Music Reviews : World Premiere for Still’s 1952 ‘Costaso’

The late William Grant Still’s three-act opera “Costaso” received its world premiere Saturday night, 40 years after it was written. The production at Rufus Mead Auditorium in Pasadena was mostly amateur but the work is not.

In both plot and musical language, “Costaso” strongly resembles Puccini’s “Tosca.” Set in the American Southwest during Spanish rule, it tells of Lt. Ramon Costaso, his faithful soprano wife and the jealousy of an evil baritone Commandant.

There are challenging arias for all the leading characters, a show-stopper of a duet concluding Act II for tenor Costaso and his baritone friend Manuel (melodically anticipating “Maria” from “West Side Story”), exhilarating choruses in the outer acts and a dramatic suicide at the end.

There are also juicy secondary roles for an Iago-like bass, a murderous tenor, Manuel’s mezzo wife, and a deus ex machina governor’s representative from Mexico City.

According to Still’s daughter Judith Anne, who was selling books and tapes in the lobby, the setting was suggested by the composer’s friend Miriam Matthews and reflected the assertion that 60% of the Spanish population in early California were of African heritage.

This charged the naive English libretto by Still’s wife, Verna Arvey, with disturbing intensity and, after the recent riots, a disheartening sense of prophecy. The governor’s representative, for example, tells an anxious crowd: “Your governor is concerned about your well-being . . . you may expect help in the form of building materials and other benefits.”

Even the Commandant’s corrupt motives are ambivalent. “Our fathers taught us to be pure in heart,” he sings, but “they were wrong, for they dealt with men who were honest, while we deal with men selfish and bold. Simple people, our fathers!”

Unfortunately, the performance organized by the William Grant Still Performing Arts Society did not match the work’s power and vision. Only the expert chorus and Michael Paul Smith’s forcefully sung Commandant were convincingly professional.

On the podium, conductor-director Paul Smith worked hard, but the orchestra could not play enough right notes to convey the imagination and turbulence of Still’s vivid scoring.

Last year, Los Angeles’ professional musicians examined music condemned by the Nazis as if the political implications were equal in importance to the musical discoveries. The Pasadena performance of “Costaso” shows that a like investment of money on the operas of William Grant Still might be similarly justified.