Opera Review: A Modern German Take on Greek Myth

Henze's Phaedra Premieres in Philadelphia.

Cage match: A scene from Act Two of Phaedra. 
Photo by Katherine Elliot, © 2011 Opera Company of Philadelphia

This weekend at the Kimmel Center, the Opera Company of Philadelphia concluded its 35th season with Hans Werner Henze's 2007 opera Phaedra, a knotty work steeped in German serialism and Greek myth. The performances, conducted by Corrado Rivaris, mark the work's United States premiere.

The story is based on Euripides' treatment of the Phaedra myth. Phaedra is the wife of Theseus, the Athenian hero best known for slaying the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Knossos. The opera opens with the death of the beast. Things take a sharply personal turn as Phaedra falls in love with her step-son Hippolyte, an illicit affair that results in disaster and the latter's death.


Henze originally stopped there, but real life led to the creation of a second act. In 2005, the composer was struck with a mysterious illness and fell into a coma for two months. Upon reviving, he worked with librettist Christian Lehnert to provide a second act and create a scenario in which Hippolyte is resurrected and crowned as king of the forests by the goddess Artemis. The final result was a 75-minute opera in two acts, performed here without an intermission.

The score of Phaedra owes much to Richard Strauss' late style and the 12-tone writing of Alban Berg. Henze makes use of a powerful brass and wind sectin in his score, supporting them with an elaborate percussion section and minimal strings. Tuned keyboard instruments are featured alongside "found" sounds, including the recording of a buzz-saw and what might be the first cellular phone ever used in an opera. Unusual amplification of instruments like the harp provide dense, otherworldly textures, a fitting background to the fantastical plot.

This work proved potent in performance. Mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford (Flosshilde in the Met's new Das Rheingold) brought physical and vocal athleticism to the title role. Heroic tenor William Burden was compelling as the dead-then-resurrected Hippolyte, the object of his step-mom's obsession. The hunt goddess Artemis was subject to some gender-bending, with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo singing the part. Mr. Costanzo's performance combined impressive vocal gyrations with a fierce dramatic heart. Finally, Elizabeth Reiter was impressive in the small role of Aphrodite, singing her duet with Phaedra to Hippolyte as he was trapped in a cage.

If Phaedra sounds like heady, pretentious stuff, it is. But it also the latest in a long operatic tradition of putting fresh spins on familiar mythology, one that stretches from Monteverdi's Orfeo, through the operas of Handel, Haydn and Mozart to the late stage works of Richard Strauss (Daphne and Das Liebe der Danaë.) At this late state in his career, the octegenarian Henze makes his case as an important composer of opera, a visionary whose work can still compel and thrill the adventurous listener.

Opera Review: Three Faces of the Void

City Opera experiments with Monodramas.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Soprano Anu Komsi in La Machine d'etre.
Photo by Carol Rosegg ©2011 New York City Opera

On Friday night, the City Opera unveiled Monodramas, a triptych of modern operas, each with a single female protagonist. Though two of the works lacked anything resembling a plot, it was a fascinating evening of experimental opera--a bold gesture from a company that nearly went dark two years ago.

La Machine d'etre, ("The Machine of Existence") led off, the first opera by downtown jazz-rebel John Zorn. This was the world premiere of Mr. Zorn's piece, and served as the City Opera debut of soprano Anu Komsi. She was slowly unwrapped, appearing like a Wagner heroine to sing wordless melismas against Mr. Zorn's jagged rhythms and shifting tonal palette.

The plotless work, inspired by the drawings of Antonin Artaud, opened with a memorable image: the City Opera company concealed and rendered genderless by gray burkhas. The performance featured Mr. Artaud's illustrations, animated above the stage on two "flying" cartoon word-balloons. Beneath them, Ms. Komsi displayed an impressive vocal technique. It would be pleasing to learn how this Finnish soprano sounds when she has words to sing.

Kara Shay Thomson, lost in the woods in Erwartung.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is the only familiar opera on this program. Written in 1909, it is the story of a nameless woman (Kara Shay Thomson, in her company debut) lost in a forest at night. Veering on the edge of madness, she encounters the dead body of her lover. Schoenberg's expressionist score captures the madness and torment of the woman. Ms. Thomson's performance was that of a promising dramatic soprano, navigating her big voice through the tricky, and often exposed passages of the half-hour work.

