Blood on the Plains

Mazzoli’s Proving Up

Miller Theatre

September 28, 2018

What makes a home? Life on the prairie is serious business.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre

A desolate plot of land took center stage at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre for the New York premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new chamber opera, Proving Up. This sandbox filled with forebodingly dark, desolate soil along with the backdrop – a stark wall of raw plywood out of which the silhouette of a simple house had been cut – were meant to represent the hopes and dreams of the Zegner family, one of many homesteaders who are wagering a future in the Nebraska Territory of the 1860s. 

The itinerant window.
Photo credit: Scott Suchman

However, the land itself does not lie at the center of the dramatic tensions in the opera. The story revolves instead around the question of a simple pane glass window, a rarity in these parts. In fact, there is only one of them to be found and it is in the Zegners’ possession. A whimsical clause in the Homestead Act of 1862 stipulates that the home must have at least one of them installed in order for the homesteader to be able to “prove up,” or lay official claim to their land. 

Proving up is a metaphor that runs through the opera, as it does in the short story of the same title by Karen Russell on which it is based. The youngest son, the 11-year-old Miles Zegner, is eager to prove up to the maturity that is expected of him in the mission that lies ahead. 

Mazzoli’s score eases us into the landscape of this world. She opens the opera with a few sparse dissonant sounds, that subtly accompany Mr. Johannes “Pa” Zegner, sung by a commanding and at times carousing John Moore. His baritone intones an anthropological prologue to the piece. He sings Mazzoli’s own setting of Uncle Sam’s Farm, a propaganda ditty espousing the virtues of the government’s purported generosity. Encouraging westward expansion, it invites the world and its unwashed masses with open arms to:

Come along, come along, make no delay;

Come from every nation, come from every way.

Our lands, they are broad enough – don’t be alarmed,

Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm.

Pa Zegner croons this tune da capo several times, with each repetition the contours of its melody emerge more and more from the inchoate dissonance of those initial sounds that become chords, as the world of the story begins to come into focus.

Facsimile of the full text of the ditty.

But then before we are thrust into the actual story, Mazzoli opts to follow her prologue with a rather pedantic introduction, in which the Zegner family sing to us about some of the finer points of the Homestead Act, with an almost musical-style refrain in which they name the piece of legislation multiple times in unison. It seems to me that there a subtler ways of incorporating this kind of information into less harshly expository moments.

As soon as one begins to wonder when the ship is going to sail, the narrative winds pick up and we are finally underway. The oldest Zegner boy, a silent role played by the dancer Sam Shapiro, stumbles onto the stage, his chest caked with mud and blood that oozes thick from a wound. He’s not going to be able to make the family’s philanthropic rounds with the prized window in this state. That onus will fall to their youngest Miles, but can they afford to lose him? Ma thinks not, Pa is counting on him to make them proud. 

You see, rumor has it that the one-eyed inspector from Washington is on his way by train to finalize the land deeds of those who have a window in their sod homes. Fancying themselves good-hearted old farmers, the Zegners spread their window wealth around. Having stolen the window themselves, they are intent to prove up in the eyes of God by installing their window in the homes of their neighbors for inspection and then covertly moving it from home to home for subsequent inspections. “Farmers,” carouses Pa in one of his more uplifting numbers, “need to look out for farmers,” which is apparently something of a family mantra. 

Peter hangs on by a thread, young Miles will have to step up.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre

Mazzoli’s score, set for a chamber orchestra, on the whole exceeded what I have come to expect from certain types of contemporary opera. It is classically refined with folksy flourishes from the flute and harp, which she brandishes like a guitar. Her use of the violins can modulate from brooding atmospherics that suggest the fog laying low out over the Great Plains to frolicsome fiddle at an old timey though slightly somnolent hoedown. The voices of the bassoon and clarinet from the woodwinds section regularly contribute eerie off-kilter colors to her immersive soundscape. 

