‘In Our Daughter’s Eyes’ and ‘Fidelio’ Reviews: A Parent’s Pain and Beethoven

In Los Angeles, Du Yun’s solo opera about a father’s struggles has its premiere and the Los Angeles Philharmonic teams with Deaf West Theatre for a unique take on Beethoven’s work. 

By 

Heidi Waleson

Updated April 18, 2022 6:29 pm ET

Los Angeles

In an early scene of Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes”—a solo opera commissioned, developed and produced by Beth Morrison Projects that had its premiere last week at Redcat as part of LA Opera’s Off Grand series—baritone Nathan Gunn, as an expectant father writing a journal, sings, “I have decided to become the protector of your story.” As the harrowing 70-minute piece unfurls, the nameless protagonist’s understanding of his power to protect or influence anything will undergo serious re-evaluation. His emotional shifts, exposed and parsed at a granular level through Michael Joseph McQuilken’s economical libretto and Du Yun’s multihued score, are the opera’s subject; the pregnancy’s agonizing trajectory is the agent of those changes. 

Optimism reigns through the first half of the piece. We hear about ultrasounds and the heartbeat; in a comic, jazzy section titled “Cravings,” the protagonist scours seven stores for items—including flax, coconuts and Moon Pies. Even the darker parts—the admissions of his need for attention and his alcohol dependency; a scary dream about diving into a frozen lake to rescue the child—end in resolutions to do better. The lake dream, for example, concludes with the line “I’ll hold my breath forever if that’s what it takes to save you.” But that classic, grandiose parental vow turns out to be useless. Midway through the opera and the pregnancy, we discover that the fetus, a girl, has a rare condition that is “incompatible with life.” The parents opt to carry to term in order to donate her organs and help other sick babies, but even that power, it seems, may be denied them. 

Mr. Gunn explores vocal expression far beyond typical baritone lyricism with whispers, speech and crooning into a microphone. There’s even a raspy, throaty howl of pain during “The Bar,” which is scored like a cacophonous death-metal song, as he has a dream about getting “blackout drunk” on learning the diagnosis. Every vocal turn seems authentic to the singer; even the lyric parts are never merely pretty but infused with raw feeling. Mr. Gunn disappears into this flawed person who ultimately finds strength he didn’t think he had. 

The six-member orchestra (violin, cello, clarinet/saxophone, trumpet, electric guitar and percussion), skillfully conducted by Kamna Gupta, conjures up an astonishing variety of timbres as the instruments solo, are mixed and set against each other or joined into a visceral wave. Each section—with a xylophone that sounds like a child’s toy; a muted trumpet suggesting hope in the midst of tragedy; a hint of a siren underlying squealing strings—reflects a new and different dive into the complexities of the protagonist’s emotions. 

The production, directed by Mr. McQuilken, with set and lighting by Maruti Evans and costumes by E.B. Brooks, is a physical metaphor for the protagonist’s struggle for control. The set is his workshop, where he assembles a crib, pries up a floorboard to find his hidden whiskey, and, in “The Bar” dream sequence, flips open a table to reveal a wall of bottles, hellishly illuminated in red. Filmed material adds texture, beginning with the opening sequence, a nonvocal, sparely orchestrated dream of a child who floats out of bed and through a house, past a father building model airplanes and a mother drinking tea, and out into the cosmos. In “Cravings,” the supermarket freezer cases scroll by; in “Legacy,” a father takes his daughter to buy a piano. As the piece proceeds, Mr. Gunn rips down the video screens and crams them into a trash can. By the end, it’s just him, taking stock of what he’s learned.

***

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s collaboration with Deaf West Theatre on Beethoven’s “Fidelio” last week at Walt Disney Concert Hall was intriguing in theory. In the semistaged performance, each singing character had a deaf actor counterpart, thereby creating a double show for hearing and nonhearing audience members. Solange Mendoza’s costumes, which resembled medieval robes, differentiated through color and fabric, with the singers in bulky layers of white and the actors in more fluid grays and browns; James F. Ingalls’s lighting helped focus attention appropriately. At times, director Alberto Arvelo had the singers stand still and serve as the voices for the ASL-signing actors; at others, the two performers playing the same character interacted with each other; and sometimes, everyone was in action together. Spoken dialogue passages were ASL-only, making for unusual onstage silences. Colin Analco was the ASL choreographer.

At first, it was fascinating to watch, especially given actors like Russell Harvard (Rocco), who conveyed an acute physical sense of the music’s pulse and duration and its aural power. But after a while, the broadness of the ASL gestures, necessary for them to read in the large theater, became distracting for this hearing audience member, especially in scenes with multiple characters. Ironically, operatic acting was once all semaphoric, a style that fell into disfavor with the modern emphasis on realism, and the gestures of the deaf actors at times seemed like a throwback. (Listeners unaccustomed to the over-the-top sound of the operatic voice might well think it similarly exaggerated.) 

The musical rendition had its own problems. As Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her imprisoned husband, soprano Christiane Libor was underwhelming, her pitch wavery and her line insecure. As her husband, Florestan, tenor Ian Koziara started out strong with his opening exclamation of “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!” but his power faded quickly, a liability in this vocally challenging role. The star of the show was Ryan Speedo Green, whose sumptuous bass-baritone gave the jailer Rocco buoyant heft and personality. Bass-baritone Shenyang was also vocally imposing as the wicked Don Pizarro, though his actor counterpart, Gabriel Silva, upstaged him, playing the classic dastardly villain in black. Gabriella Reyes was a sweetly innocent Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel pushed the tempi mercilessly, giving much of the performance a rough-and-ready feel. The stage setup, with the orchestra in front and the singers and actors on a raised semicircular platform behind it, meant better aural presence for the orchestra than for the singers.

The singing/signing duality worked well for the chorus parts. The Los Angeles Master Chorale sang eloquently from tiered seats flanking the stage while the Coro de Manos Blancas from Venezuela signed from the platform. The Coro’s rendition of the prisoner’s chorus, “O welche Lust,” with its synchronized gestures, communicated the same magical feeling of awe at release from bondage, however temporary, as the singing did. 

—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).