Sunday, November 04, 2007

Eddie Never Knew He Had a Destiny

(analog blogging circa 6 pm Sunday on a Greyhound bus, faithfully retyped with light editing some 4 1/2 hours later)

Currently I'm on the way back from DC, where I spent the weekend with Nate. Largely that was to take in William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge at the Washington National Opera. We agreed on a positive judement: musically involving & unusual, dramatically effective. Well worth seeing.

View was adapted from the Arthur Miller play and premiered at the Lyric Opera of Chicago back in '99. (Having gone to the Met in '02, the opera's on its second major revival here -- heartening, as most new operas drop out of sight permanently at about this point). Bolcom's stylistic signature involves mixing early American popular styles (ragtime, light jazz, pre-rock pop) with a muscular, dramatically potent brand of expressive modernism. In View this provides a lyrical, very approachable front. The first act tends to flit from scene to scene a bit, while the second act anchors itself with heavier and darker music. There are more than enough highlights to make this a memorable opera: a gorgeous song called "New York Lights" sung by the lead tenor; a scene soundtracked to a mocked-up early-50s instrumental rock record, with the characters singing lines that fit into its harmony; a couple of particularly ominous arias in the second act that hammer in a coldly emotional intensity.

There's one thing that doesn't quite work about this kind of opera, I think, and that's the selective push for realism that the staging aims for. Setting an opera in gritty working-class Brooklyn is a stretch; putting it on the shoulders of the male leads to take on a convincingly threatening swagger may have been too much. (The baritone, Kim Josephson, had originated the lead role of Eddie at the opera's premiere. He sang it very well, but something in his bearing didn't quite do it for me.) Almost-realism tends to pull one out of the production a bit, and it clashes with the more stylized aspects of the opera (dramatic high notes, portentious choral proclamations).

(In '02 I saw the NY City Opera do Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking -- incidentally, the success of that one has touched off some other high-profile operas based on films -- and that production included a fairly realistically staged rape scene acted out over some terribly ineffective orchestral music. The rest of the opera worked fine for me, but that one scene still sticks as downright uncomfortable -- disturbing action has really got to be matched by music that makes as powerful an impact on its own terms.)

There's a CD recording of A View from the Bridge from the premiere production. If you haven't heard any Bolcom before, the first recording to get a hold of is his massive setting of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which took him a couple of decades to gradually complete. (On CD, it makes sense to listen through this bit by bit rather than in one full swoop.) I also highly recommend CDs of Bolcom's Fourth Symphony (which has a vividly imagistic abridged setting of Theodore Roethke's poem "The Rose," sung by Bolcom's wife and frequent vocal collaborator Joan Morris), the Twelve New Etudes for piano, and his Piano Concerto (which has a final movement where Bolcom aims for a caustically ironic sendup of American patriotism, by way of a mishmash of patriotic songs and Broadway filler, but succeeds more in creating a brilliant Charles-Ives-style mayhem that lacks subtext but is a hell of a lot of fun). These don't find very many live performances, unfortunately.

The Boston Symphony has commissioned Bolcom for a choral symphony (his 8th) due to premiere in February, and I'm planning to hear this when they bring it to Carnegie Hall.

* * * * *

Other weekend goings-on were pretty low-key; I mostly had checked off the cultural highlights when I was here a month ago. Since it was, by totally natural processes, 70 degrees on Saturday, we drove out to Manassas to wander around the battlefield and try to get a sense of First Bull Run's geography without watching the introductory movie in the visitors' center. The scale of the fighting ground, as always, is surprisingly small.

Also we hung out with a few people briefly on Sunday (mutual Swat friends, a couple of Nate's local friends), and beyond that spent some time watching nerdy TV-on-DVD while drinking beer and eating junk food. Which is pretty much exactly what I was looking for in the weekend.

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