This season brings genre-pushing variety, from the premiere of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’ to Rossini’s rarely seen ‘Otello.’
Timur and the Dime Museum perform live with the film of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’
PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO
By Heidi Waleson
Oct. 4, 2022 5:47 pm ET
Philadelphia
After two years of pandemic-imposed hiatus, Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking festival returned this fall with some new twists. The festival has always looked to the future, and the medium of opera on film has exploded recently as producers searched for alternatives to live performance. Festival O22’s marquee event was thus the premiere of David T. Little’s opera film “Black Lodge.” O22 also presented “Opera on Film,” 12 screenings encompassing several dozen wildly different takes on the intersection of those two mediums.
“Black Lodge” demands some advance work: Last November, I saw a preview screening cold and was baffled. This time, I was prepared for the piece’s literary, filmic and theatrical inspirations in the work of the surrealists William S. Burroughs, David Lynch, and Antonin Artaud. Mr. Little’s score, Anne Waldman’s libretto and director Michael Joseph McQuilken’s screenplay depict a man trapped in the Bardo—here a nightmarish space between death and rebirth—endlessly reliving the worst thing he has ever done. That event is based on Burrough’s accidental 1951 killing of his wife, whom, in one version, he shot while drunk as part of a William Tell stunt.
With context, you can appreciate the project’s artistry. Timur Bekbosunov, frontman of the glam rock band Timur and the Dime Museum, is an operatic tenor with a remarkably protean instrument—in “Black Lodge,” he sounds alternately like a baroque countertenor, a baritone, a rocker and a crooner. The piece is scored for string quartet, rock band and electronics; Timur, his band, and the Opera Philadelphia String Quartet performed it live at the Philadelphia Film Center, which was exciting, if extremely loud. (Ear plugs were provided.)
“Black Lodge” is a dark, unredemptive vision. It ends basically where it begins, in a large industrial space with Timur (the Man) in a swinging chair next to a 1950s-era TV with his face on it. In between, he undergoes shock treatment, gets covered in clay, and visits both a forest with a string quartet and a desert with a thrashing rock band. A dancer (Jennifer Harrison Newman) portrays, among others, a sinisterly masked medical technician, a bartender who splits in two, and the victim of the killing in a suburban living room.
Projected titles were essential to understanding Ms. Waldman’s gnomic text; they were, alas, small and hard to follow at the same time as the fast-moving images. Yet this time, I could feel the human anguish under the noise and horror. The climactic killing scene was interrupted by a howling interlude in the desert: As the screen was splashed with comic book-style gun explosions and blood, and the music recalled the infernal electronic drone at the end of Mr. Little’s “Dog Days,” the text that rose to the surface was, hopelessly, “The answer is no.” A recording will be released next spring; the film streams on the Opera Philadelphia Channel beginning Oct. 21.
“Black Lodge,” which was developed and produced by Beth MorrisonProjects, was reimagined as a film due to the pandemic, and seems made for the medium. Of the three Opera on Film screenings I saw, Arizona Opera’s “The Copper Queen,” which had a traditional operatic structure and score (by Clint Borzoni) and was shot entirely on one set, was the most conventional. Still, director Crystal Manich used the immediacy of film closeup to showcase soprano Vanessa Becerra in an impressive performance as Julia, the passionate ghost of a mining town whore. I was intrigued by “After/Glow,” directed by Ryan McKinny, which imposed a more complicated narrative—a ménage à trois with a tragic ending—on Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe.” The film was layered with additional poetry by Marc Bamuthi Joseph; the Schumann was sung and played by the splendid countertenor John Holiday. Director E. Elias Merhige’s “Polia & Blastema” was a cipher, more film than opera with its sci-fi visuals, a pair of clay-encrusted women, and soprano ululations in the background.
Kristen Choi with dancer Muyu Ruba in ‘The Raven’
PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO
Festival O22 also brought back live theater. “The Raven” (2012) Toshio Hosokawa’s monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players, probes deeply into the terror and loss of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem through a jagged, atonal setting that stretches the scansion out of its familiar rhythm. Directed by Aria Umezawa, featuring mezzo Kristen Choi, and conducted by Eiki Isomura, it was ingeniously mounted at the Miller Theater with the audience surrounding the action on bleachers, runway-style, on the stage. Overhead, scenic designer Jennifer Hiyama’s hanging sculpture looked like an undulating drift of white paper that had been chewed by termites; discarded manuscript papers and photographs were strewn on the floor.
Ms. Choi embraced the piece’s wide range of pitch and dynamics, shifting from whispers and Sprechstimme to full-throated song (the first time on the word “Lenore,” the name of speaker’s dead love). She was equally intense in her movement, interacting with a dancer (Muyu Ruba) wearing a bird mask and a black robe with giant sleeves. Ariel Wang designed the Japanese-influenced costumes, hair and make-up.
In a pre-show opener by the theater collective Obvious Agency, half a dozen performers, in white costumes draped with red cords, all claimed to be “Lenore” and engaged the audience in groups. It was not illuminating. These Lenores also turned up midway through the main part of the show, stripped off the dancer’s robe and mask, and revealed that she was also Lenore.
Tenor Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello
PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO
O22’s most traditional offering was Rossini’s “Otello” (1816), a diva showcase, though not exactly the expected one. Unlike Verdi’s version, the plot unfolds entirely in Venice (here called Adria) and the hatred/jealousy angle is spread more widely, incorporating Elmiro (Desdemona’s father) and Rodrigo, Elmiro’s preferred candidate for her hand, as well as Otello and Iago. Other than Elmiro (bass-baritone Christian Pursell), they are all tenors, and Rodrigo (Lawrence Brownlee) has the flashiest music. Mr. Brownlee had the notes and the agility for the role, but his delivery throughout felt effortful—impressive, but not comfortable.
His colleagues were less exposed, with more recitative and ensemble writing than stand-alone arias. Khanyiso Gwenxane’s softer-edged tenor made for an ardent, expressive Otello, though the Rodrigo-Otello antagonism felt less potent than it could have. Alek Shrader was a nicely toxic Iago; Mr. Pursell a properly stiff Elmiro.
The star of the show was mezzo Daniela Mack, who gave a rich-voiced, poignant performance as the unfortunate Desdemona, fought over by men and heard by none of them. Only her confidante, Emilia (an affecting Sun-Ly Pierce), pays any attention to her. The murder scene, which has Otello chasing Desdemona around the room and insisting that she’s unfaithful, was regrettably more comic than tragic. Although conductor Corrado Rovaris tended toward grand gestures rather than transparency, the deft Rossinian construction of the opera’s trios, quartets and the like made the piece worth hearing.
The production, from Belgium, had traffic-cop direction by Emilio Sagi. The post-World War I design, with a single set by Daniel Bianco, costumes by Gabriela Salaverri and lighting by Eduardo Bravo, placed the action in the vestibule of a stately home with a dispiritingly gray color scheme. Numerous liveried servants kept moving the furniture around during Act 1; by Act 2, the furniture was, curiously, draped in dust sheets. The show could have used some of the visual energy of “Black Lodge.”
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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