Opera in Boston Is Frustrating
James Levine’s BSO in Stravinsky and Bartok
By: David Bonetti - 01/07/2011
James Levine conducted concert versions of operas by Stravinsky and Bartok.
Igor Stravinsky composed the opera Oedipus Rex.
Bela Bartok composed Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.
Oedipus Rex
By Igor Stravinsky
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
By Bela Bartok
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by James Levine
January 6, 7, 8
In its presentation Thursday night of two modern operas, Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and a trio of vocal soloists produced an evening of aural pleasure with shimmering orchestral textures, almost pagan folk rhythms and gorgeous choral and solo singing that moved from static and hieratic to deeply expressive. It was a great evening in the concert hall.
It didn’t do anything, however, to solve the problem of opera in Boston. Of course, the orchestra didn’t set out to do so and it has no responsibility to end a problem that has lasted a century. The frustration is that the orchestra’s music director and conductor, James Levine, is one of the great opera conductors alive at the moment, and he conducts legendary opera performances just down the road in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera.
Lacking a proper opera house, Boston doesn’t get to hear proper opera very often. Yes, there are small companies that often heroically put on adventurous work, most either early (Monteverdi and Handel) or late (Hindemith and Shostakovich), all of it small scale. But they play in theaters without the space or resources to do the big 19th century operas by composers like Wagner and Verdi that continue to define the medium. Certainly the enormous orchestra playing the double-header this weekend at Symphony Hall couldn’t fit in the pits at either the Cutler Majestic or the Shubert, the two primary theaters used in Boston for opera today.
You could say that the curse of opera in Boston is the concert opera. Trying to make the most of a bad deal, Boston has grown dependent on presenting on the concert stage without sets or costumes works of art that require both. It makes audiences, many of them coming to the medium from years in church choirs and immersion in Handel oratorios, grow comfortable with a facsimile.
And it’s frustrating. This autumn I attended two staged operas, Opera Boston’s “Fidelio” and Boston Lyric Opera’s “Tosca,” neither of which rose above the provincial level. Ironically, the best singing I heard was at two concert presentations – Lauren Flanigan in Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” at B.U.’s Tsai Performance Center and Barbara Quintilliani singing two arias from Cherubini’s “Medea” with Boston Baroque. Excerpting arias for a concert that includes symphonic works as Boston Baroque did is legitimate and reasonable. But it was truly frustrating to hear Flanigan pouring her guts into a performance that demanded a full-scale production while standing at the foot of the stage with the rest of the cast lined up beside her. Okay, it was a college production. Excuses, excuses, excuses. In the meantime, we get concert opera after concert opera and precious few of the real thing.
I was hoping at least for semi-staged productions for Stravinsky and Bartok. Neither work is especially dramatic in terms of what actually transpires. Stravinsky even called “Oedipus Rex” an opera-oratorio and cited Handel’s oratorios as a model. One of the best semi-staged productions I ever experienced was at the BSO in the 1980s when Seiji Ozawa led a fantastic performance of “Wozzeck” with a little stage erected over the orchestra.
Levine must have decided that neither work would benefit from a halfway production, and that by foregrounding the orchestra, the chorus and the vocal soloists he would serve the music best. He was probably right. Boston Symphony Hall is not an opera house.
The two works, each about an hour long, one composed in 1911 (“Bluebeard”), the other (“Oedipus Rex”) in 1927, make a natural pair on either stage or concert hall, although it seems only recently that they have been presented together. (Maybe they’ll become a modern alternative to the ubiquitous “Cav/Pag.”) Although “Bluebeard” still carries all the signs of a weary late romanticism with echoes of Mahler and Debussy in its dense chromatic scoring, and Stravinsky was already a full-fledged modernist with little regard for overt emotionalism when he wrote “Oedipus Rex,” both composers were solid members of the forward looking branch of early 20th century music. And both rooted their music, no matter how revolutionary it might have sounded at the time it was written, in the folk songs and rhythms of their homelands, Hungary for Bartok, Russia for Stravinsky. It becomes a sort of “Where’s Waldo” game to pick out snatches of gypsy melodies or Russian peasant dance rhythms woven into the scores.
And totally coincidentally, I’m sure, both operas focus on May-December relationships. The aging Bluebeard, who fulfills the common male fantasy of trading in the wife for a younger model, seeks to make Judith his fourth wife, her three predecessors conveniently kept locked in a cupboard. (The scenario eerily prefigures Bartok’s own life. He dumped his first wife, one of his former students, for a student a generation younger.) And Jocasta, of course, not only married a man young enough to be her son – he was her son!
“Bluebeard,” based on scary old fairy tales, has been done by the BSO only a few times, but “Oedipus Rex,” based on Sophocles’ play, one of the monuments of Greek drama, has a long history here. Indeed, the American premiere of this major work was presented by the BSO under Serge Koussevitsky in 1928, just a year after its completion.
