Music Reviews : Paul Dresher’s Revised ‘Slow Fire’ in Local Premiere

Paul Dresher may be the Gian Carlo Menotti of the electronic generation. That’s not exactly a compliment.

Dresher’s so-called opera, “Slow Fire”--presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts in the local premiere of its revised form, Saturday at the Wadsworth Theater--revealed a melodramatist with meager lyrical gifts addicted to push button emotionalism.

Unlike Menotti, however, Dresher was not his own librettist. The librettist was tenor Rinde Eckert, who was also the protagonist in this non-linear monodrama.

The sometimes coherent and witty narrative revolved around the character Bob and his vaguely Freudian/social/political conflicts with his father. Eckert agilely played both parts, singing, speaking, yelling, cavorting and changing costume as required in Richard E. T. White’s busy staging.

Apart from embodying all that Eckert deems politically detestable in American society, Bob’s father’s most heinous crime may be that he killed himself. It wasn’t clear.

That incident takes place in the second act, which is new, though it recycles major images and themes from the first act. When the work was presented locally in 1985, it was a one-act work-in-progress.

At any rate, Bob apparently can not escape his father’s ideals even though he ridicules them. We see him last as a gun-toting soldier of fortune, his mission unclear.

Moments of stagecraft, admittedly, were inventive and striking such as the use of the large folding screen as a huge photograph album or the Japanese-style sliding screens at the back. Larry Neff contributed the dramatic lighting.

Musically, except for sappy tunes reminiscent of Menotti--or maybe the Bernstein of “Mass”--Dresher’s virtually incessant, overamplified rock/minimalist score, played on stage by the composer and percussionist Gene Reffkin, bludgeoned the senses.

The chief beneficiary of all that power consumption, however, was probably Southern California Edison.