Chorus Shines--as a Whole

The various Gay Men’s choruses around America offer a happy and necessary reminder of how disparate voices can become one. The singers are not typically professional, not likely to be individually distinguished. But the polished result they often produce make these musical societies one of the last important links to a once glorious amateur tradition in music, a tradition of music in service of community.

For its latest program at the Alex Theatre, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles proved, though this time inadvertently, just how remarkable that transformation of individuals into a beaming single body can be. The occasion was the local premiere of a half-hour opera for chorus, “Night Passage,” by Robert Moran.

The opera, which was written three years ago for the Seattle Gay Men’s Chorus, is based on an incident in the life of Oscar Wilde, but is not about him. On the night in 1895 when Wilde was arrested in London for sexual crimes, some 600 men immediately fled the country on the late-night ferry from Dover to Calais. Nothing is known about them, but most were presumed homosexual and fearful of similar persecution.

Both Moran and his eloquent librettist, the poet James Skofield, took great pains to point out Saturday night in a talk before the performance that “Night Passage” is meant to evoke a universal theme of exile and loss. At the time of the composition, Rwanda was in the news.

The music of “Night Passage” is rapt and luminous. Moran is one of the most distinctive, enthusiastic and radiant voices in American opera today and, shamefully, one of its best-kept secrets. He writes in a wondrously lyric style that is a kind of ecstatic cross of Handel, Richard Strauss and Philip Glass. Melodies never seem to end; the vocal writing is seductive; instrumental textures are gorgeous. But Moran may also be his own worst enemy in a work like “Night Passage,” which seems almost predestined to fail.

The opera uses nearly two dozen members of the chorus as soloists or members of various small ensembles, such as sailors or workmen. The main soloists were crudely overmiked, emphasizing vocal struggle--the raw material that conductor Jon Bailey miraculously turns into something smooth and surging in the choral passages. Without support of other singers, these individual characters sounded like lost souls in more ways than dramatically useful.

A clever set by Charles D. Tomlinson that transformed bleachers into boat and eager if fussy direction by Robert Robinson spoke more of specifics than universals and tended toward the sentimental. A small instrumental ensemble in the pit was musically buried, to the work’s detriment (and not even acknowledged in the program).

The evening’s overriding theme was Wilde. In the first half, the British actress Jane Carr engagingly narrated “The Happy Prince” with trite, narrative-halting choral episodes by Scott Henderson. Three cute, camp songs were also sung from a forgotten 1960 off-Broadway musical, “Ernest in Love.” In both instances, the chorus was much better than the music, the men in massed voice sounding secure and spirited.

But Wilde can be more deeply served than with slight entertainment. A double bill of Frederic Rzewski’s chilling “De Profundis” for speaking pianist and the Moran opera sung without staging could make for a bold and powerful evening.