‘The Hunt’ and ‘Sin-Eater’ Reviews: New Songs of Old Worlds

Kate Soper’s opera, which had its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre last week, adapts a medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns; David T. Little’s work, performed by Philadelphia’s The Crossing, stems from the bygone practice of paying social outcasts to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 17, 2023 at 5:31 pm ET

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Brett Umlauf, Christiana Cole, Hirona Amamiya

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York and Philadelphia

Kate Soper’s specialty is turning old stories on their heads, and with “The Hunt,” a sort-of chamber opera that had its world premiere at Miller Theatre on Thursday, she investigates the medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns. Ms. Soper wrote her own text and adapted lyrics from sources as disparate as Hildegard of Bingen and the poet H.D. Spoken sections are modern girl talk; the poetic songs have harmonies that start out sounding medieval and then stray into dissonant and alluring realms. “The Hunt” is tighter and more focused than Ms. Soper’s sprawling “Romance of the Rose,” a medieval allegory about love done at Long Beach Opera in February; it is closer in spirit to her feisty “Here Be Sirens” (2014), about another mythical trio awaiting their prey.

The three virgins—Fleur (Brett Umlauf), Briar (Christiana Cole) and Rue (Hirona Amamiya)—are sopranos; the first two double on ukulele, and Ms. Amamiya plays the violin. They have been hired as bait to enable the King to capture a unicorn. The 90-minute show is a series of similarly constructed scenes: a perky livestream update (“Day 43!”), lunch, a bawdy riddle, a sung trio, a possible sighting of the unicorn, and a solo aria. There’s a lot of material, and it takes a bit too long for the virgins to get to the show’s turning point, the realization that capturing the unicorn means killing it for the greater glory of the patriarchy. Their response: “We are not going to deliver that creature into the hands of a bunch of blood-thirsty, sword-wielding thugs just so they can mutilate it in the name of a depraved power grab that they got out of a f—ing fairy tale.” They decide instead to “spoil the bait.” 

The comic byplay is mildly amusing, but the show is about the songs. Ms. Soper has a wonderful feel for layering women’s voices, and the trios, with their arresting harmonies, are never the same, whether the selection is a dark folk song or the culminating erotic set piece. In one delicious moment, the three, having ingested a drug meant for the unicorn, create an entire edifice out of vocal noises and lip trills. The voices shine individually in solos—Ms. Umlauf’s coloratura; Mx. Cole’s darker, more vibrato-tinged sound; Ms. Amamiya’s sensual line—and the other two sometimes back up the soloist with a wordless bass line. The instrumental accompaniment provides delicate support and counterpoint: the ukulele line is rudimentary, the violin playing more virtuosic. Supertitles would have been helpful; the poetry texts were often incomprehensible. 

Ms. Amamiya and Ian Edlund

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

“The Hunt” was efficiently and elegantly produced. The set conflated modern and medieval: Scenic designer Aoshuang Zhang’s flat rear wall seemed prison-like until its revolving panels offered glimpses of a world beyond; Camilla Tassi’s projections included both snippets of the Cluny Museum’s “Unicorn” tapestries (the inspiration for the piece) and the virgins’ livestream. The lunches, in plastic deli clamshells, arrived through a small hatch in the wall; silent men occasionally came through with brooms to sweep the trash to one side of the stage. Terese Wadden’s clever body-concealing white gowns—a parody of virginity, as seen from a male point of view—were gradually shed, along with one virgin’s wig, to reveal more modern attire and tattoos. Aided by Masha Tsimring’s dramatic lighting, stage director Ashley Tata and music director Mila Henry deftly paced the action from blind acceptance to revolt.

***

David T. Little’s “Sin-Eater,” which had its world premiere at the Annenberg Center on Saturday, also stems from an old practice—this one real: In Wales, through the mid-19th century, poor social outcasts were paid to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead by literally eating bread and beer that had been placed on the bodies. Mr. Little’s “ritual grotesquerie,” commissioned by The Crossing, Philadelphia’s renowned new-music choir, and Penn Live Arts, considers that practice in contemporary terms, through those who absorb the worst horrors of the modern world so others don’t have to. 

“Sin-Eater” was supposed to be fully staged by the Dutch director Jorinde Keesmaat and have additional performances in Amsterdam, but funding shortfalls curtailed those plans. In the more minimalist production conceived by Donald Nally, The Crossing’s artistic director and conductor, the 24 singers were arrayed at two banquet tables, their places set with bread and wine, with a string quartet (the Bergamot) positioned in front. White catering aprons were donned and doffed, napkins waved in the air, knives pounded on the table for percussive effect. The singers sometimes ventured out of their places into the foreground and lighting designer Eric Southern supplied some dramatic color changes. Yet the theatricality of Mr. Little’s music, coupled with his original and adapted text, is so intense that it hardly needed the visual cues to have a shattering impact. 

The four-part, 70-minute work grows progressively darker. Part I, “Tell Me What You Eat,” a quote from the culinary pundit Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, which concludes, “and I’ll tell you what you are,” seems almost merry at first, with the women’s voices tripping fast and light over a bouncy bass-drum riff. The menu of a 17th-century French royal feast is comical until we get to “a tiny guillotine” and the vocal lines start to fragment. A description of “humane” butchery, including a seductive line from the women, segues into a solo tenor singing Jonathan Swift’s satirical treatise on cannibalism, “A Modest Proposal.” The chilling relationship between eating and power is clear.

Part II, “The Grotesque Body,” takes the metaphor to even grimmer places: there’s a death march to a Wilfred Owen war poem; in a meditation on horror movies and the disfiguring of women’s bodies, each of the 12 women has her own vocal line, with the highest soprano finally exploding into a shriek. In Part III, “Dirty Work,” the stories become personal and harrowing: a wrenching chorale about working in a slaughterhouse; a description of being part of a firing squad, with single words spit out on top of each other like bullets; a poignant, folky account of a pandemic worker communing with the dead in a refrigerated truck; a slashing, mechanical sequence about social-media content moderators watching torture and beheadings that turns into cacophonous vocal noise. A tiny snippet of the chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is quickly buried in the din. 

One might expect Part IV, “Eucharist,” to offer consolation. It doesn’t. Nominally liturgical and evoking the Christian ritual of transubstantiation, the music grows steadily weightier as the singers take on the burdens of others, but the flowing, ominous conclusion is a text from Stephen Crane: “You say that you are holy / But there are those who see you sin.” “Tell me what you eat . . . ” returns as memory. There is no escape. 

Led by Mr. Nally, The Crossing’s uncanny ability to articulate text and weave innumerable lines into tapestries of intricate clarity, as well as throw itself into pure noise, brought the dizzying variety of Mr. Little’s settings to vibrant life. The string quartet, along with percussion played by choir members and occasional synthesizer lines, added some rhythm and color, but the voices of The Crossing built a universe all by themselves. 

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).