy, transposed onto a reality-show frame, was aesthetically out of joint with everything else. The set, which now included a giant bed atop whose back the prince initially perched, before it turned around to reveal a Himalayan pile of mattresses on which the putative prince capered, wracked my nerves; instead of focusing on Toch's cheery melodies, I found myself praying no one fell from that precarious aerie. The opera company might moreover have done more to explore the deeper idea in the fairytale and in Toch's work, of the beloved needing to possess a particular kind of purity, especially given Toch's background and the looming consequences of racialization in subsequent decades.
After a short break, Hindemith's 12-minute "Sketch mit Musik," as he described it, unfolded in thrilling fashion. Very much redolent of silent movies--then current--and Expressionist works in all genres--visual art, literature, music--Hin und zurück tells the story of a woman who decides to have breakfast with her grandmother when her husband arrives home with with a gift for her birthday. She also receives a letter from her lover, which the husband sees, and he ends up shooting her before jumping out of the window. In 6 minutes! This being an avant-garde work, an angel-like figure appears, sings that nothing matters, and rewinds the entire story, not just dramatically--which means that the wife, her husband, and granny all move backwards--but musically, as a palindrome. It was over almost as soon as it began, but it made me wonder whether it influenced some of the internal musical mirroring in works by Hindemith's peers, including Bela Bartók and Alban Berg, who has palindromes in both his "Chamber Concerto" and his final, unfinished opera Lulu.

From Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse
(Photo by Richard Termine)

My main reason for attending the concert, though, was to hear Kurt Weill's music performed live. I had never heard anything by him in a live setting, so the six Mahagonny-Songspiel songs, several of which I knew pretty well, were a revelation, chief among them Elisabeth Hauptmann's English-language parodies the "Alabama Song" and the "Benares Song." The singers, especially the famous soprano Helen Donath, served up the perfect mixture of beauty and yearning as she crooned, "Oh moon, of Alabama…." The staging, however, did neither the songs nor the concept behind them, no credit. The cast performed one of them on treadmills (?), and as with Toch's opera, I found myself focusing more on their personal safety than on what they were singing. The Mahagonny songs' commentary on the underside of jazz age prosperity--dissolution, poverty, homelessness, the desire for escape with no place, not even Mahagonny, offering anything but illusion--lacked its reflection in the set, not least when a performer wandered around in his underwear (huh?), though the performers did their best to bring the songs to life. The staging was, unfortunately, a lost opportunity. For a very affordable price on a fall evening, though, the opportunity to see four live early 20th century operas, whatever their failings, was an excellent deal.

The cast, with the conductor

Thomas Adès's The Tempest @ the Met

Thomas Adès The Tempest

Irony, or perhaps, uncanniness. Which is the apter characterization to invoke when noting that on a chilly but precipitation-free night the weekend before Tropical Storm Sandy, a real-world tempest, tore through the region, I went with a friend to see British composer Thomas Adès (1971-) conduct the Metropolitan Opera's performance, the New York premiere, of his second opera, The Tempest (2004)? The real tempest did foreclose any possibility of my writing a positive review of the piece right after seeing it, but it has not diminished my enthusiastic appraisal of Adès's mastery of and in this form. The opera, running about two hours and 40 or so minutes and a co-production that premiered at the Festival d'Opéra de Québec in July, is easily the best new work of its kind I have heard in many years, and in its richness and inventiveness of orchestral writing and assured dramatic and sonic presentation of the opera's core story, cements the composer's status as one of the chief contemporary heirs to Benjamin Britten, Britain's greatest modern operatic composer and one of the finest in the history of European art music.