George Manahan emphasized the rich, melodic content of Schoenberg's score, and the City Opera orchestra was in top form. As with the first work, Ms. Thomson was slowly revealed from beneath her burkha. She was surrounded by a small group of silent, female doppelgangers, all wearing identical white dresses, a memorable image. The most mind-blowing moment of Erwartung arrived in the closing bars: an imaginative, superbly executed time-reversal effect that stopped the opera in its tracks.

Cynthia Sieden (left) and the mirrored boxes of neither.
Photo by Carol Rosegg © 2011 New York City Opera

neither is an apt title for the final work on the program, a lengthy excursion into form and function by American minimalist Morton Feldman. Feldman is an expert at writing stretched-out textures on an enormous canvas. (His String Quartet No. 2 lasts six hours if you play all the repeats.) neither is a setting of a text by Samuel Beckett, and true to this composer's style, each word is stretched out to its breaking point over a series of repeated figures in the orchestra.

Cynthia Sieden did a commendable job of singing the work, a formidable task since she had to hit the same pitch again and again for the first half with absolutely no melodic or harmonic development. The words are stretched distorted to the point where not even the supertitles help with comprehension.

The stage action featured skilled physical movement, at a glacial pace that recalled the productions of Robert Wilson. The action, such as it was, took place inside an iridescent, shimmering cube, adorned with colored lights and 66 (I counted) mysterious mirrored boxes that raised and lowered slowly from the ceiling, hanging in mid-air like miniature avatars of the 2001 monolith. It looked really cool. And it was all very mysterious.

Concert Review: Urban Soundscapes with the American Composers Orchestra

The American Composers Orchestra presented its second concert of the 2010 season at Zankel Hall on Friday night under the skilled direction of George Manahan. The program: Orchestra Underground: A Time and Place offered a Charles Ives classic, aptly paired with four contemporary compositions offering very different slants on the urban experience.

The High Line Park, now with its own tone poem.

The concert opened with Ives' Central Park in the Dark. This ten-minute tone poem evokes New York a century ago, with shifting textures of strings depiciting the rustles and stillness of the park at night. Horn figures, woodwinds embody the occasional drunk passing by.

Duelling honky-tonk pianos provide repeated, almost humorous interruptions to the contemplative strings. George Manahan led a shimmering, impressionistic performance that captured the magic and mystery of New York's most famous greenspace.

Another green space motivated Ryan Francis' High Line, a ten-minute tone poem depicting the newly built park atop an abandoned industrial railroad track on the West Side of Manhattan. Mr. Francis made use of swelling, surging figures in the brass and atmospheric percussion and winds to create the sound of a sunny day atop the elevated park. It was a perfect match for the Ives piece.

Things moved onto a faster track with Black Diamond Train to Hell, a concerto for cello, samples and orchestra by Douglas J. Cuomo. Mr. Cuomo triggered the samples, taken from an old record of black Baptist preacher A.W. Dix proselytizing about the short track to sin and damnation. The work surged through a powerful first half, shot through with skilled commentary from cellist Maya Beiser. However, preacher, cellist and orchestra stalled in the slower second half. Finally, the piece rolled to a stop, deprived of its initial burst of energy.

Christopher Trapani was the featured soloist in his own work: Westering. He played an electric guitar armed with a "hexaphonic" pickup, allowing the sound of each string to be electronically separated, remixed and manipulated. The work was filtered through an array of speakers that moved the sound of soloist and orchestra around Zankel Hall. Mr. Trapani created a sweeping landscape, depicting the desire to explore the vast idea of America. Strings, wind and mandolin provided commentary on the westward journey, with the lead guitar providing atmospheric effects.

The concert concluded with The Fire at 4 a.m., a tone poem by Jerome Kizke. It veered between percussion and brass breaks. Mr. Kizke writes pentatonic passages that recalled Puccini, and a series of minor-key chord changes that evoked the romanticism of Antonín Dvořák. The piece started, stopped, and shifted, with the rhythm being tossed between three hard-working percussionists. The orchestra players  scat-sang and added vocalises even as they played. Finally, the work shifted into a long series of codas, and ultimately outstayed its welcome.