Visions of Silence

Carnegie Hall

A woman’s broken relationship with her Pentecostal snake-handling father; revisiting family letters from a victim of the Holocaust.

The cast of ‘Taking Up Serpents’ Photo: Scott Suchman 0 Comments By Heidi Waleson Jan. 15, 2019 12:41 p.m. ET

Washington

Washington National Opera has taken a practical approach to the creation of new work with its American Opera Initiative, now in its seventh season. Every year, WNO commissions four chamber-scaled operas—one hourlong work and three 20-minute ones—workshops them, and gives them world premieres in modest productions in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, using the talents of the singers from its young artists program. Recent projects have traveled successfully: Just last year, Missy Mazzoli’s “Proving Up” went to Opera Omaha and Miller Theater in New York, and a new, expanded version of Huang Ruo’s “An American Soldier” (2014) was presented at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

This year’s hourlong opera, Kamala Sankaram’s intriguing “Taking Up Serpents,” which opened on Friday, also merits a wider audience. Like the composer’s “Thumbprint” (2014), it deals with a woman’s escape from a patriarchal background, this time, a Pentecostal snake-handling church in the American South. Jerre Dye’s compact libretto neatly telescopes the story and explores the primal association between snakes and fear while leaving space for us to get to know the principal characters through Ms. Sankaram’s skillful, passionate vocal writing. There is Kayla, who has left home but can’t rid herself of the toxic remnants of her once-worshipful relationship with her snake-handler preacher father, and Nelda, her mother, whose faith is tried in a different way. How do modern women survive being told that they are weak, cursed and “made for sin”?

That question becomes central when the father, known only as Daddy, is dying after being bitten by one of his snakes. Nelda, against his wishes, has hospitalized him and summoned Kayla home. Ms. Sankaram’s music deftly limns Kayla’s limbo state (she works in a mini-mart and is full of longing) as well as her growing anger; for example, the flute that flutters tentatively around her vocal line at the beginning becomes an insistent presence as she finds her courage. It also ingeniously depicts her environment with choral writing inspired by the raw contours of shape-note singing, deployed both in the church and on a midnight bus ride full of lost people.

Alexandria Shiner was an affecting Kayla, her powerful soprano gaining strength and security along with her character. Mezzo Eliza Bonet brought a fierce energy to the conflicted Nelda, and bass Timothy J. Bruno was persuasive as Daddy, whose overbearing sense of entitlement suffused the two dramatic flashback scenes. Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya ably shaped the score: Its spare orchestration is built on string drones and slithering glissandos and colored with punchy special effects, such as the whirly tubes that make a soft, creepy hooting sound, associated with Kayla’s memories, and the glockenspiel that plays as her father brands her as a sinful daughter of Eve and that later accompanies her triumphant assertion, “I am the light.” Director Alison Moritz focused the action and made the most of the simple set—stacks of plastic crates, a hospital bed, a lighted cross. It would be interesting to see this piece in a fuller production.

***

Jessica Tyler Wright and Brian James Myer in ‘Dear Erich’ Photo: Sarah Shatz

New York

A Holocaust-themed jazz opera seems like an unlikely combination, and so it proved with Ted Rosenthal’s “Dear Erich,” given its world premiere by the New York City Opera in collaboration with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage last week. Mr. Rosenthal is a jazz pianist and composer; this opera, his first, was sparked by the discovery of 200 letters written between 1938 and 1941 by his grandmother, Herta, to his father, Erich, who left Germany to study at the University of Chicago. That’s powerful raw material, but neither the cliché-ridden libretto (by the composer and Lesley Rosenthal, his wife) nor the bland soft-jazz score evokes much emotional resonance.

The story is anchored in the present, with Old Erich’s adult son, Freddy, learning about the family history that his father never talked about and whose absence has left a gulf between them. There are flashbacks to Germany and Young Erich’s new life and love in Chicago, along with the letters that connect those two worlds. The opera’s best scene depicts the desperate, separate, efforts of Young Erich and Herta to get Herta a visa to come to America; with its background drumbeat and quick alternations of narrative, it captures the urgency of the situation. That is the real core of the story: Herta never gets a visa, the letters stop, and her son knows nothing of her fate. It is Freddy (in the present) who finds out that she died in the Sobibór extermination camp.

The opera could have used more of that urgency. Instead, there are lengthy, repetitive arias crammed with pointless rhymes (“So many flames, so many pyres, so many blazing heavenly choirs”) and trite lines (“The darkness comes before the morning”). The tunes, written to be pretty, are interchangeable, though Old Erich’s nurse, Carmelita, gets a Latin rhythm for her number, a heavy-handed signifier of her ethnicity. (The aria, about why immigrant parents don’t tell their children the truth about the past, is more of a device than an organic development, as is the scene in which present-day German thugs menace a Muslim woman.) The music never explores the pain of Old Erich’s survivor guilt, and the tidy conclusion, with the present-day family reconciled and a final, full-cast chorus opining about the importance of remembering, feels entirely predictable.

The no-frills production (a couple of fabric panels with facsimiles of the letters on them, a few chairs and table, off-the-rack costumes, and no lighting to speak of), minimally directed by Mikhaela Mahony, didn’t help. The cast was adequate: Notable were baritone Brian James Myer, who brought some vocal depth to Young Erich, and the rich mezzo sound of Sishel Claverie as Carmelita. Adam Glaser led the 11-member orchestra; the jazz trio at its center got its chance to swing in the extended instrumental sections.