The Metropolitan Opera House, before the curtain rose

The Tempest, William Shakespeare's final play (1610-1611) and a staple of high school and college literature courses, is a strange, disturbing and beguiling work, perhaps a comedy in the oldest sense of the word, which has attracted many an interpreter and adaptor, among them composers, before. It has innate dramatic potential, its vivid, clear plot turning on revenge and romance, as well as the supernatural. It includes characters, like the magus Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan; his daughter Miranda; the native servant Caliban; and the members of the intrigue-ridden, shipwrecked Milan court, including Prospero's duplicitous brother, Antonio; Alonso, the King of Naples; Naples' son, Ferdinand; and those Shakespearean staples, the fools, in this case the drunken butler Stefano and the jester, Trinculo. Any combination of these characters would make for an interesting operatic scenario, but Adès maintains them all, winnowing their interactions down for the purposes of the opera's momentum, and its music. What also is clear to any reader of the play is its wealth of ideas and themes, among them familial relationships and the nature and effects of power, the role and effects of art (especially if the latter is viewed as a kind of magic), parental love and domesticity, and, as Adès astutely brings to the fore, colonialism, which, as critic Paul Gilroy noted, speaking of the "Black Atlantic," is the corollary of Modernity, and which, as Sylvia Wynter among others noted, makes possible the very problematic conceptualizations of "man" and the "human" as we know them.

Audrey Luna as Ariel, at the opera's beginning
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

One of the reasons Adès succeeds with his operatic version is because he is willing to do two things: compress the play into a manageable shape that retains nearly all of its key elements, and two, step away from Shakespeare's extraordinary language in favor of a more score-friendly libretto, by Meredith Oakes, which benefits his music even as the libretto itself falls short.  Rather than strictly follow the play's baggy act-by-act progression, Adès pares, writing three acts and seldom using exposition to explain or backtrack, so that the drama itself, which sharpens into view, rushes forward along with the music. Another reason The Tempest works so well is that Adès more severely etches the contours of each character, giving the opera a much more current feel. Prospero rages, in vengeance and intoxication, at least at first, with his power; Miranda is not just a defiant child but a feminist; the drunk and jester are really buffoonish; only Caliban has been softened and made more audience-friendly.  For my friend, who plays music and can read scores with ease but who confessed knowledge with English and American literature, especially Shakespeare, I had to explain a bit about what was going on at first, but by the second act he had figured figured out what Prospero was up to, who Ferdinand was and why his courtship of Miranda was so problematic, what Caliban's role was, and how the court of Naples ended up on the island. There is still a bit of description in the libretto, but between the visual imagery production chief Robert Lepage employs, vividly evoking the La Scala Opera House as well as the remote island where first Prospero and Miranda, and later, by Prospero's "art," the Neapolitan court find themselves grounded, and the clarity of roles and the music's own powers at narration, the story itself proves no hurdle.

Alan Oke as Caliban, emerging from the prompter's box
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

My knowledge of musicological terminology is limited, so I will say only a little about the score itself. From what I could make out, Adès's idiom is tonal, but shot through with dissonances, especially in the first act, and richly textured so that it sounds anything but sweet or obvious, and very contemporary while also not breaking the ear. There is an enchantingly lyrical duet between Miranda and Ferdinand, and, my friend noted to me, a quintet passacaglia at the end of the third and final act, when Prospero blesses the coupling of his daughter and the King's son, releases Ariel, and agrees to return to Milan and forsake his powers. Adès associates each main character with a particular orchestral motif, though not as obviously, to my ear, as Richard Wagner, but enough such that a sense of continuity and recognitions develops. One that I was able to note was Antonio's, which struck me as bombastic, fittingly enough, for a character who betrays his brother for power, a title and monetary gain. Adès also sets the vocal line of Ariel (Audrey Luna), the enslaved water-spirit, at the upper-most reaches of a coloratura soprano's range, forcing the singer to produce near screech-like vocalizations that were akin to tuning into a frequency from another planet, in the best way. That Luna not only pulls off the singing but does so while climbing and hovering through the air (when her body double isn't doing so) makes her one of the performance's treasures. Especially strong are Simon Keenleyside, who debuted as Prospero in 2004 and reprises it here; Isabel Leonard, in a mezzo-soprano range, as Miranda; and Alan Oke as Caliban, dressed by Lepage as something truly monstrous, out of Where the Wild Things Are, but whose aching celebration of his matrimony (for it was his mother, Sycorax, buried under the sands, whom Shakespeare recalls), and his failed attempts to befriend and help Prospero break one's heart.

