‘The Comet / Poppea’ and ‘Innocence’ Reviews: Desperate Couples and Family Secrets

Yuval Sharon melds a modern work with Monteverdi in a staging at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; at the San Francisco Opera, Kaija Saariaho’s final opera is a both timely and timeless meditation on our capacity for evil.

By 

Heidi Waleson

June 18, 2024 at 5:19 pm ET

A scene from ‘Innocence’ at San Francisco Opera.

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Los Angeles

Director Yuval Sharon shakes up opera—his groundbreaking “Hopscotch” (2015) performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles was just an opening salvo. In his current project, “The Comet / Poppea,” which had its world premiere at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on Friday, “The Comet,” a new score by George Lewis, is performed simultaneously with excerpts from Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” (1643). Unlike John Cage’s “Europeras,” made up of random, superimposed operatic selections, which Mr. Sharon has staged in Los Angeles and Detroit, the result is not chaos, but rather two pieces that dovetail and at times speak to each other. The 80-minute show keeps the audience perpetually off balance, which seems to be the point.

In “Poppea,” the Roman emperor Nero and his manipulative mistress, Poppea, scheme to make her his wife and empress, destroying anyone who gets in their way. In Douglas Kearney’s libretto for “The Comet,” distilled from a 1920 story by W.E.B. Du Bois, a comet has seemingly killed everyone except Jim, a poor black man, and Julia, a rich white woman. Will they be able to overcome their racist conditioning and repopulate the world?

Each opera is performed on—but not confined to—one side of Mimi Lien’s continuously rotating set:  for “Poppea,” an all-white arrangement of steps with a cascade of sculpted flowers flowing down its back wall; for “Comet,” a fancy 1920s New York restaurant, strewn with dead diners, with “Poppea” playing on the radio. (John Torres did the lighting; Oana Botez the costumes.) Audience members seated at the east side of the long space experience the show differently from those on the west side, but even if you miss a beat of Mr. Sharon’s highly specific direction, you see its result a few seconds later when the other side of the set comes into view. As the goddesses Fortune, Virtue and Love squabble about who is the most powerful, Jim explores the restaurant; later, when Julia arrives and cries out, “What has happened? Tell me!” we see Nero glaring balefully at his wife, Ottavia, as he removes his robe and climbs into a bath with Poppea.

Mr. Lewis’s vocal settings mesh surprisingly well with the Baroque style of “Poppea.” Both are constructed to maximize the intelligibility of the words and deal in emotional extremes, albeit in different musical languages. The contrast is greater between the limpid continuo accompaniment of “Poppea” and the more strident instrumental music of “The Comet.” The show’s commentary on power speaks through the vocal timbres: In Anthony Roth Costanzo’s sinewy, ferocious countertenor, Nero (and at the end, Julia’s father) always has the upper hand, while Jim, humane and questioning in Davóne Tines’s velvety, eloquent bass-baritone, will not escape his place in the social hierarchy.

The excellent cast also included Nardus Williams (Poppea), Kiera Duffy (Julia) and James Hayden (Seneca), along with Amanda Lynn Bottoms, Joelle Lamarre and Whitney Morrison doubling roles in “Poppea.” Conductor Marc Lowenstein adeptly managed the musical shape-shifting. The noise of the rotating set interfered with the musical experience, but the motion stopped for the final scene, allowing the transcendent love duet “Pur ti miro,” sung in both operas, to work its spell and make the point that Mr. Tines and Ms. Lamarre (here as Jim’s wife, Nellie), singing it in English, deserve its beauty more than Nero and Poppea do.

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San Francisco

Kaija Saariaho’s devastating final opera, “Innocence,” stunningly performed in its U.S. premiere at the San Francisco Opera, uses all the powers of the form to examine an all-too-contemporary subject. At a wedding in Helsinki, secrets come to light: Ten years earlier, the groom’s brother shot up his school, killing 10 students and a teacher. Sofi Oksanen’s taut libretto, translated from Finnish into multiple languages by Aleksi Barrière, the composer’s son, has two sets of characters: In the present, the wedding party, served by a waitress whose daughter was killed; and, in “the realm of memory,” six students and a teacher who cannot get past that day. A murmuring, unseen chorus haunts the opera, the vocal embodiment of the toxic miasma that hangs over them all.

Miles Mykkanen and Lilian Farahani

PHOTO: SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

The gradual uncovering of the complexities beneath this lingering trauma is carried by Saariaho’s rich orchestration, its colors shifting as it flows through the intermissionless 104 minutes. Celesta and mallet instruments slide in for the memory sections; dramatic revelations are sharply etched, all skillfully handled by conductor Clément Mao-Takacs. Floating over the orchestra are the fierce confrontations among the wedding group: the groom’s parents (Rod Gilfry and Claire de Sévigné), the couple (Lilian Farahani and Miles Mykkanen), the Priest (Kristinn Sigmundsson) and the Waitress (Ruxandra Donose).

Emphasizing their otherness, most of the “memory” characters speak their lines in their own languages, including German, Czech and Greek—it was an international school—and those different rhythms and timbres enrich the aural texture. Additionally, the wild Sprechgesang of 80-year-old soprano Lucy Shelton expresses the Teacher’s loss and despair, while the high, yelping music of Vilma Jää, as the Waitress’s dead daughter, based on Finnish folk vocalises, gives her a childlike aura. It suggests her innocence, yet as we gradually discover, no one is innocent, or free from suffering.

Simon Stone’s original production, from the 2021 Aix-en-Provence Festival, was directed for San Francisco by Louise Bakker. Chloe Lamford’s remarkable rotating (and noiseless!) set reflects the inexorable unfolding of the story. A cube, it turns to reveal different rooms, such as the wedding banquet space, a classroom, a bathroom. Yet as the opera goes on, the rooms are transformed—the banquet hall becomes a cafeteria where the students taunt one another—and by the end, they are all empty, their white walls marked with smears of blood.

Mel Page’s costumes differentiate the desperate formality of the wedding and the sartorial variety of the students; James Farncombe’s lighting picks out the moments of revelation. Eight nonspeaking actors are crucial to the flashback school scenes. Operas based on current events have become almost common, yet this one seems both timely and timeless, and just one more reason that Saariaho’s death last year, at age 70, was a tragedy for music.

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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).