Reading Russell’s prose, one is struck by its pervasive quirkiness, strewn as it is with flashes of poetic wit, which turns out to be very well suited to Mazzoli’s sensibility. Librettist Royce Vavrek managed to carry over many of Russell’s most incisive gems. And the composer imbued this otherworldly period piece with a strangeness that was largely very melodic and pleasant on the ear, not to mention evocative of a distant yet familiar time and place in our collective imagination. 

Ma conjures the ghosts of her dead daughters.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson 

There are nevertheless several moments in which I feel like she falls victim to the tendency in modern opera of calling unnecessary attention to itself as opera. I don’t see the need to excessively set words to a music that distorts their expressive sense in the narrative. Unfortunately, the talented soprano Talise Trevigne, whom we have admired elsewhere, in the role of Mrs. Johannes “Ma” Zegner, had to sing several of these zingers. But so did her husband. Not even Miles’ lines are immune to this scourge. It seems to me that these are the moments that alienate new audiences from the art form. 

Thankfully enough of her operatic writing served the story more than call attention to itself for the sake of using the operatic voice to sound operatic, which gives me hope. In fact, I am excited by the prospect not only that she will soon be taking on a commission for the Metropolitan Opera but that she will reportedly take on Lincoln in the Bardo,the eminently visionary if not downright eccentric recent masterpiece by George Saunders. After Proving Up, which is set in the same period, I have a feeling that her style is perfectly suited to this. (Here’s to hoping she proves up!)

Sisters behaving like sisters even in death.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson

Like Saunders’ Bardo (which refers to the purgatorial portion of the Buddhist afterlife), Mazzoli’s Nebraska Territory is run through with spirits. The souls of the Zegners’ two dead daughters haunt their plot and hardly leave the stage in their long white prairie dresses. Their near constant presences, sung by Abigail Nims and Cree Carrico with ghoulish gusto, serve to enliven the proceedings. Russell makes much less use of them in her story. In fact, Mazzoli and Vavrek seems to change the spirit focus in their work. In highlighting the active role of the daughters as ghosts, they end up transforming Russell’s primary spirit character into actual very material man. 

The mystery sodbuster as mountain of a man.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson

Having read the source story before the show, I half anticipated this mysterious zombie southpaw, the sodbuster of the spirit realm, the supreme judge and executioner, the omniscient angel of death, to be sung by a counter tenor. In the story he speaks with a “jangly tone” that is so “reedy and high” that the narrator Miles can barely understand. “His voice is almost female, or animal, and the words make no sense whatsoever,” is how the Miles of Russell’s story describes him. 

In Mazzoli’s score, Russell’s “willowy man” becomes a husky hulk of a bass-profondo with otherworldly booming long low lines. Here he was sung by an abundantly bearded, Andrew Harris, whose face was anything but gaunt. He struck rather the stage presence of an intimidating mountain of a man. Which leads to the impression that he is less all-knowing wraith and more self-interested settler who is up on his gossip and ready to come up in this harsh, hard world by any means necessary. 

What Harris as the deep-voiced sodbuster-turned-assassin has to sing were perhaps the most mellifluous musical lines of the evening. At any rate his writing gave him very few awkwardly parsed words and the expressivity of his instrument were used to effective narrative ends. In cases like this in modern opera, where the form perfectly serves the content, it is hard not to rejoice. 

You can look through the window but may not like what you see
Photo credit: Scott Suchman 

The only thing that struck me, even in his case, is one of the symptoms that has plagued many of the modern operas I have seen, namely, the repeated singing of the name of the character being addressed. While it may make sense on the page to clarify the identity of the interlocutor, on the stage it is utterly superfluous. It’s not how people talk to each other and it is not how any masterful opera or even play for that matter go about it. Can you imagine if every time someone addressed Rigoletto they called him by name? It would quickly grate on you. Once we find out that the aggressive sodbuster knows Miles by name we get it. It is clear that he is scolding him, if not downright lecturing him about the hardships he has endured and the hypocrisy of his family denying the thievery by which they got ahead. All the apostrophes of his name amount to unnecessary clutter that only pander to an audience that is more intelligent. 