Audrey Lima as Ariel
(Sarah Krulwich/New York Times)

The libretto, however, was the opera's main--and only, as far as I could see it--flaw. I am not a libretto-mane and certainly, Oakes could hardly compete with Shakespeare under the best of circumstances, but her use of rhyming couplets with sometimes questionable prosody and slant rhymes became wearisome after a fashion. Perhaps I was already more attuned to the poetic rhythms than many listeners, but I found myself not only being able to predict what the concluding rhyme-word of each pair of sentences might be, but also having to block them out at times because they assumed an almost metronomic effect that was nowhere evident in Adès multilayered score. In some cases, such as Ariel's famous poem, the compression worked for the music's sake, but Shakespeare's own verse--and in the play, Ariel sings in verse--might have proved the better choice, not just to break up the monotony of the couplets, but because of the beauty of the playwright's language. I thought this might have been an option in several other places as well, such as at the play's end, where Prospero reverts to verse, of an exquisite sort, to declare the loss of his powers, and beg mercy of a power higher than himself: "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, / Let your indulgence set me free."

The cast taking its curtain call, with Adès at the center

Yet even taking the libretto into account, the opera marks a major success. I hope it returns, and if so, I will proselytize to get people to see it. I am no big fan of pre-20th century opera, and many other operaphiles I have come across cannot bear 20th and 21st century repertoire, but this is one opera I think quite a few people might enjoy. Adès, I also hope, will find the time and support to write another one before too long!

Stephen Sondheim on the Revamped 'Porgy and Bess'

From left, the director Diane Paulus with the actors Phillip Boykin and Audra McDonald at a rehearsal for “Porgy and Bess” at the American Repertory Theater. (Chad Batka for The New York Times)

For today's post, I'm turning this blog over to a professional...musician, that is. One of the great living American composers, Mr. Stephen Sondheim, who was so exercised by New York Times arts reporter Patrick Healy's August 5, 2011 article, "It Ain't Necessarily Porgy," that he wrote a long letter to that newspaper to critique the proposed production.

The short of it: three brilliant figures, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; director Diane Paulus; and composter Diedre L. Murray, have decided to revamp and reenvision George and Ira Gershwin's and Dubose Heyward's 1935 opera, Porgy and Bess, as a Broadway-ready musical, starring Norm Lewis and Audra McDonald. The new name of the piece will be The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, the same title as Trevor Nunn's earlier version of the work. No Heyward.

As for the changes, which include a happier ending, more character backstory, and some tightening of the plot, one quote from the Healy people might suffice:

I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires having your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character,” Ms. Paulus said of Bess, whose motives and viewpoints are muddied in the opera, where she is largely an appendage of Porgy or Crown."

(I'm agnostic about this; I do enjoy Gershwin's opera, which I've listened to on CD a number of times but have only ever seen in the movie version, which is to say as a musical--I'm thinking specifically of the 1959 version, starring Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, and Sidney Poitier--so I am curious to see what Paulus, Parks and Murray have devised. I should also say that I would love to see these three talented people create a new work that embodies much of what they want to impart to the Gershwin-Gershwin-Heyward work. Why not write a new musical for our day, based on archetypal characters as Porgy and Bess is, without the stereotypes, with women characters at its center, and grounded in the experiences of people today? Or some other day, but not that of the earlier work? I know if I could afford to I'd pay to see such a work. Given the artists involved it could not help to be intriguing at the very least.)

Left, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown in the title roles of the 1935 production of “Porgy and Bess"; right, Norm Lewis and Audra McDonald, who play the roles in a new version being staged by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. (Culver Pictures; Chad Batka for The New York Times)

At any rate, take it away, Mr. Sondheim (from today's New York Times Arts Beat Blog):

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

Ms. Paulus says that in the opera you don’t get to know the characters as people. Putting it kindly, that’s willful ignorance. These characters are as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater, as has been proved over and over in productions that may have cut some dialogue and musical passages but didn’t rewrite and distort them.

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

Then there is Ms. Paulus’s condescension toward the audience. She says, “I’m sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.” I don’t know what she’s sorry about, but I’m glad she can speak for all of us restless theatergoers. If she doesn’t understand Bess and feels she has to “excavate” the show, she clearly thinks it’s a ruin, so why is she doing it? I’m sorry, but could the problem be her lack of understanding, not Heyward’s?

