Let There Be Cake!

Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appétit! A Delicious Opera

Shelter Studios

September 15, 2017

Melissa Collom charms as the wonderful and slightly wacky Julia Child

On an unseasonably hot mid-September afternoon, New York-based mezzo-soprano Melissa Collom invited a select group to partake of a special performance of Bon Appétit! A Delicious Opera by the late, great Lee Hoiby. It was proposed as a kind of reception of sorts with champagne and, of course, there would be cake, she promised. What more can you ask for?

Race against the machine: And the winner is?
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Collom has been known to take on unusual and inventive projects, like her series of aria music videos, and this little initiative is no exception. Bon Appétit! is the only opera I am aware of that doubles over, quite literally, as a recipe. 

In Collom’s agile hands it becomes a veritable pop-up mini-opera: you can book it for events, school programs and even bring it into your own home to impress, entertain and instruct your friends.

In Bon Appétit! composer Lee Hoiby has set to music an episode of Julia Child’s historic cooking show in which she makes her favorite chocolate cake, or gateau au chocolat. “It’s a very special, two-pan cake,” we are told in Julia’s inimitable homely sophisticate way.

The whole episode is there, including all of Child’s signature dry humor. She cracks jokes in passing: discouraging us from going out to play croquet while the chocolate is melting over a low flame. Oh, the temptation! Or bragging about having a self-cleaning kitchen when she taps the excess flour from her buttered pan out onto the floor. It’s only funny in that uncanny Julia Child’s kind of way, but it’s a hoot when sung as effervescently as Collom does.

Some lucky guests get to help prep the ingredients
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

When she gets ready to mount the egg whites, she wistfully decides to challenge her Kitchen-Aid mixer to a race. Why race her machine? Because she feels like it! And she is sure she will win because, well, she’s bigger. Absurd! But so much ridiculous fun. With his elegantly playful yet delightfully wicked sense of humor, Hoiby left it all in there – all of her quirks and idiosyncrasies. It serves as a reminder of just what a nut Julia Child was.

The penthouse at Shelter Studios
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The original is scored for piano, strings and woodwinds, but Collom performed the piece in a stripped down setting for solo piano that more than sufficiently creates the atmosphere and the mood of a lively live television studio broadcast. An energetic Matt Lobaugh accompanied her on the piano with bravado and pizzazz.

From the moment the piano kicked into the opening bars, smiles spread across the faces of everyone in the room. It presents the kind of steady euphoria in a show that you never want to end. The texture of the music reveals the savor of an impressionistic Debussy and the succor of a more assertive Ravel. The piece is all frothy culinary delight with flamboyant bubbles and a fluid, flowing beauty runs through the whole thing. It’s genius and joyful, informative and entertaining – a real crowd pleaser.

The chef in her self-cleaning kitchen
Photo credit: Melissa Collom

There was nothing make believe about Melissa Collom’s mise-en-scène. She had all the ingredients prepped and ready to go, just like a regular cooking show. As the audience arrived for our special afternoon performance Melissa was already there, more or less in character giving tours of her “set.” This is the part that you can imagine would even be very kid friendly. Some lucky guests even got to try their hand at mounting the egg whites that would be used in the show.

It was clear throughout that Melissa is just as comfortable in the kitchen whipping up tasty treats as she is on the opera stage or acting in front of a camera. She handled the inevitable, foreseen slip ups with the kind of style and grace that were characteristic of her source material and so flawlessly incorporated them into the general pace of the piece that they seemed to be an integral part of it. There is nothing more exhilarating than a little controlled chaos.

And the beauty of it is that you actually learn a few things along the way. The fact that egg whites mounted in a copper bowl hold up longer than in glass is something I never knew but will now never forget. Melissa Collom’s boisterous yet stately incarnation of the legendary Julia Child has indelibly etched it musically into my mind.

– Lui

She said: "Let there be cake!" And there was cake!

