New Worlds Ripe for Exploration

After years of neglect, new operas have started making regular appearances at American opera companies, and audiences have indicated their approval. But the newness of those operas is not in their style or methods, not in their interest in doing something fresh with genre. Instead, they are typically traditional musical illustrations of popular American plays, novels and films.

In Europe, however, a new opera is more often likely to take an original approach to the genre. And if its novelty is not readily comprehensible to a general audience, that is not a worry; indeed, it is often a badge of honor.

So distinct are these opposing philosophies that Americans on the cutting edge are forced to work abroad more than at home, and American audiences have very little opportunity of seeing that work. The exception is the annual, three-week Lincoln Center Festival, which has demonstrated a strong commitment to genuinely new opera. This year the festival, which opened last Tuesday and runs through July 29, has the American premieres of two important and stunning new operas imported from Europe.

The operas--presented in five-day runs that ended Saturday--are “White Raven,” a Philip Glass/Robert Wilson collaboration, and “Luci Mie Traditrici” (“My Treacherous Eyes”) by the Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino and directed by the American choreographer Trisha Brown. Each is written in a radically different musical style.

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Glass’ repetitive orchestral music--which uses narrowly selected rhythmic, melodic and harmonic materials to achieve ecstatic climaxes, and forthright vocal setting of text--has become so well-known that most listeners find the style immediately recognizable. On the other hand, Sciarrino, a 54-year-old experimental composer from Sicily, strikes us as more mysterious. Almost exactly the opposite of Glass, he writes sumptuously for the voice, but he places the singers in an environment of scraping, blowing, tapping sounds produced by a small orchestra that seldom plays its instruments in a conventional fashion.

Also very different are the themes of these operas. “White Raven,” which was created for Expo ’98 in Lisbon to a Portuguese libretto by Luisa Costa Gomes, follows (sort of) Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and is concerned with the concept of discovery and the enlargement of our universe. It is populated with all manner of fantastical characters and creatures--Judy Garland, Miss Universe and an amazing character with the giant foot of an elephant join the historical members of Portuguese court.

Sciarrino’s opera, which had its premiere in March at the Royal Theater of the Monnaie in Brussels, is based on the incident in which the strange, melancholy madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo murdered his wife and her lover in the early 17th century. “Luci Mie Traditrici” is an interior opera, which enters three bizarre, self-contained psyches until, in its increasing claustrophobia, it implodes. Its characters all wear elegant white, and the scary minimalist stage is a rise cut through by six large circular saws.

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Yet these two operas do have something essential in common. Both re-imagine history in a striking way that can only be done with the resources of musical theater. The operas do not envy the ability of film, theater or the novel to recall history, to tell a story. Rather they are interested in how we actually experience history, in our fantasies of it, however peculiar, and how they then affect our own lives. Moreover, both operas are spectacularly produced, with every aspect of music, design, lighting and movement superbly controlled. The librettos can sound a bit pretentious, but you can’t have everything.

As the latest occasional collaboration by Glass and Wilson, “White Raven” has been greeted in New York with a certain ho-hum cynicism, given that it is now exactly 25 years since their “Einstein on the Beach” spearheaded the nonnarrative opera revolution. “I can’t believe that they are still at it,” a friend who had once worked unhappily with Wilson said at intermission. Glass’ music does chug along as it always does. And Wilson sets the stage aglow as he always does (although only a small fraction of his work gets seen in the States).

And yet “White Raven” is a model of the kind of sheer ravishment that only Glass and Wilson can produce. The universe of the opera is, of course, nothing you can quite put your finger on. Throughout the five acts, which are separated by the short scenes Wilson calls kneeplays, Vasco sails off to Africa and India a couple of times. But he doesn’t exactly sail as in history, since he might just as easily land in the present, the future or the ancient past. One scene is an exploration underwater. Another time he winds up going through a black hole, which is where he finds Miss Universe, with Dolly Parton’s hair, resting on a crescent moon.

If you don’t look at the program, however, you are not likely to know where you are, and even that doesn’t explain the wonderfully exuberant burlesque. A dance out of time, with oddball flappers seen in silhouette, this actually holds a key to why the opera works as well as it does. Glass’ music hints at an unexpected um-pa-pa, the dancers’ steps seem almost recognizable but not really. And everyone has a great time--the audience at the Saturday night performance burst into spontaneous applause. The point is, don’t try to understand and you can be open to new experiences. And that is also the larger point of revisiting, in this opera, Vasco’s exploits.

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The production is not one of Wilson’s most elaborate, although the cast is large and it seemed to tax the resources of the New York State Theater to the limits. Dennis Russell Davies did a superb job of conducting the American Composers Orchestra in the pit (and, despite some critical protests, Glass’ score does have small, interesting novelties). Among the singers who stood out were Ana Paula Russo (the Queen), Herbert Perry (Vasco), Janice Felty (Miss Universe and the Dragon) and John Duykers (the Tinman and Acephalus).

Sciarrino’s opera also benefited from an ideal presentation in the smaller LaGuardia Drama Theater, a high school venue behind Lincoln Center. It was extraordinary to look at it. The set by Roland Aeschlimann curved around the stage, was covered by scrim and was illuminated along the bottom with a strip of blue neon. The chamber orchestra, excellently conducted by Kazushi Ono, sat to one side of the stage.

Trisha Brown moved the singers in a careful, stylized way that often fell somewhere between dance and drama (just as Sciarrino’s score often fell somewhere between music and noise, and sound and silence). There was lust, seduction, violence and madness on stage, but the emotions were often all but hidden, making them even more shocking when they subtly revealed themselves.

Not all of “Luci,” though, is understatement. Sciarrino occasionally alludes to Baroque opera in his score. It comes out weirdly distorted by the orchestra, giving us a modern angle on Gesualdo, who has appealed to a number of Modernist composers (Stravinsky, especially) for his exceedingly strange and modern-sounding sense of harmony. But Gesualdo’s world comes out in the singers as sensual, intertwining vocal lines who are otherwise anonymous figures rather than historical personages. The cast was sensational, with Annette Stricker (the Duchess), Paul Armin Edelmann (the Duke), John Bowen (the Servant) and Lawrence Zazzo (the Guest).