She is joined heartily in this sentiment by Ms. McDonald, who says that Bess is “often more of a plot device than a full-blooded character.” Often? Meaning sometimes she’s full-blooded and other times not? She’s always full-blooded when she’s acted full-bloodedly, as she was by, among others, Clamma Dale and Leontyne Price. Ms. McDonald goes on to say, “The opera has the makings of a great love story … that I think we’re bringing to life.” Wow, who’d have thought there was a love story hiding in “Porgy and Bess” that just needed a group of visionaries to bring it out?

Among the ways in which Ms. Parks defends the excavation work is this: “I wanted to flesh out the two main characters so that they are not cardboard cutout characters” and goes on to say, “I think that’s what George Gershwin wanted, and if he had lived longer he would have gone back to the story of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and made changes, including the ending.”

It’s reassuring that Ms. Parks has a direct pipeline to Gershwin and is just carrying out his work for him, and that she thinks he would have taken one of the most moving moments in musical theater history — Porgy’s demand, “Bring my goat!” — and thrown it out. Ms. Parks (or Ms. Paulus) has taken away Porgy’s goat cart in favor of a cane. So now he can demand, “Bring my cane!” Perhaps someone will bring him a straw hat too, so he can buck-and-wing his way to New York.

Or perhaps in order to have her happy ending, she’ll have Bess turn around when she gets as far as Philadelphia and return to Catfish Row in time for the finale, thus saving Porgy the trouble of his heroic journey to New York. It will kill “I’m on My Way,” but who cares?

Ms. McDonald immediately dismisses any possible criticism by labeling anyone who might have objections to what Ms. Paulus and her colleagues are doing as “Gershwin purists” — clearly a group, all of whom think alike, and we all know what a “purist” is, don’t we? An inflexible, academic reactionary fuddy-duddy who lacks the imagination to see beyond the author’s intentions, who doesn’t recognize all “the holes and issues” that Ms. Paulus and Ms. McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks do. Never fear, though. They confidently claim that they know how to fix this dreadfully flawed work.

I can hear the outraged cries now about stifling creativity and discouraging directors who want to reinterpret plays and musicals in order to bring “fresh perspectives,” as they are wont to say, but there is a difference between reinterpretation and wholesale rewriting. Nor am I judging this production in advance, only the attitude of its creators toward the piece and the audience. Perhaps it will be wonderful. Certainly I can think of no better Porgy than Norm Lewis nor a better Bess than Audra McDonald, whose voice is one of the glories of the American theater. Perhaps Ms. Paulus and company will have earned their arrogance.

Which brings me back to my opening point. In the interest of truth in advertising, let it not be called “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” nor even “The Gershwin-Heyward Porgy and Bess.” Advertise it honestly as “Diane Paulus’s Porgy and Bess.” And the hell with the real one.

 Strong stuff, no doubt. He makes some great points. We shall see.

The Gonzales Cantata @ The Rotunda, Philadelphia

Happy Labor Day.

Millions of people all over the US face very tough times right now; the unemployment ranges from the official 9.7% to the morely likely 16.4% or higher, and runs as high as 40% or more in parts of some states, like California, and in some metropolitan areas, particularly among certain groups like African American men and young people. The Obama administration and Federal Reserve chief are touting a recovery that began in August, but so far the country continues to shed jobs, though at a slower rate than before. From what I can tell, there appears to be little indication, despite the helpful suggestions and arguments of labor advocates and workers themselves, employed and unemployed, economists, and others, that those in charge are taking the longer-term issues of labor in this country to heart, except in an abstract sense. The financial industry and multinational corporations appear to be the chief concern of the nation's economic leaders, and our mainstream corporate media. We heard a lot of airy rhetoric about "Main Street," as tiresome a cliche as there is, during the campaign season and again early in the year, but Wall Street continues to hog all the air--and money--in the room, and the neoliberal agenda among the Democrats, and a corporatist right-wing agenda among the GOP, continues unabated. Perhaps one thing to do today is think about the present state of working people, especially working-class and poor people, in this country and globally, and consider ways that you can help to refocus the discussion to ensure that this country and its industries creating viable and sustainable jobs here, but also helping to create conditions for viable and sustainable jobs elsewhere.