Worlds Collide Amidst the Renoirs

David Hertzberg’s The Wake World

Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17

Barnes Foundation

September 23, 2017

World Premiere

Is this real life, or is it just fantasy?
Photo credit: Opera Philadelphia

The Wake World was commissioned for Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17 as a site-specific work to be staged in the very special Barnes Foundation museum (which is wonderful, by the way, and deserves a visit to Philly on its own right). The audience was encouraged to roam around the museum for an hour before the beginning of the performance. The sense of anticipation was palpable and we were not disappointed, as sure enough some strange individuals started popping out in the various museum rooms, walking around and checking out the paintings as normal museumgoers. Except they were wearing all blue, pink or grey outfits with matching face paint, or else they looked exactly like characters in some of the paintings, in a way suggesting that they just popped out of the art work.

Strange occurrences in the galleries shortly before curtain
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

When the opera finally started, however, it was not in the exhibition portion of the museum, but rather in the Annenberg Court, a large hall immediately adjacent to the galleries themselves. A bit disappointing, as it would have been terrific to have the characters go through their journey amongst the actual paintings. Admittedly, however, that would have presented insurmountable logistical challenges. The immersive side of the performance was very strong even in the large hall as the audience was free to walk around and follow the singers as they moved on the long catwalk. I have to say that there was something very special about being so close to the singers (and to the composer and director, both of whom followed the action along with us, almost like characters in the show) as they performed.

Some characters seem to have descended from the paintings
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Director R. B. Schlather brought some striking ideas to the staging of composer David Hertzberg’s surreal and fantastical (though ultimately pointless) riff on a wild and wacky short story by the sometimes-mystic occultist writer Aleister Crowley. I say riff because he slapped a sort of prologue onto it, swapped out the overall naive and playful tone of the original (ostensibly a tripped out children’s story) and replaced it with a more dramatic overall melancholy tone of moping. Most of all he gave it a spin by endowing it with something recognizable as an ending, which was perhaps the most poetic, most visionary and potentially most moving part.

The monochrome people look like brushstrokes
Photo credit: Opera Philadelphia

At the end of the roughly ninety minute long one-act opera, the Fairy Prince suddenly reveals himself to be a shapely woman with luscious long flowing locks of hair. He who is now a she (though, as they say these days, gender is just a construct anyway) appears on the end of the catwalk in a stunning translucent nightgown with an armful of flowers and sings a song of longing and love for her now absent Lola. Then Lola appears with her own armful of flowers and in a matching translucent slip for their big very wide-awake world reunion in the afterlife, presumably. The way the two of them glow in the light of their love for one another is also as though they have actually shed their mortal human clothing and transcended the earthly plane to become angels. The moment has no analogue in the original story but was among the most satisfying passages of the opera.

Let the ghostly frolicking begin
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The apotheosis is complete once the two frolic off together and end up running into the distance, out the exit doors, and into the garden of the Barnes Foundation, literally out into the “real” world outside, beyond the panes of glass where they dance like woodland ghostlike creatures by the scenic reflection pool. What does that make the wake world? And the wide-awake world? And the world after death? Which is which? The mystery remains an open question, in this respect, not unlike the Crowley story, which ends with a reference to a serpent eating its own tail – the classic insoluble knot, the conundrum to end all conundrums.

While Crowley utilizes Lola’s transhumance as a commentary on the habits of mind (like those forged by conformity and social conditioning) that make us who we think we are, Hertzberg seems to be less concerned about the construction of the self and more concerned with the spirit or the soul.

A dreamlike encounter in the prologue
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Hertzberg also ups the ante on the poetic register. The texture of Crowley’s prose is rather plain and Lola’s narrative voice is intentionally confident but naive and playful. The entirety of Hertzberg’s text is almost overly ornate, full of archaic and rare aulic terminology and rife with alliteration more often than not. Which is not a characteristic of Lola’s first person narration in the original text at all.

The bog behind this stooping brow

Hath its measurements congealed.

Say what? Several of the Dream characters, a couple of whom seem to reference figures found in the paintings in the museum, especially the two bedraggled men in the prologue, speak with pseudo-archaisms as in this bit quoted above. Or else: “The patch, she devoureth herself.” (Huh?) Their verbs end with Shakespearean -th suffixes and are paired with doth’s and hath’s and shalt’s. Many made up words abound, especially those that have a peculiar pseudo-antiquated flair.

And find faultless joy in phlegm unstained.

