Snow could not deter the faithful from The John F. Kennedy Center last weekend where we saw an extraordinary commitment of artists and audience members gather as part of this year’s American Opera Initiative from Washington National Opera. Many came bringing skills and focus to give respectful consideration to four pairs of composers-and-librettists and their forays into the expanding field of music-theatre called opera. It shows what a little love and money, some time, and a mentored process can do for young artists to reach for and engage in opera.
Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye delivered a powerful one-hour opera, Taking Up Serpents. (Reviewed here.)
In addition, Washington National Opera shared three twenty-minute operas that the organization has mentored through a year-long birthing process.
The three short operas were more sketches than completed works. The artists in the orchestra, all assembled in plain view on stage, helped remind the audience these were intentionally works-in-progress. Nevertheless, the serious focus that conductor and musicians gave each of the works was most impressive, and, musically, the range and challenges were met with professional rigor. Singers, mostly drawn from the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program, stood or sat behind music stands and moved around only to clarify major action in the stories.
The works themselves had earmarks of assignments, challenging the young writers and composers to stretch themselves in this (for some) new form. All three teams had definitely found a focused theme and lead to guide their stories. 75 Miles and Relapse chose to address topical social issues which gave them dramatic heft, in the first case access and right to abortion and in the second opera substance abuse was an issue not just of the addict but all those around the afflicted. You could say the third opera, Pepito, also attacked an issue or two: pet adoption and, perhaps more critically, the alarming imbalance of health and well-being in professional young lives today.
The process these teams went through was as rigorous as the vetting to receive these coveted opportunities to see and hear works performed, especially with a small orchestra.
They needed to meet major challenges in shifting from purely dramatic or musical writing into operatic writing. Gene Scheer, the librettist mentor for this year’s teams, addressed in the introduction for the evening the enormity of the task of writing for opera: how one has to learn the craft and what he called the “idiosyncratic aspects of the form…the unique footprint” of writing an opera. Unlike a musical or a drama with some songs, in opera the music is always there. Scheer reminded those who would attempt such a feat that, “You have to let [the music] do what it does, and it does a lot.”
How difficult this dictum is became immediately apparent. In the two operas. 75 Miles and Relapse, the stories moved forward mostly by single line conversational dialogue. This kept the composers from being able to develop sufficiently musical themes and too rarely gave the singers opportunities to do what they do: open up and sing.
The language in the two operas was further made more colloquial by spiking the stories with ubiquitous expletives. In Taking Up Serpents, though such language is never displayed on sur-titles as is WNO’s policy, the few didn’t bother me. Here, they seemed distracting, explosive bombs dropped too near for comfort and, frankly, too *#%$!!! hard to sing.
Jake Heggie, the composing mentor, had also alerted the audience with a few choice tips of his own for composers writing for opera. “Don’t just write words. Be intentional by working with a palette of sounds that are singable and can celebrate the voice.”
In some ways, though the musical palettes of 75 Miles and Relapse were quite different, the works were still struggling with the stringing together of “too many words” to deliver the story.
75 Miles takes a look at a rural family struggling to make ends meet and dependent on their one car. They face many moral, social, legal, physical, and geographic obstacles if pregnant teenage daughter Avery is to get an abortion. One can understand the need in the parameters of the assignment for so compressed an event. The opera wisely offers to take on the issue by focusing on the relationship of Mom and Daughter in one key scene, but the time constraints and the naturalism in the writing make the story a little soap-opera-ish.
Composer Matt Boehler, a bass singer himself, shows considerable promise in understanding dramatic use of the voice, and his musical writing feels particularly satisfying in the duets. Alexandra Christoforakis, veteran of the WNO chorus, and Alexandra Nowakowski, as mother and daughter gave strong performances. Joshua Conyers gives us a Dad so beset by the fear of losing his job that he is all but absent at home.
Relapse got off to a promising start with an aria sung by Amanda Palmeiro, which plumbed the loneliness of addiction and the possibility of an overdose event as catalyst for recovery. Composer Molly Joyce created a palette of jangling sounds that seemed to resonate with and augment the competing sounds in the young addict’s head. The moments where librettist and composer steeled themselves to use repetition of the names of the two sisters, addict and family member, were most satisfying, as music was allowed to carry all their pent up frustrations and longings. Nowakowski and Palmeiro rise to the vocal challenge.
Too often the language and theme felt like preachy recovery-field lingo. Samson McCrady as sympathetic Nurse would have been better served with his looks to score a role in an on-going TV hospital series. Even a fine singer-actor as Alexander McKissick can’t pop in for a dramatic cameo turn as the drug pusher boyfriend and sing his way past the clichés.
The most entertaining show of the fledgling trio of operas was Pepito, in large part, no doubt, because the titled character was a big, shaggy dog, — a role sung, howled and barked effectively by Samuel Weiser. But what started as what I thought might be a gimmick demonstrated as it went on a growing understanding of methodical approach and material by the young creative team.
Librettist Marella Martin Koch knew that a trip to a dog shelter by a harried professional couple would be enough to bring drama and character revelation and, that in the space of twenty minutes, wouldn’t tip into high melodrama or crash and drown in sudsy soap opera, and she showed a cleverness in constructing humor for opera (not an easy task!)
Nowakowski, who does triple duty in these operas, here takes on the role of young professional. When her fiancé, played by Joshua Blue, the preoccupied, ambitious go-getter, shows up late at a dog shelter for a squeezed-in quick ‘puppy” adoption, he and she have to confront an officious processor (Christoforakis) and their own failings as individuals and as a couple. Are they ready for a big, sloppy dog, and will Pepito win them over and find his “forever home”?
Koch and composer Nicolas Lell Benavides took on the adventure of writing in English and Spanish. Benavides not only wrote music that used repetition of musical theme and melody but, in cannily crafting a (somewhat) bilingual story, employed the setting of gorgeous Spanish vowels, giving a nod to classical opera’s multi-lingual canon. Pepito’s doggy answer to everything is snuggling up with a bass howl of “Te quiero.” The phrase, especially repeated in the ensemble singing, was both a send up of opera and at the same time a profound truth, offering an answer to all our troubles.
There was enough repetition in the commands to the dog, it set me thinking – what a great way to teach language in the schools – through opera! And what a great way to introduce opera –through a Spanish-singing dog!
75 Miles. Music composed by Matt Boehler. Libretto by Laura Barati. With Alexandra Christoforakis, Alexandra Nowakowski, and Joshua Conyers.
Relapse. Music composed by Molly Joyce. Libretto by James Kennedy. With Amanda Palmeiro, Alexandra Nowakowski, Samson McCrady, and Alexander McKissick.
Pepito. Music composed by Nicolas Lell Benavides. Libretto by Marella Martin Koch. With Alexandra Christoforakis, Joshua Blue, Alexandra Nowakowski, and Samuel Weiser.
Produced by Washington National Opera . Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