Mazzoli’s ending is enigmatic to say the least, it lives with me still. It haunts you in a different (more absurd?) way than Russell’s original ending. In Russell’s version, the ambiguity is pretty straightforward, and it makes you rethink the strange cross-shaped trees that were planted behind the Yotherses’ home the year they inexplicably disappeared. Mazzoli and her librettist bring the violence right out onto the stage. 

Pa Zegner ponders the import of the window.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson

Miles doesn’t make it home, but this not so neighborly angel of death makes his way there in his stead. Ma Zegner confuses the silhouette of the sodbuster with a rifle on his shoulder for her returning son, whom she greets with: “God, you’ve brought life back to the promised land!” But she speaks too soon. Promise land, indeed. A shot rings out. Peter is down. But then rather than murder the rest of the family along with him, the loony sodbuster drops his rifle and attempts to tend to the wound he caused and to console a shaken Ma. Meanwhile Pa, in a drunken stupor, takes up the abandoned rifle and stumbles across the stage to exit on the other side, with the window under his arm, muttering to himself, “All that’s required, all that’s required.” A weapon and a precious commodity – all that’s required. All that’s required.

And thus closes an unsettling window onto American life. “That’s the thing with windows,” Russell’s sodbuster says at one point. “Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see.” 

– Lui

All that is required.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson

Composer Missy Mazzoli and her librettist Royce Vavrek.
Photo credit: Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre

NYC Prototype Festival 2016

Bombay Rickey

Opera-Cabaret Presentation

HERE Arts Center

January 9, 2016

It's Bollywood meets surf rock meets Incan opera star.
Photo credit: Prototype

Lei: For our maiden voyage with the much-hyped Prototype Festival, we caught Bombay Rickey’s evening of “opera-cabaret” dedicated to the mysterious and mystical figure of the late great Yma Sumac. It was not really an opera but rather a series of musical numbers sewn together by a humorous narrative presented as banter between the different band members.

The Incan princess herself.
Photo credit: 20 minutos

Lui: The music of Bombay Rickey is a heady cocktail of very different genres stirred up by the leading lady’s use of her brilliant coloratura soprano both for traditional vocals and as a musical instrument. In this particular instance, it was their signature blend of Bollywood, spaghetti western, and surf guitar meets the Incan exoticism of the intriguing Yma Sumac, whose musical idiom is actually a perfect fit for the group’s otherwise highly evolved eclecticism. Mozart’s Queen of the Night was also thrown in the mix quite nicely as this soprano could totally handle it. I have a feeling they could be onto something if they keep exploring the Sumac sound. I sense a kindred spirit there.

Lei: While I loved their musical ideas and found them highly powerful, entertaining and thought provoking, more often than not the narrative felt forced and borderline silly. It was painfully evident that these artists are very fine musicians but it’s really not their job to be cabaret comic entertainers. If they only stuck to their music, that would have been more than enough to carry the show.

Lui: The conceit of the unnecessary narrative glue of the show was that the singer (Kamala Sankaram) somehow channeled or had become the reincarnated spirit of Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. Though the story took many twists and turns, it eventually included a series of diatribes about everything from identity politics and political correctness to cultural appropriation, late night television and Charlton Heston movies. Still, Bombay Rickey’s music is exciting, sophisticated and highly entertaining, will definitely look forward to seeing them again.