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
[Panels for National Child Labor Committee Exhibit], after 1904. Gelatin silver print; 3 1/2 x 5 15/16 in. (8.9 x 15 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 (1993.43.289)


***

Yesterday we dipped down to the City of Brotherly Love to see Melissa Dunphy's The Gonzales Cantata. As longtime fans of J's Theater know, I'm fond of operas and orchestral music, particularly anything written from the late 19th Century forward, and I'm also a political junkie, so I was very happy when C suggested we check out this piece, which we first learned about from the invaluable Rachel Maddow Show. The Gonzales Cantata, part of the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festivals, ran for three shows at The Rotunda, a crumbling but beautiful former Christian Science church (meeting house?) and now contemporary performance space designed by the famous early 20th century Beaux Arts architects Hastings and Carrère (architects of my beloved New York Public Library Research Branch, at Bryant Park), on (the edge of) the University of Pennsylvania's campus. I hadn't been to Philadelphia since I gave a reading a few years ago, and hadn't been on Penn's campus since a friend lived right near it a lifetime ago, so I really relished the quick trip from Jersey City.

According to the press materials, Australian native Dunphy quite inventively conceived of the cantata after watching the exasperating (my word) US attorneys firing scandal hearings on TV. How often have you watched our crazy political dramas and thought to yourself, I'm basically watching a (soap) opera? Dunphy did, and then pulled it off. (Hint: someone ought to consider the Blago story as grist for a musical drama of some sort.) She used truncated versions of the hearings transcripts and Gonzales's resignation speech to create her libretto, and then set the words to music that incorporate baroque, classical, Romantic and modernist, but overall tonal, traditions. While the piece did lack narrative drama and drive, its ending already known and its "story" an extended ellipsis whose true backstory remains greatly unknown to us even 2 years later, Dunphy more than made up for it through her confident, charged composition and orchestration, her pragmatic inventiveness in the cantata's construction, and the work's frequent wittiness and use of irony. Since most of the Senators grilling Gonzales were men, Dunphy reversed the performers' genders, so all of the individual male roles, and most of those in the chorus, were sung by women and vice versa. In addition, to highlight the preening quality of the politicians, all of them appeared as sashed pageant contestants, the male Senators in gowns and elegant dresses, crowned with tiaras, the female one (Feinstein), in quasi-white tie. None of the Senators were singled out, at least by Dunphy, for ridicule, their words being enough of an indictment, but the character of Gonzales was structured so as to emphasize the combination of absurdity, idiocy and criminality he embodied during his Attorney General tenure.

One of the highlights of the piece was Dunphy's playful incorporation Gonzales's repetition, 72 times during the original hearings, of "I can't recall" to the Senators' questions about the attorney firings. She also juxtaposed his repeated contradictions of his having been in control and not in control of the firings, and she managed to rekindle real outrage when the chorus recited only a portion of the Bush administration's crimes, including the widespread use of torture and illegal spying on Americans, in which Gonzales played a central role. I personally began asking about halfway through the hour-long piece why Gonzales was not in jail, which provoked a bigger question I think we can never ask enough: why aren't numerous members of the previous administration at the very least on trial, either here in the US, or at the International Criminal Courts, in the Hague.

My abilities to assess voice quality are minimal, but I found most of the individual singers, as well as the chorus, vocally gifted and assured. The young women singing the Gonzales and Senator Pat Leahy parts, and the young man who sang as Feinstein, had pipes. Dunphy conducted a small orchestra of strings and harpsichord, a clever, baroque touch, very deftly, managing to wring an immersive, often dramatic and thrilling soundscape from a tiny ensemble. One of my favorite moments was just before the Senatorial chorus lodges its complaints against Gonzales, and Dunphy switched from a Bachian mood, which in a few spots perhaps didn't work to the best advantage of the piece, beautiful as the music was, to something evoking a Bernard Herrmann score (think Psycho). An addition treat was her orchestration of three "patriotic" songs, including the treacly, jingoistic "Let the Eagle Soar," which were sung often in near falsetto by a very talented tenor and accompanied by the harpsichord and flutes. As you might imagine, the Republican anthem was appropriately syrupy, sentimental, and yet, in its performance, astonishing at the same time.

