At the Metropolitan Museum, the stories of a runaway slave and a shunned author.
Martin Bakari as Genji and Kristen Choi as Lady Murasaki in ‘Murasaki’s Moon’ Photo: Stephanie Berger By Heidi Waleson May 20, 2019 4:20 p.m. ET
New York
The Metropolitan Museum’s MetLiveArts programming has a strong focus on the contemporary. This season, the unconventional American soprano Julia Bullock’s residency was particularly imaginative, especially “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” her shattering embodiment of Joséphine Baker, a collaboration with the composer/percussionist/pianist Tyshawn Sorey, which they performed on the steps of the museum’s Great Hall several months ago. The show amplified the furious inner voice of Baker, the black American entertainer who was the toast of Paris starting in the 1920s, uncomfortably exploring Baker’s feelings about race and being objectified. In mid-May, Ms. Bullock curated a piece amplifying another marginalized voice: Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón” (1970), which is based on the oral history of an Afro-Cuban ex-slave Esteban Montejo. Born into bondage in 1860, he worked on the sugar plantations, escaped and lived in the jungle until slavery was abolished in 1886, and fought in Cuba’s war of independence from Spain. He lived to age 113.
Henze’s 80-minute chamber piece for voice, flute, percussion and guitar was a tour de force for the mesmerizing bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who recounted Montejo’s story with a deliberate, matter-of-fact cadence that belied its horrifying content. Much of the text was spoken, and when, in moments of rage or other extreme emotion, Mr. Tines veered into song, it was often falsetto, as though the storyteller were somehow possessed. The musicians, Emi Ferguson, Jonny Allen and Jordan Dodson, built atmosphere under and around the voice. A huge percussion array, with dozens of instruments including marimba, steel drum, melodica and gongs, was used subtly for color and variety rather than as massed cacophony; the delicacy of the Spanish-style guitar and the multiple special flute effects contributed to a score that felt purposely fragmentary.
Different sections powerfully evoked the brutality of slavery; the freedom of life in the jungle; the machines of the sugar factories; Montejo’s musings about ghosts, women and priests; and his account of the Battle of Mal Tiempo, when he joined the rebel cavalry in slaughtering Spanish soldiers with machetes. With direction by Zack Winokur, the percussion instruments crowding the stage of Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium became, among other things, an obstacle course for the escaping Montejo and the jungle that hid him for years. The neutral-colored homespun costumes, designed by Carlos Soto, completed the effect.
The world premiere of Michi Wiancko’s “Murasaki’s Moon,” co-produced with On Site Opera and performed in the museum’s Astor Court this weekend, accompanied a special exhibition that explores the artistic tradition of the celebrated 11th-century Japanese novel “The Tale of Genji.” Artists through the centuries have played with the imagery of this 54-episode saga and the exploits of its amorous hero—the exhibit includes parodies, erotic paintings, card games and manga illustrations, among other objects. In their hour-long opera, Ms. Wiancko and her librettist, Deborah Brevoort, offered a feminist spin, putting the focus on the novel’s author, Murasaki Shikibu, who was a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court. Their Lady Murasaki is lonely and unpopular with the other ladies because she is educated and not pretty; she decides to write her tale, which centers on Genji’s quest for the perfect woman, in order to show the negative outcome of that behavior for both the pursuer and the pursued.
The structure is clever. A quick sequence of episodes from the novel, depicting Genji’s serial conquests (he collects lovers’ fans as trophies) and his lack of consideration for the women he seduces and abandons, is bookended by Murasaki’s meditations and her conversations with her creation. However, the libretto often tells instead of shows, and its moral—that the artist must speak the truth, even if it doesn’t make her any friends—is heavy-handed. The vocal writing similarly has expressive high points, like the Murasaki-Genji duet about loneliness, but too often devolves into simple text-spinning melodrama.
Kristen Choi was a powerful Murasaki, with a big, expressive mezzo and a commanding presence, and she ably switched characters to become Genji’s different conquests. Tenor Martin Bakari made an amusingly arrogant Genji. As the bossy Buddhist Priest, who chides Murasaki, saying “the purpose of stories is to keep women in their place,” John Noh’s text articulation was unclear. Geoffrey McDonald capably led the eloquent chamber ensemble made up of a string quartet with Japanese flutes, percussion instruments, and a koto providing non-Western accents. Director Eric Einhorn made a virtue of simplicity: The singers used the whole courtyard space, often venturing behind the audience that flanked the narrow runway at the center, and Murasaki’s plain kimono (designed by Beth Goldenberg) established her low-level position in the glamorous Imperial court.
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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