MUSIC REVIEW : Bach Survives Sellars at Brooklyn Academy

Peter Sellars brought his odd juxtaposition of Kurt Weill and J. S. Bach to New York Thursday night, not to Manhattan, of course, which has yet to see a Sellars staging of anything, but to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s pretentiously seedy Majestic Theater.

Calling his evening “Mahagonny Songspiel (Das Kleine Mahagonny) and Conversations With Fear and Hope After Death,” the enfant terrible of operatic stage directors has combined the original “Mahagonny” song cycle, composed in 1927 to the text of Bertolt Brecht, with excerpts from seven Bach cantatas, the “Christmas” Oratorio and the “Orgelbuchlein.”

One can tell an evening is supposed to be chic when the audience is made up of yuppie Manhattanites, one or two Che Guevara look-alikes, student types and Jerome Robbins.

Lots of discussions of the Meaning of It All could be heard at intermission, along with frequent checks of watches during the performance. One of the biggest debates was whether the rain leaking through the roof had been planned or not.

Sellars plays the Weill work relatively straight, using a raft-like pad on rollers containing a kitchen table and several chairs pushed to and fro over a blacktop Road of Life complete with a double yellow line. Six singers in evening dress perform the bitter, cynical work, all about lust and greed in America.

The purity of Bach and the belief in Protestant redemption is seen as an antidote to the despair of Weill, but here Sellars becomes gimmicky, if not mocking. His singers are now barefoot, the men without ties. Using the Weill band, we get saxophone and vibraphone instead of Bach’s strings and continuo.

The director is at a decided disadvantage with Bach, since the experience is an aural one, not lending itself to any narrative approach. Sellars apparently does not trust the utter simplicity of the music, nor does he seem to believe in the text. He contradicts both with Lumpenproletariat action that verges on the offensive (e.g. dropping dollar bills on a corpse covered with newspapers).

Still, the composer survives. Even a crooning saxophone could not obliterate the heart-wrenching beauties of such an aria as “The Spirit Rests in Jesus’ Hands” (both works were sung in English), in Cantata 127. Here the excellent soprano, Lorraine Hunt, made one forget the physical absurdities being witnessed.

She was joined by Mary Westbrook-Geha, Frank Kelley, James Maddalena, Sanford Sylvan and John Osborn, other soloists who gave Sellars everything he asked. His longtime musical collaborator, Craig Smith, conducted and was responsible for the orchestrations of the Bach pieces.

A recent uncut performance of “Die Walkure” seemed short by comparison to this hour plus of music. By the time the evening ended with the Chorale “It Is Enough,” from Cantata 60, few could disagree with the sentiment.