Some photos:

The line to enter the Rotunda

The perfomance of the patriotic songs

Composer Melissa Dunphy, during her pre-performance talk

Dunphy, conducting the chorus (The singer of the Gonzales part is at the front of the lectern)

The Gonzales Cantata program and postcard

The cantata underway; Leahy stands at the lectern, opening the piece; the supertitles are visible at left; the orchestra, led by Dunphy, is in the chancel area up front

The Rotunda's original main chandelier, now a floor sculpture

Alexander Liberman's "Covenant," on Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania campus

John Adams's Dr. Atomic @ Lyric Opera

I don't think I've ever posted about a live opera on this blog, so here's a first go at it. Last night I trooped down to the Lyric Opera of Chicago to see contemporary American composer John Adams's most recent opera, Doctor Atomic. The opera, whose "found text" libretto, staging and direction are the handiwork of impresario Peter Sellars, was first mounted in San Francisco in 2005, and it explores the experiences over monthlong span of several of the central figures involved in the first testing of the atomic bomb, the "Trinity" test, in the New Mexico desert. The protagonist is physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the opera's other important figures include fellow physicist Edward Teller; General Leslie Groves; Oppenheimer's anxious wife Kitty; the weatherman, Jack Hubbard; and the bombastic General Leslie Groves; and Pasqualita, the Oppenheimer's Tewa (Native American) nursemaid.

I should begin by noting my affinity for post-Romantic operas, and in particular for operas (and musicals of operatic cast) from the era of early Modernism on. The sorts of operas that drive purists crazy, such as Debussy's aria-less Pelleas et Mélisande; Bartók's brief and spellbinding Duke Bluebeard's Castle; Schoenberg's unfinished, conceptual masterpiece about the unrepresentability of God, Moses und Aron; Berg's formally intricate case study in pre-World War II decadence, Lulu; Joplin's unique African-American essay in the form, Treemonisha; and Britten's homoerotic homage, Billy Budd, are among the works I cherish, but I also like very current operatic fare, especially works that push opera's aesthetic conventions, such as Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten, Steve Reich's Three Tales, and Anthony Davis's Amistad. One of my works, which perhaps drew me to the genre, is Adams's 1987 opera, Nixon in China. It is one of the few very recent operas to have entered the repertoire. In this work, Adams extends his post-minimalist musical language to match Alice Goodman's exceptional libretto, and together they create a powerful portrayal of the soon-to-be disgraced former president's groundbreaking trip to China. Some of the arias, such as Nixon's "News, news," or the reception's choral exchange "Cheers!" have been derided by critics, but the opera also drew immediate praise and has continued to be one of the most popular works of the last 40 years. Its accessibility, blend of humor and drama, biting set pieces, inventive tunefulness, and moments of masterful orchestration and dramatization, such as when Pat Nixon longs for the music of home (California), or Mrs. Mao's aria demonstrating her personal power, probably account for its enduring popularity.

In Dr. Atomic, Adams shows that his grasp of composition, and in particular scene-painting and orchestration, has only grown in the intervening years. With the exception of the musique concrète tracks that open and close the opera's two halves, the music exemplifies Adams's mastery, both of 20th century music in general and of how to write operatic music in a contemporary vein. Whether it aims for mimesis, as when he portrays the thunder and electrical storms that are threatening the bomb test, or the spectacular choral set pieces, such as the second half's (Act 2, Scene iii) "O, Master" chorus, excerpted from the Bhagavad Gita, which to me was one of the most breathtaking in the entire work, or the arias, by Oppenheimer, his wife, Pasqualita, or Hubbard, who manages to lyricize a weather report (!), Adams never falters--and, I must add, never did the singers, who were on the whole extraordinary. The essentially tonal composition bears Adams's usual fingerprints, eschewing neo-Romanticism in favor of a more complex, pungent assemblage of styles, with moments of hypnotic repetition, contrapuntality and crossrhythms, passages of jazz-like stylings, and controlled dissonance. In fact, it was often the music, along with the sets and staging, that provided what little drama the opera had to offer, and elevated the libretto's inherent poetry, or rather reminded me that I was listening to the words of Baudelaire, Muriel Rukeyser, Donne, among other texts, set to music. There were moments where I simply closed my eyes and listened to the music to relieve the tedium of the libretto, which seemed to stretch on and on unnecessarily.