Channeling the spirit of Yma Sumac.
Photo credit: Prototype

David T. Little’s Dog Days

NYU Skirball Center

January 11, 2016

Here, little doggie.
Photo credit: The Guardian

Lei: NYU’s Skirball Center was packed and the buzz was palpable – on a Monday night no less. I have learned to keep my expectations very low on contemporary operas but nevertheless go every time as a (mostly painful) duty to keep up with what composers and librettists are popping out as opera nowadays. While Dog Days had an amazing score, I had a fundamental problem with virtually everything else. Libretto and theatrical plot did not work with the music. In addition to the usual problem of sung operatic English sounding ridiculous (why on earth do people need to sing “I’m out of deodorant”?), music and voices were all brutally amplified, which produced a cacophonic and fastidious effect. While I get the need to amplify the electronic effects in the score, I just could not get over feeling attacked by the sounds waves, and not in a good way. With maybe one exception (the Hello, beautiful aria), the work was just unpleasant to hear and rather ugly to watch. I do not need to see a girl wash her mother’s corpse with her own urine nor three men covered in blood writhe with feigned side-effects of their descent into cannibalism. I understand the points that the opera wants to make, with its reflection on the tenuous nature of civil society and that thin skein of decorum that makes us human and so on, but I also stand by the basic need for opera to be a pleasurable, enriching, exciting and enlightening experience. Dog Days just wasn't. I went home and listened to Verdi over and over again in the hope of cleaning out my ears.

Hello, beautiful!
Photo credit: Fort Worth Opera

Lui: Lauren Worsham, whose background singing in musicals seems to shine through the tessitura of her voice, was one of the highlights of the night. Her Hello, beautiful aria in the second half of the show was one of the most unique and unusually captivating musical moments I’ve experienced of late. The use of a camera mounted in the “mirror” was strikingly effective. Essentially, she sings the whole number staring straight into the mirror-mounted camera that is in turn being projected onto a huge screen above the stage and so the whole solipsistic aria, which is rife both with narcissism and a hearty dose of existential dread, ends up becoming an intimate theatrical experience. It opens up a space for the audience to peer directly into the raw soul of this quickly deteriorating character. The music here was also very interesting. Full of unusual tempo changes, false starts and longer flowing passages, intimating that a seed of self-confidence had taken root deep down inside her despite being overgrown with self-loathing and doubt, the aria kept you on your toes as you listened and stared transfixedly into her face on the big screen. Which also gave you that strange voyeuristic feeling of watching intently someone who both knows and doesn’t know she is being watched – strange because of the hybrid live-projection phenomenon they staged. It was like watching television, but there she was bearing her soul in a close up right there on the stage. It amounted to one of those moments of theatrical genius, I have to say.

Deodorant-less masculinity.
Photo credit: LAOpera

I wish I felt the same about most of the rest of the show. The music was brilliant. The story and most of the acting and other singing was not. Most of the text also lacked the kind of probing that the mirror aria put front and center. 

I’m all for staging bold challenging moments in opera or in any other genre but here the shocking bits just didn’t do it for me. From the cannibalism that apparently sends dad and brothers into seizure-like fits of convulsive hysteria to stripping mom and slowly wiping her body down with urine for like ten minutes simply felt gratuitous, anti-climactic and empty, though the intensity of the score in that final passage would lead you to think and feel otherwise: it features a sustained gradual crescendo of the entire electro-acoustic ensemble, with the electronic bits being featured most of all in this final movement. The reverb slowly builds like an enormous impenetrable wall of noise, consisting of feedback and other mostly abstract vibrating sounds that come off sounding like radiation. It was powerful and intense but at odds to me with what was happening in the scene.

 

It's a bleak, bleak world.
Photo credit: New York Times

Jorge Sosa’s La Reina

An Electro-Acoustic Opera

FIAF’s Florence Gould Hall

January 17, 2016

Lei: We braved a snowstorm and even Citi-Biked through Central Park to get to the Upper East Side venue of La Reina, and I’m so glad we did as this brilliant work by composer Jorge Sosa and librettist Laura Sosa Pedroza (commissioned by American Lyric Theater) restored my faith in contemporary opera. Musically, La Reina had so much going on, starting from a blend of different sounds that worked surprisingly well together delivering a complex soundscape: classical orchestra, electronic sounds (news reports, an echoing feedback filter on the death goddess’ voice, recordings of roosters, sirens, children crying). The English/Spanish blend worked (and will work even better in the hands of Hispanic singers – this cast meant well but there were a few too many Mexicans played by Gringos who butchered Spanish words like nobody’s business).