Allegorical introductions and farewells
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco 

(Huh?) However, when Lola begins speaking in the early segment called, “II. The Beginning,” all of the hifalutin gibberish goes out the window. This is where the Crowley story begins and we seem to enter the world of the Fairy Prince’s palace proper. Very little, if anything, was done to intimate the space of a palace. Aside from a catwalk that ran the length of the long rectangular Annenberg Court, the large reception hall where visitors congregate to enter the Barnes Foundation, there was no set to speak of. Instead Hertzberg created an otherworldly place out of his use of shards of language and an immersive sound experience that was brought to life by the Opera Philadelphia Chorus. Words repeated and syllables alliterated in the construction of phrases that unfolded into what could possibly pass as sense or meaning.

Strangers, why do you stand there

Smiling softly in sinister silence?

Soprano Maeve Höglund in the principle role of Lola, “the key of all delights,” sang her heart out and eventually sang her clothes off and her silky skin and her bones. Her character seemed to get her vestments from one of the Renoirs in the collection, or else Alice in Wonderland for the adult crowd. It was definitely Höglund who buoyed the whole show with her charismatic presence as well as her singing. Her muscular soprano pined with longing, lusted with feeling, was conflicted in her desire and worked through many surreal doldrums and other abstractions along the way.

The Fairy Prince toys with his plaything
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

The Fairy Prince was sung by mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb who played “him” as a sort of Annie Lennox or mid-1980s Madonna in drag as a man in a three piece double-breasted suit, hair pulled back and wielding a gentleman’s pipe. Chaieb cut a commanding figure as she toyed with her little plaything mostly from afar. A cloud of gender-stereotyped behavior hung heavy over their interactions. At one point little Lola grovels at her Fairy Prince's feet for whose dear indulgence she supplicates as she grabs his knees.

The torment continues
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

There was even a woman dressed in a full body flesh-colored jumpsuit who looked like a Renoir nude, complete with the eroticized knee high white stockings and red high heels. She seemed to have stepped right out of one of the Renoirs that Dr. Barnes, in one of his elaborate symmetrical wall compositions, paired with a still life of bulbous apples that recall the female form in one of the sensory overload rooms in the galleries through which we were invited to wander in anticipation of the start of the opera.

For all the vagaries of the libretto and its improvement upon the source material, Hertzberg’s score constituted a highly sophisticated piece of music. It was suggestive and dreamy and beautiful in every bar. He never reverts to strange or jarring dissonance just for the sake of creeping the audience out. Musically he creates ambience, a stunning sense of space and place. It was incredibly listenable. Hertzberg’s music definitely takes you places – flashes of Debussy, maybe, and Saariaho, only without the cacophonous weird bits.

This man plays the "blue room"
(whatever that means)
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Most of all, I thought of Bartòk’s Bluebeard’s Castle, perhaps mostly in terms of its enigmatic narrative structure and its unsettling palatial architecture, musical and otherwise. Like Bartòk, Hertzberg’s score as well as his libretto keep you on the edge of your seat in wonder. Where is he taking us? What does it all mean?

The shame it seems to me is that such visionary and refined talent continues to be wasted on such superficial and shallow projects. Audiences are hungry for real depth and emotional breadth. They can wrap their minds around challenging and complex material when the mind of the creator rises to that level and gives us something of substance to grapple with, yet so many of our contemporary composers give us trifles.

Singers like these are also capable of delivering an even greater range of emotions and of inhabiting more complex dramatic scenarios than the relatively monotone ramblings composers frequently give them to communicate.

There are lessons to be learned from the repertory that musicians and singers in circulation at the moment know and play well. Why have we lost the sense of a Norma, for example? A character who undergoes a real journey not only through disappointment and great adversity but also through the whole range of human and musical emotions. There is something to be recovered from the soprano assoluta role, even if she is not composed as the Everest of opera.

This Alice is a little lost lamb in her wonderland
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Hertzberg is one of the most exciting composers experimenting with narrative musical forms that I have encountered of late. I’m eager to see where his talent evolves and where his vision takes him. I hope he manages to marry his highly articulate flights of fancy with something that is also rooted in the ground of an even more fleshful human experience. If The Wake World is any indication, Hertzberg has it in him.

