Cleopatra Crashes Havisham's Would-Be Wedding

A Double Bill of Monodramas:

Argento’s Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night

Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre

On Site Opera

The Harmonie Club

September 30, 2016

A bold pairing: Aurelia and Cleopatra
Photo credit: On Site Opera

It was a misty evening. The street glistened and traffic was backed up down Fifth Avenue under an incessant drizzle. When we arrived at the historic Harmonie Club on East 60th Street, I half expected Dorothy Parker to greet us, or Eleanor Roosevelt to take my coat. We were ushered through the elegant lobby and up to the second floor ballroom, where the ceiling was all rosette studded wood inlay and the chandeliers exuded the old New York refinement of another era. We were showed to our table that was set in grand fashion for a multicourse dinner service. It was as though we stumbled into a proper wedding reception. Though at the same time, something wasn’t right: cobwebs covered the wedding cake, the mantle pieces on either end of the salon were caked in dust, and the floral centerpieces on each of the tables were beautifully arranged but all the flowers were withering (artfully) away. Waiters came around with red and white wine and the feeling of excitement was palpable. It was after all Miss Havisham’s much anticipated wedding night (with a nod to Dickens).

A haunting stage is set and you're in it
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

First up, Berlioz’s La mort de Cléopâtre – an intense soliloquy in music. I came in wondering how they might carry it off in a space like this. The score takes us on the whirlwind of emotions that buffets the great fallen queen during her final moments of life.

Gaissert goes Cleopatra á la Alma-Tadema
Photo credit: On Site Opera

In the role of Cleopatra, mezzo Blythe Gaissert moved violently yet gracefully about the room as if possessed. She embodied Berlioz’s heroine with fervor. It’s such a moving piece especially when in the middle passages the cellos kick in and send the emotions into the lower more guttural range of the mezzo’s voice – deep and sad and chesty. It tore at my heart. There were at least three moments in the twenty or so minute long piece in which I found myself on the verge of tears, if only the tempo allowed me the catharsis. Instead the piece pushes on and we move into the next movement of the emotional rollercoaster that is Cleopatra’s demise. So moving, so beautiful.

Who got the snakes out?
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

We were privy to Cleopatra’s in extremis breakdown. And she sang it as if we weren’t there. Amazing. And if the moment before the suicide was not dramatic enough, Ms. Gaissert pulled out a real snake! The live-reptile move definitely helped shake up anybody in the audience who may have drifted off and served to refocus their attention on Cleopatra’s every syllable (and gesture, god forbid she lose her grip on the snake). The scene played out like an Alma-Tadema painting. It had me tingling all over. And left me wanting more.

Gaissert showed us her stuff. She sounded deep and powerful, like a woman who is used to being in control. And she moved about the room with self-assurance and pride, but on the verge of annihilation. It was frenzied, yet totally called for. 

Berlioz’s setting of this text was composed in 1829 for a competition during his apprenticeship, when he was up and coming in the music world. I have always found it dramatically satisfying. I was curious to see how they might adapt it not to a recital or a proscenium but to a site-specific ballroom space. It was intriguing. Though we were all seated in a wedding dinner fashion, it was as though we were silently eavesdropping on her. Very dramatic. 

Here comes the bride
Photo credit: On Site Opera

While I wasn’t worried about the musical qualities of the Berlioz, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the second piece on the bill, this more recent and completely unknown work by Dominick Argento, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night. On my way there under the rain, I had prepared to brace myself for anything, but after Cléopâtre my guard was down and I was open to whatever might come.

Madness sets in
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

And come she did. Miss Havisham burst into ballroom where we were all seated for her cake and champagne reception, though she was more of a nervous wreck than her predecessor. She scurried around the room, like Cleopatra, as though we weren’t there – skittish, delusional and disturbed. Soprano Leah Partridge sounded great, with very dynamic, at times almost syncopated singing.  And even looked the part, as she vaguely resembled her Helen Bonham-Carter incarnation from the famous movie based on the same Dickens novel with a slight Julianne Moore thing going on there too. She was striking both as an actress and vocally. Her instrument was happily strident to match the shrill madness of the character but also full and expressive, pliant and versatile so as to better flesh out the many twists and turns poor Miss Havisham undergoes over the course of reliving her wedding night meltdown (presumably years after the fact).

A love lost but not forgotten
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Argento’s score was surprisingly pleasant from start to finish, all while rendering musically the character's violent mood swings. Thank God he didn’t feel the need to go over the top in terms of the setting of the human voice against the orchestration just for the sake of being weird. Instead I feel like he adhered much more closely the mode that I came to appreciate in David Lang’s recent visionary operatic character study. Thanks to The Loser I came to think of Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night as more of a dramatic monologue – this after all is the story of one of literature’s real losers, in a manner of speaking. The orchestration helped the soprano to achieve a sort of soliloquy that was expressive of a range of emotions that ran the gamut from delusion to anticipation and then from despair to the return of hope and back again. Though the overall takeaway was schizophrenic, the music remained contained and took her state of mind seriously throughout. Argento's approach was compassionate and humanistic and so ultimately even more tragic which is the nature of the poor Miss Havisham character in the novel, a woman who still nevertheless commands our sympathies despite her overarching eccentricities. It is a very subtle setting on the part of the composer, which was very tightly and tactfully interpreted by the orchestra under the baton of Geoffrey McDonald.

