Opera Review: A Total Eclipse of His Art

Rod Gilfry is the loser in David Lang's new opera.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Alone in the dark: Rod Gilfry in the loser.
Photo by Richard Termine for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The BAM NextWave Festival opened last week with the world premiere of David Lang's new and thoroughly unconventional opera the loser. Starring veteran baritone Rod Gilfry and pianist Conrad Tao, this probing monodrama casts a scathing narrative eye on the merits of the quest for artistic perfection and the narrow world of virtuoso pianists in waiting, preparing for a hoped-for launch into the stratosphere of the classical concert circuit. This writer saw the second performance on Thursday night.

Opera Review: The New Cruelty

Berliner Ensemble present Threepenny Opera at BAM.

Swinging London: Macheath (Stefan Kurt, center)
about to be hanged in Act III of Threepenny Opera. 
Photo by Leslie Leslie-Spinks © 2011 Brooklyn Academy of Music.

It is entirely appropriate that this year's NextWave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music chose to mount the acerbic Three- penny Opera (in a production by the Berliner Ensemble and Robert Wilson) during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Coincidence, but entirely appropriate.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's Jazz-Oper is well known in this country as the source of "Mack the Knife", a jazz standard and a pop hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. In this production, using the original German text and the bare-bones vision of director Robert Wilson, Threepenny regains its sharp teeth. Brecht's bitter commentary about man's inhumanity was especially resonant last night--the audience roared approval at that line about bankers being worse than murderers.

Mr. Wilson's staging emphasizes Brecht's "theater of alienation." His production removed most of the sets, trappings and even props from the action, forcing the listener to focus on the text. The effect: this sordid tale of London's back alleys (based on The Beggar's Opera by British composer John Gay) becomes a strange, alien ritual, conducted by just-landed extraterrestrials with the rogue Macheath as the sacrificial victim.