– Lei & Lui

The reflection pool at the Barnes Foundation with a Wake World installation
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

"The Language of the Wake World is silence," Aleister Crowley
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco

Love Is Elsewhere

Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin

Metropolitan Opera

December 17, 2016

Love is elsewhere, until it isn't.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

From the very beginning, with its in medias res amorphous opening, the uncanny score of Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin throws you into a dream-like universe. Lush and atmospheric, the Finnish composer’s music suspends the listener over an indistinct watery expanse. Eschewing an overture or prelude of any kind, the first bars conjure a brine-laden formless and foggy seascape that only slowly comes into focus the way distance lies out over the ocean.

Susanna Mälkki conducted an exceedingly smooth reading of this uncanny score with the utmost polish. Interestingly, in recordings with other conductors the same score seems more flush with jolting surprises from jarring horns and more pronounced cacophony from the percussion. The mood created by Ms. Mälkki was more suggestive, more oneiric. It came off to my ear more of a dreamy Debussy dream (à la Pelleas et Melisande), with some of the quirkier Messiaen eccentricities that punctuate its aural landscape toned down and mellowed out.

Bands of light imitate the sea.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Director Robert Lepage’s luminous production provided a fitting counterpoint to the mellifluous score. Lepage and his team focused on the ineluctable and seemingly insuperable obstacles that separate us from one another in any relationship; the daunting gulf that so often divides two people and impedes connection. The staging at the Met was dominated by some two-dozen bands of light that represented the central figure of the sea in the story over which he suspended a mobile crane that could become a stairway with a platform on either end. The effect of the bands of light was hypnotic, particularly when they were made to fluctuate, rise and fall, imitating at one point the movements of a gentle yet unsettling storm at sea. But like many of this visionary director’s productions this one was kind of a one trick pony, which in this case was not entirely off base. It matched the spectral, minimalist nature of the music, and it heightened the dreaminess of certain moments in the story, especially when Rudel dreams and the idealized object of his affections (played by a dancer) materializes over the bands of light, diving through the waves in a dolphin-like fashion.

Also effective was the way the chorus was deployed. Strategically placed beneath the “water” toward the back of the stage, where they could only just barely be seen allowed them to lend their voices to the majestic and almost mystical heightening of the singers’ voices throughout the opera. It created a haunting and often imperceptible embellishment of the sound of the individual singers and an almost spiritual elevation of the emotions. Less compelling was the peek-a-boo choreographies they were made to do, poking their heads up over the “surface” of the water in certain nightmarish moments.

The chorus makes its presence known.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Based on a very brief romanticized account of the life of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, the plot of L’Amour de Loin can be summarized as follows: a prince is bored with his womanizing life and decides to devote his energies to love more deeply; a pilgrim passing by tells him about this incredibly beautiful woman who lives across the sea in enemy territory; prince gets very excited about the idea and starts singing lovely poetry about the woman as the perfect idea of love; pilgrim tells the woman about all the fuss she’s created overseas and she’s not sure how to take it; prince decides to make the trip across the sea to finally meet the object of his desire but when he gets there he dies from the hardships of sea travel; woman finally sees the love and gets all combative about the whole ordeal.

A lyric lady of love breaks through to the other side.
Photo credit: Met Opera

This is an opera composed by a woman about a man looking at a woman who in turn finally gets her voice in the act of looking back at that man. Despite the seemingly traditional underpinnings of the romantic story itself, the triangulation of these various gazes, nevertheless, packs a radical punch.

Scores of lyric ladies have appeared over the millennia in the amorous and elegiac poetic tradition from Catullus, Propertius and Ovid to the troubadours, Dante and the centuries of Petrarchists who continue to write right down to our own time. In the history of this patriarchal literary trope, rarely are the female objects of these poets’ affections ever afforded the agency of speaking for themselves, seldom are they granted a voice of their own.

If you read the libretto divorced of the score and its staging, you come away with the impression that Clémence is quick to respond to her suitor’s advances in kind. But the way the end of both Act II and Act III were staged by LePage show that something slightly deeper may going on here.