Although the story itself is inherently dramatic--the government and military are racing to test an atomic bomb to drop on Japan, to end the Second World War, and many of the key scientists involved with it are torn, ethically, morally, emotionally, about their contributions and the possible aftermath of a successful weapon--the libretto, which derives not only from poetry but from declassified government documents, blunts this by telling too much, and thus becoming explanatory, or striving for profundity, which runs aground the shoals of obviousness. In such instances, the narrative's drama sputters, but as in some other operas with little narrative or drama, such as Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, there are no compensatory character arcs or dramatization, and so Oppenheimer himself remains enigmatic, while Kitty's anxiety, as it never abates, becomes static and tiresome. Then there is the issue of length--too much is, well, too much. Even a marvelous moment, like Oppenheimer's aria based on Donne's "Holy Sonnet No. XIV," "Batter my heart, three-personed God," provoked by his appreciation of the inhuman power the "gadget" he has helped create, just drags on too long. Or perhaps it wouldn't have felt too long if there weren't so many other such moments, where Sellars seems incapable of condensing the text, thus blunting whatever propulsive force the music and narrative manage to generate. The opera runs 3 and 1/2 hours, though it felt like 6; a half-hour of the Robert Wilson-esque quasi-avant-garde processions to literalize the complicated temporality (on figurative and literal levels) and silent moments could easily be cut, and many of the arias could be truncated or at least condensed, saving as much of Adams's music as possible. By the end of the second half, I think the only thing keeping me from bolting was the music and the recognition that I ought not miss the moment of the test, which I'll say disappointed musically and performatively. (By this point a number of the older opera patrons sitting near me had already fled.)

The singers are, as I say above, outstanding, and often wring the most piercing moments out of their arias. Particular notable were Leslie Rivera (what a voice!) as Kitty Oppenheimer, Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and James Maddalena, the original Richard Nixon in Adams's earlier opera, as Jack Hubbard, the beleaguered weatherman. Eric Owens, playing General Leslie Groves, manages to infuse his ranting-like near-Sprechstimme with real passion, making me wish he'd been given better material to work with. I was less enchanted by Meredith Arwady as Pasqualita; at times she appears to struggle to sustain a continuous rising or descending line, and sounds off key, or perhaps this is how the part was written, though it sticks out beside Rivera's mellifluous declamations. The directing and staging mostly succeed; Sellars is on firmest ground here, and the subtle and unexpected lighting shifts, the always-evocative modular sets, and the lively corps de ballet, match the music and nearly rescue things. One enjoyable side element to the evening was that the grand-daughter of the woman sitting next to me was one of the dancers. She told me she'd come up from Orlando to see her granddaughter dance, and eagerly pointed her out whenever the corps took the stage.

I left the opera house feeling much the way I did when I first went to see John Harbison's The Great Gatsby during its first run at the Met: that I'd heard some great music, but it was expended on a thematically very interesting, above-average, but not great, project. I'm not sure how much tinkering Adams and Sellars will attempt; I missed Sellars's pre-opera talk, but I've read that he acknowledges the libretto's faults, so perhaps they will figure out how to tighten it up if it continues to travel. Cutting the explanatory material, which might mean snipping some of Groves's part, and distilling Kitty Oppenheimer's scenes should be the first order of business. Mirroring the second-half's "O, Master" chorus in the first would also be a good idea, to punch things up a bit. The ending also could use some work; not representing the bomb blast orchestrally is, I admit, brilliant, but I'm not sure the electronic substitute is enough. It almost felt predictable, and kitschy. As it is, I would still recommend anyone interested in contemporary see Doctor Atomic, just to hear Adams's opera, but I'd add that they shouldn't be surprised if they find themselves glancing at their watch, twiddling their thumbs, and wanting to scream get on with it during some of its many, unnecessary longueurs. It's in Chicago until January 19, and moves to the Met in 2008 (they should start with Nixon in China, but then who am I to suggest anything to the Met...).