One of the most most memorable events in the BSO’s illustrious history is the time “Oedipus Rex” wasn’t done. In 1982, Ozawa commissioned wunderkind Peter Sellars to direct the work with Vanessa Redgrave as narrator. In face of local opponents of the Palestinian activist, whom Redgrave might very well have termed “Zionist hoodlums,” the phrase she had used in another context, who threatened actions because of her involvement, she was essentially fired and the performances cancelled. Redgrave filed a lawsuit for damages and after seven years was awarded only her contracted fee and the fee for a production in New York for which she had been engaged that was withdrawn because of the Boston controversy. However you see it, it was a sad day for the BSO. Maybe that’s why it fails to mention it in the copious program notes about the work’s performance history.
The performances Thursday night were with a few exceptions flawless. Levine, enthroned on his orthopedic chair, kept a firm but loose control on the assembled forces, which were formidable in the Stravinsky, with the large orchestra accompanied by the massive male chorus and five vocal soloists and a narrator. (You sense that Levine, like the leader of a jazz band, keeps a firm hand on the proceedings but allows a lot of freedom to his players – no improvisation, of course, allowed.) The brilliant burst of the chorus and the pulsing orchestra with an incessant tom-tom beat at the start was stirring enough to raise the dead. The pagan rhythms characteristic of Stravinsky seemed as appropriate here to ancient Greece as they did to pre-Christian Russia in “The Rite of Spring.”
But, although the work is generally loud, it’s not all ffff. An impressive moment comes quick upon a stentorian passage, when the chorus quiets to a whisper to utter the words, “We will listen.” The effect is to make the audience listen as well.
Stravinsky avoided overt expression of personal emotion in his work and his soloists have to sing with detachment even when one of them is discovering that he killed his father and slept with his mother. Some of the soloists coped with the challenge better than others. The one who did the best was the Oedipus, Russell Thomas, a young tenor with a rich and resonant voice that suggested deep feeling within the strictures set by the composer. His mother/wife Jocasta, the estimable mezzo-soprano Michelle De Young, expressed the proper regal authority and shock upon discovering the facts of her marriage, but seemed constrained by the restrictions placed on her natural expressiveness. Albert Dohmen, who played both Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law/uncle and the Messenger, swallowed his words, but his long black jacket was the only sign of chic on stage. The rest of the singing cast was serviceable.
The big star of the (half) evening was the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which operated like a blunt instrument when frequently required to, but was able to switch instantly to gentle, lyrical, nuanced group singing. The highlight of the performance was its brilliant dispatch of “Glory to Queen Jocasta,” her entry piece. May we all be so heralded.
Not brilliant was the narrator of the evening, Broadway star Frank Langella, who read the text as if he were seeing it for the first time. You’d think that he might have at least looked at it on the flight up from New York. A BSO engagement is not something to take casually. Maybe the BSO should have hired Redgrave to read the part, partially in order to right a great wrong, but also to get a committed performance. I doubt that’s in the books anytime soon.
If “Oedipus” was all sharp angles and jagged rhythms, “Bluebeard” was all shimmering surfaces and simmering colors. One of a handful of symbolist operas, it has been a hard sell in the opera house – a one-act opera in Hungarian is not a dream ticket for most programmers. But it is beautiful, and Levine and the orchestra played it for all its late romantic worth. If the chorus was the star of “Oedipus,” the orchestra was the star here. Gorgeous.
De Young and Dohmen returned from the first half of the program to take the roles of the two soloists, Judith, a prospective wife, and Duke Bluebeard. Both were in far more comfortable territory than they were in the Stravinsky. De Young, who made a costume change to no great effect, is known as a singer of Wagner and Mahler, and she let her full voice with its rich and varied colorations soar here. Dohmen sang well and played a strangely sympathetic Bluebeard. When he intoned “Night, night” in a near-whisper at the end as Judith leaves him, you actually felt for the man who kept a torture chamber and a closet full of ex-wives in his gloomy castle.
As in “Oedipus,” the major problem here was the hammy narrator, who fortunately only appeared in a brief prologue. Ors Kisfaludy, who has made a career as a narrator of oratorios and operas, acted as if the evening were all about him. It wasn’t.
LET HIM FALL ON HIS SWORD
It seems that I made a grievous error in my review of the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of “Tosca.” I cited a witty summary of the opera as a “shabby little thriller.” What the critic Joseph Kerman actually wrote was “shabby little shocker.” To make matters worse, I used the term thriller in the next couple of paragraphs to describe the opera. (On deep thought, I think that “trashy little thriller” is a better term overall, but I haven’t conferred with Kerman on the matter.) I owe my former colleague at the San Francisco Examiner, Allan Ulrich, for the correction. There’s a reason we called him “the professor.”