Lui: The plot is loosely based on the novel La Reina del Sur by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, about the rise and fall of a young Mexican woman, who is anything but ordinary. From the innocence of her provincial youth, she goes on to lead one of the most powerful and ruthless drug cartels and eventually winds up in prison. Interestingly, the novel is based on the real life of the Mexican drug cartel leader Sandra Ávila Beltrán and was also the source of a popular Mexican telenovela starring the actress Kate Del Castillo, who came to the forefront of international news recently for her key role in brokering an interview between El Chapo Guzman and Sean Penn (which is rumored to have led to the arrest of the Mexican drug lord).

The stuff Mexican telenovelas are made of.
Photo credit: Telemundo

Lei: As reworked for the opera, the story was thrilling and utterly captivating, timely and cathartic. It is the story of trauma, vengeance, violence and repentance, rife with morally ambiguous situations in which our heroine is forced to turn to the dark side and ultimately sees the light at the end. Fast paced and with many coups de théâtre, this opera has lots of staging potential (what we saw was a concert reading). The work was pleasant to the ear (pretty rare for a contemporary composition) and often oozed just sheer beauty. Most of all it was moving and deep just as an opera should be. The score features a multi-layered yet effective and smart use of different sounds, with the right balance between the classical and the electronic. The complexity of the score mirrors many levels of the story that encompasses travel through space and time as well across different dimensions (both in this world and the one that awaits in the afterlife).

Lui: At its core, La Reina is something of a Mephistopheles story. We open in the jail cell of La Reina who is praying to La Santa Muerte, patron saint of drug dealers, or so we’re told, when suddenly La Santa Muerte comes to life and appears to the suppliant prisoner. What ensues is a panoramic reprisal of the life that La Reina has lived and a reflection on everything that brought her to where she is today. In many ways, Goethe’s Faust seems to be in the background here, with the title character in the role of Faust and La Santa Muerte filling the shoes of Mephisto, who takes her on a guided tour of the intricacies of her life and leads her to reflect on what it all amounts to. And it is a wild, wild ride at that!

Lei: The libretto by Laura Sosa Pedroza and Jorge Sosa is pure genius, peppered with colorful regional Spanish expressions like, “Si quiere azul celeste que le cueste,” and other popular sayings  and nuggets of folk wisdom that a grandmother in a small village in Sinaloa might use. The language was very vivid and alive. As well as colloquial gangster talk as when one of the cohort says, “Chinguense ese para que los demas aprendan.” It’s real language from the streets that really enlivens the story.

Lui: Another fresh cultural touch was the way the composer incorporated the Mambró children’s nursery rhyme. Once I tuned into the way the composer intermingles these different musical vocabularies, I started to think that he could could have done much more with this kind of experiment in order to make the story come across even more authentically. Rather than draw on so much of the musical vocabulary of late twentieth-century operatic language, Sosa could have given this uniquely Mexican piece far more regional flavor. In my mind it would have been enriched by more Latin rhythms, more Mexican flavor, more regional inflection in all the best ways.

La Santa Muerte comes a knocking.
Photo credit: Prototype

Lei: The opera had several highly lyrical and moving moments: an innocent love duet at the wedding early in Act I, all of La Santa Muerte’s bits with the eerie, otherworldly electronic effects they used on her voice, not to mention the perfect deployment of coloratura by her character, and the finale that takes us to the land of Mictlan filled with candles symbolizing the countless victims of violence. Sosa’s unconventional compositional and dramatic ideas definitely have potential for a fully staged incarnation.

Lui: There were really a lot of suggestive dramatic moments that present real possibilities for a fully realized and utterly unique operatic experience. One of the key moments was when La Reina commits her first murder and she comes to realize how natural the cruelty of her dirty business comes to her. “L’arma fue leger en mi mano,” she reflects in retrospect on this pivotal moment in her journey. This is a mujer with cojones. And that to me was another plus about this opera: the conviction of this incredibly strong female lead. There isn't nearly enough of this kind of thing in the classic repertory.

And so, I have to hand it to the Prototype Festival for bringing us so many utterly unique voices, for representing experiences so different from what one usually finds, especially on the operatic stage and finally for giving us some hope that contemporary opera can break into new uncharted territory but also be beautiful and touching at the same time.  

– Lui & Lei