A lavish affair
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Both singers were of the utmost refinement, not to mention impeccably made up and dressed, and the space was truly next level. Eric Einhorn's direction was solid and made a good use of the space. In a stroke of genius, towards the end of Miss Havisham's delirious performance, he had Cleopatra come back in and have tea with the the crazy bride, almost as if the Egyptian queen was one of the many hallucinations of a disturbed mind. The ballroom of the Harmonie Club was decorated to perfection and the wood paneling provided great acoustics, too. And the lighting, oh, the lighting was phenomenal. It subtly shifted as the piece slowly shifted tones from desperation to the return of hope and back again. The shadows they cast as a result were strikingly suggestive. It was haunting yet grandiose, beautiful and unsettling all at once. On Site Opera spared no expense on this one and every detail was meticulously executed and visually stunning. Even the program was cleverly conceived of as that of Aurelia Havisham’s wedding to one Matthew Compeyson. This ranked up there with the most successful of On Site's efforts. The whole package was just of such extraordinary and extravagant polish that it was clear that this company has money (and from time to time knows how to use it). The wilted centerpieces, silk lace tablecloths and four glasses per guest alone must have not been cheap, not to mention insurance for that live snake! The attention to detail in creating such an immersive parallel universe is definitely praiseworthy, especially when all other key aspects of the production are equally solid. 

Set dressings caked in cobwebs
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Of everything we’ve seen from them this ranks right up there with the Paisiello they did at the Fabbri Mansion last year, only in that case there were even more moving parts. But like tonight there they also stuck to the exotic European language of the original, which is an absolute must. I only wish they would take a hint from successes like these and give us Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, which they announced for the spring, in the original rather than another bastardized English translation. The public is not that dumb, there is no need for English adaptations! Please give us La finta giardiniera in the original! Nevertheless, the company’s first-ever original commission will be a community-oriented piece that is to be performed in the dinosaur wing of the Natural History Museum. Not to be missed!

– Lui & Lei

An Operatic Character Study

David Lang’s The Loser

2016 Next Wave Festival

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House

September 7, 2016

 

A man suspended in artistic space
Photo credit: BAM

Lei: A handsome man with slicked back blond hair, donning a crisp tuxedo and a slightly arrogant, sardonic grin ascends a platform some twenty feet in the air above the orchestra seating.  The man starts what will be an hour-long uninterrupted monologue accompanied by 5 instruments that can be summarized as follows: “My friend and I were studying piano with Horowitz in Salzburg and thought we were going to be the best virtuosos in the world, then Glenn Gould arrived to attend piano classes with us and we realized we would never make it because he was so good. Since I could not be the best piano virtuoso, I decided to become a philosopher instead and give away my piano to a 9 year-old who would destroy it in the shortest time possible. My friend also gave up piano and took up writing and ultimately committed suicide by hanging himself in front of his sister’s home to spite her. Glenn Gould died by a heart attack while playing the Goldberg Variations. Even in death Glenn is the victor and we are the failures.”  

Lui: This is David Lang’s word for word adaptation of several passages from Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser, a vocal performance for solo voice baritone, double bass, viola, cello, percussion and, of course, piano. The music very tastefully buoyed the vocal performance and never jockeyed for weirdness or overpowered the voice. Rather, the musical accompaniment only added color to the sung through prose of the narration. Much of Bernhard’s text (in translation) is featured untouched: at no point did Lang feel the need to turn any of it into song or add a ritornello, just the basso ostinato of the constantly recurring utterance “I thought,” which repeats with the same frequency in the prose of the novel as well.

Lei: The whole monologue was all intact sung right through, and the delivery by baritone Rod Gilfry was crystal clear. Mr. Gilfry did a good job teasing out some of the unsettling underlying monstrosity of the character, which is pervasive and infectious in the novel. He was particularly commanding in a handful of sudden outbursts of intensity that enhanced key dramatic points in the narrative and also sent chills down my spine. Having seen this singer before as a demonic Don Alfonso in Alden’s dark Cosi for NYC Opera back in 2012 only heightened my perception of his performance here, as his character in The Loser is equally dark and twisted. Yet the negativity of the role as delivered by Mr. Gilfry was unequivocally enticing. There was something about his rendition of the loathsome character that made you kind of like him or at least not entirely hate him. He embodied the arrogant, smooth jerk that women cannot help but fall for even if they know he’s trouble. And trouble is an euphemism here, as the guy is elegantly perverse, excessively introverted, sadistically cruel and with a complex of superiority that is really of inferiority. Still, one cannot help but being hypnotically attracted by him.

The philosopher and the pianist
Photo credit: Richard Termine 

Lui: The performance worked really well in this particular take on something that was written for an operatic voice though did not constitute what typically passes as opera. The Loser is a uniquely satisfying piece of experimental modern operatic music. More like a character study or a piece of vocal acting. We’ve seen modern operas in which singers are given awkwardly ridiculous lines to sing, sorry excuses for poetry. Here there was no attempt to elevate any of it to poetry. Nor for that matter to impose traditional operatic cadences nor to abstract out the syllables of words for uncertain purposes. It was truly a baritonal monologue elevated to a sort of Viennese elegance and style, which perfectly suited the dark slightly perverse Austrian nature of the unnamed character. His declamation of the text bore the right amount of embellishment and self-important confidence to give it all the right classy old world spunk.

Loathsome but not quite
Photo credit: Richard Termine

Lei: The audience was limited to the mezzanine, and it was packed. The run seems to be completely sold out though most of the cavernous space of the Howard Gilman Opera House sat empty. It was a very unique use of the grand space, shrouded in darkness. The booming of the voice in the center of the space, literally, suspended some twenty feet in the air, and the audience limited to just one rather claustrophobic section halfway up, lent an air of intimacy to the space that I have come to expect from shows at the Harvey but not in the big house. In this respect it was unlike anything I have experienced.

– Lui & Lei

Viennese style
Photo credit: Hilary Swift / New York Times