Clémence steps down from her pedestal.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The most powerful of these moments occurs at the end of Act III. Throwing a mini-conniption fit, Clémence steps down off the pedestal, on which even the director has placed her, thus breaking the illusion of the show, and stands between two of the bands of light, in the middle of the “water,” as though the make-believe were over and it was no longer “water.” She is indeed brazenly standing up and making herself heard as a living woman and not an idealization. She defiantly no longer wants to play the game of representation and fantasy anymore. If she has a say in the matter, she isn’t going to allow herself to be loved in an idealistic way by someone who has never even met her. In this take, Clémence transcends her status as passive object of desire. For a fleeting moment in the story, she’s not going to humor a distant love like this. She is a human being just like he is and thus wants a love that is human.

In the role of the lover from afar, Jaufré Rudel, was bass-baritone, Eric Owens, from whose booming imperious voice I expected more. He left me feeling a little lukewarm. Other singers that I have heard in this role have imbued the character with a slightly more irascible, angrier reaching quality that makes the desire of the poor bereft troubadour soar a little more. Owens sounded more resigned in the chesty depths of his longing, coming across as a lover who is more languidly lethargic than energetic in his desire.

The messenger scene.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Beset not only by the obstacle of the sea, the two lovers in this opera, which is set in the eleventh century against the backdrop of a holy war, are positioned on opposite sides of enemy lines. The figure of the Pilgrim, here sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford, is deployed as a conduit for the lyricism of the troubadour to pass from one character to the next. The flights of poetic inspiration with which the opera opens belong to Jaufré. He sends his lyrical spirit along via the Pilgrim who has been charged with the task of embodying those inspired verses for his beloved which then in turn inspire her to embark on flights of lyric fancy of her own.

Like Sancho Panza in an analogous messenger scene in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the Pilgrim rather humorously forgets most of the content of the poetic missive from Jaufré to Clémence. He manages to transmit nothing more than the gist of the message after garbling the end of the song he was sent to sing on behalf of his master. It is a light-hearted moment in an otherwise rather stolid evening at the opera. Fortunately Mumford didn’t ham it up but rather she played the humor with subtlety and tact. She pushed the ethereal sound of her instrument throughout. And equally used her mezzo to soar on amorous pinions in ways that Eric Owens’ instrument simply did not, at least the evening that we heard him. Interestingly, the Pilgrim’s arias are the only portions of the opera that sound like they belong to the era the plot is set in, with a style reminiscent of medieval madrigals.

Don't shoot the messenger
Photo credit: Ken Howard

Soprano Susanna Phillips, in the role of Clémence, was simply stunning. She embodied the tricky tempos and other idiosyncrasies of the score beautifully and she nailed all the soaring high notes that gave angelic wings to her unattainable beauty. Phillips made the show, as both the empowered woman with a say in things and the impressionable young pushover that this character’s duality encompasses. Because, of course, by the end she does indeed eventually embody the cardinal virtue suggested by her symbolic name.

The poet sets out to cross the sea.
Photo credit: Sarah Krulwich

Once Jaufré musters the wherewithal to cross the sea, the journey takes its toll on him. He arrives only to collapse at the feet of his beloved and rather anticlimactically dies in her arms. There is nothing particularly moving about this sudden and almost mechanical turn of events. Instead, the climax is saved for Clémence’s response to what she is forced to endure. Seeing that God has struck down a man so good and so sincere in his love, she lashes out in frustration at the injustice underlying God’s moral universe.

The lovers briefly meet across the chasm.
Photo credit: Ken Howard

The outcome of this brief but profound long-distance romance leads her to take up another call to arms. This time Clémence turns to another “lover,” one who rather ambiguously is either God himself or the deified spirit of her lost lover. To remedy one distant love she turns to another even more impossibly distant love. Depending on how you take this spiritual turn in the story, the end of the opera either undermines or reinforces the notion that there is something about true love is always only ever elsewhere.

And this is where L’Amour de Loin, while it may be set in the middle ages, is the product of a more modern and intellectual, almost aseptic, sensibility. This is not an opera that unleashes emotions or visceral reactions of any sort. The dramatic tension is somehow there, yet it does not explode in any traditional way. There is a lot of exploration of ideas about love, but the story as told by the music never gets to your heart.

– Lui & Lei