—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).

at the Met.

Dutch Masters at the Met

The review in this morning’s paper by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim reminds me of story told to me by one of my early mentors, Dick Kapuscinski, Oberlin cello professor and principal cello at the Boston Symphony for decades. Dick related that at a BSO rehearsal with conductor Fritz Reiner, the players were frustrated by his economic but nearly invisible beat. At one point one of the players whispers to himself “Maestro, maestro, the beat!” and Reiner ignored him and continued the rehearsal. A second time and in a conversational tone, the player says, “Maestro, maestro the beat!” and again Reiner ignored him. A third time, the player stands up and screams “Maestro, the beat; it’s too damn small.” Reiner puts, down his baton, stops the rehearsal and smiles slyly, “Small but good,” he replies.

The opera-theater festival’s two big shows, ‘prism’ and ‘4.48 Psychosis,’ portray varieties of mental chaos.

A scene from Ellen Reid’s ‘prism’ at the Prototype Festival Photo: Maria Baranova 0 Comments By Heidi Waleson Jan. 9, 2019 4:50 p.m. ET

New York

The opera-theater pieces of the Prototype Festival tackle unconventional subjects, often in uncomfortable ways, and two big shows of its seventh season are no exception. At La MaMa, Ellen Reid’s gripping “prism” (it had its world premiere in November at the LA Opera) starts out mysteriously. Who are these two women, Bibi (Anna Schubert) and Lumee (Rebecca Jo Loeb), snuggled in bed together in a cozy white room whose door has multiple locks? Bibi can barely stand. Lumee tries to get her to take medicine; she spits it out. They recite a sequence of nonsense words and enact rituals. There’s talk of memory and forgetting; that yellow is safe, but blue, which is outside the door, is not; that Bibi is getting worse, and her bones will soon turn to dust. Is Lumee Bibi’s protector, or something more sinister?

The strangeness of Roxie Perkins’s libretto turns out to be deliberate. This is an internal struggle, a depiction of PTSD following a sexual assault, and the things ricocheting around inside the sufferer’s head probably don’t make sense to anyone else. However, Ms. Reid’s urgent, kaleidoscopic music clearly supplies the turbulent emotional soundtrack of Bibi’s world: the sweet, Copland-like melodies with strings, harp and flute that evoke the safety of forgetting; the horn and percussion that accompany her will to remember and heal; the alluring offstage chorus that tempts her to stand up and open the door. The music gets wilder, with infusions of rock and electronics, in the flashback Act II, which depicts the precipitating event—a sexual assault in a club. Act III is a swifter, grittier replay of Act I, ending with Bibi’s escape.

Ms. Schubert’s pure, naked soprano gave a piercing intensity to Bibi’s pain, and her acting of physical impairment was persuasive; Ms. Loeb’s mezzo, alternately soothing and threatening, made her an intriguing foil. (It’s not clear if Lumee is really Bibi’s mother, who left her child alone to be assaulted and is now overcompensating, or simply a voice in Bibi’s head, but the ambiguity is interesting.) The Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the instrumental ensemble Novus NY, conducted by Julian Wachner, were splendid.

James Darrah’s elaborate production provided this mental world with a vivid, concrete shape. Designer Adam Rigg’s creepy all-white room gave way to 24 hanging disco balls to represent the club, and then to the messy squat of Act III; Pablo Santiago drenched the sets with colored light; Molly Irelan did the costumes, which included a childish baby-doll nightgown for Bibi in Act II. Four dancers, in writhing choreography by assistant director Chris Emile, represented the danger and excitement of the world outside the room of forgetting.

A scene from Philip Venables’s ‘4.48 Psychosis’ Photo: Paula Court

As an experience of psychological disturbance, Philip Venables’s “4.48 Psychosis,” at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, makes “prism” look like a walk in the park. Based on the final play of Sarah Kane, who suffered from mental illness and killed herself at age 28 in 1999, “4.48 Psychosis” is 90 relentless minutes of raw pain and mental chaos.

Six women, headed by soprano Gweneth-Ann Rand, speak and sing as the voices of the protagonist; they are often drowned out by the heavily amplified 14-member orchestra (Contemporaneous, conducted by William Cole), which includes saxophones and an accordion. Mr. Venables varies his techniques, but even the musically calmer moments are full of agony. A Baroque-like lament is overwhelmed by strings that wail like sirens; texts of conversations between the patient and her doctor, projected on the wall of the set, are violently pounded out by two percussionists (at one point, the doctor is represented by a snare drum, at another, a saw). A long list of drugs, with their terrible side effects and ultimate failure to make any difference, becomes a litany, accompanied by a rollicking orchestra, that is almost comic in its grotesqueness. A blast from an organ ushers in a moment of religious contemplation and clarity, soon exploded into a vocal and instrument cacophony so extreme that the only recourse is electroshock therapy. Yet through the noise you hear the patient’s longing, however hopeless, for some connection that will allow her to stay alive.

This Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production, originally staged at the Lyric, Hammersmith in London in 2016, was directed by Ted Huffman.Hannah Clark’s simple set is a shallow white box with three doors, a few chairs and a table (the orchestra is positioned above); D.M. Wood’s stark lighting alternately floods and shadows this bleak world. The six women, all in the same gray sweater, jeans and sneakers, convincingly portray the protagonist’s fragmented mind, whether they are challenging and throttling each other or singing in ensemble. It’s a place where no one could want to live. If 90 minutes is too long, it’s excruciating to imagine what it would be like for years.

—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).