Music Reviews : UCLA Forces Present ‘Four Saints’ Opera

February being American Music Month, and last Friday the 115th birthday of Gertrude Stein, what more appropriate celebration than the first Southland presentation in several years of the initial Stein/Virgil Thomson operatic collaboration, “Four Saints in Three Acts,” now 55 years old?

Combined forces of the UCLA department of music--which gave a memorable mounting of the other Stein/Thomson opera, “The Mother of Us All,” in 1965--have prepared this new production. It will open the 10-day UCLA Festival of American Music, Friday, and close Saturday.

Samuel Krachmalnick’s solid, textually pointed and tightly paced conducting, combined with John Hall’s deft, witty but never overstated stage direction, prove the irresistible elements of this reconstruction, seen at the first performance, Friday night.

The friendly collaboration of the university’s Opera Workshop, Music Theatre Workshop, Chamber Singers and Contemporary Music Ensemble seemed well-rehearsed on at the opening, in Schoenberg Hall Auditorium on the Westwood campus.

Not all of Stein’s wacky words--how contemporary her nonlinear verse seems, 60 and more years after they were written!--crossed the proscenium intelligibly. It is no accident, of course, that the masterful Thomson (and Stein too) counted on the fact that judicious repetition would solve that built-in problem. Here, it did. And imbalances of stage-pit sound never seemed to arise; besides the writers, credit conductor and performers for that.

In a plotless operatic entertainment, lighting, stage groupings and visual accents keep the listeners within the authors’ grasp. Hall and Krachmalnick have accomplished such a hold on their audience with strong help from lighting designer Ralph Pyle and set designer Robert Demann.

Also illuminating is the eclectic, attractive and 1970s-style costuming--in solid, bold and unsubtle colors--the handiwork of Hall and Demann. Large, unmistakably symbolic props--a huge and mobile elephant sculpture, giant sea horses in soft lavender, an oversize jukebox, among others--also proclaim the optimistic character of the piece.

The cast, remarkably smooth and stylish in movement, makes up in vocal aggression what it may lack in dramatic finesse.

Among the more prominent singers on Friday were Heidi Herzog (Commere), Malcolm McKenzie (Compere), Aimee Willis (St. Teresa 1), Brian Asawa (a male alto as St. Teresa 2) and John Gillott (St. Ignatius), though all the name-part soloists seemed to be giving their all. The two choruses and instrumental ensemble, indefatigable and energetic, did the same.