‘The Silver River’ Flows With Exquisite Lyrical Beauty

Chamber opera, once such an important part of American musical life, is dying, the latest issue of Opera News warns us. It’s a worry. But maybe not so much here in the American West as on the operatically stodgier East Coast.

The Long Beach Opera last month gave the premiere of an important chamber opera, Stewart Wallace’s “Hopper’s Wife.” And here in Santa Fe, opera--grand and chamber-sized alike--seems to blossom as vibrantly in the desert climate as wildflowers.

On the same weekend that Santa Fe Opera presented the premiere of Peter Lieberson’s beautiful “Ashoka’s Dream” and the Center for Contemporary Arts offered Morton Subotnick’s futuristic “Intimate Intensity,” the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival got into the act as well. In celebration of its 25th anniversary, the festival commissioned a music theater piece from this year’s composer in residence, Bright Sheng.

“The Silver River,” which had its premiere Sunday evening at the St. Francis Auditorium in the Fine Arts Museum, is just the kind of shot in the arm chamber opera needs, and it is not a bad inoculation even for the healthier genre of chamber music. Happily, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County is a co-commissioner.

Collaborating with popular playwright David Henry Hwang, Sheng has devised an irresistible hour’s entertainment, for a cast of four and an instrumental ensemble of five. Based on a Chinese legend beloved throughout Asia, it is a lovely tale set, in the words of Sheng and Hwang, “long ago, when heaven and earth were not quite so old and jaded.”

Sheng is a Chinese-born composer who teaches at the University of Michigan and has made a reputation with brilliant instrumental music and an affecting earlier chamber opera, “The Song of Majnun” (now out on a Delos CD). He has lately been returning to his ethnic roots, combining not just Western and Chinese instruments but also musical approaches. And he has done so in his most extreme and fascinating fashion yet in “The Silver River.”

Each of the opera’s four characters is intended to be a radically different kind of performer. The Golden Buffalo, which is sent on a mission from heaven to earth, is a traditional Western actor (played by Arye Gross of television, movies and theater). The poor Cowherd, whose beauteous flute playing so entrances the Buffalo, is sung by a Western opera singer (with utter clarity by baritone Michael Chioldi).

The other two roles are for Chinese performers. The Jade Emperor (Jamie Guan), the fearsome imperial ruler of heaven, requires the dramatic style of Peking Opera. The Goddess Weaver, who falls in love with the Cowherd, was created for a specific musician, the virtuoso of the pipa, a Chinese string instrument, Wu Man, and hers is a nonspeaking role.

This aggressive multiculturalism becomes an occasion for Sheng and Hwang, through both music and theater, to examine some prickly racial issues. The Goddess and the Cowherd find that the flute of the West and pipa of the East are not easily compatible; it’s a difficult and frustrating marriage.

Only when separated by the Jade Emperor do the forlorn lovers find a unified style, and theirs is a music so mournful that all heaven cries and floods earth. The solution is to allow the couple one day a year together; on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, the Silver River, the Milky Way, joins them, as the stars Vega and Altair.

That it all works so seamlessly is, I think, primarily the music’s responsibility. Sheng moves with ease between scene setting, dramatic music and his glory, music of great lyrical beauty. The gestures seem always so right that the differences between East and West are beside the point, more color than character.

The opera is handsomely mounted by Lisa Peterson and played before simple but effective scrims cut and decorated like Chinese scrolls by Rachel Hauck, which made a nice little set, too, for the concert opener, Schubert’s magnificent String Quintet in C. This is one of the greatest pieces of all chamber music, and a near impossible act to follow. But that was not the case Sunday. Indeed, Schubert was just another character, however welcome and inspired, in a vaster vision.