UCLA fails to do justice to Spain’s poet Lorca

For composers, the lure of Federico Garcia Lorca can be overpowering. Many have set the lines of Spain’s most famous 20th century poet to music, have turned his plays into operas. Lorca was spellbound by the moon, by death, by fate, and those spells helped make George Crumb’s surreal music so haunting in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Assassinated by fascists in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, Lorca is now a subject for opera as well. Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar,” performed last year by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and currently being rewritten for Santa Fe this summer, is a nuanced, multifaceted look at the poet’s ambivalent sexuality and his seeming rush to death.

Thursday night at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, another bio-opera premiered. The three-hour “Lorca, Child of the Moon” was composed by Ian Krouse, chair of the UCLA department of music. Margarita Galban, artistic director of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts in Los Angeles, wrote the libretto and directed the student production.

Krouse -- whose fascination with Lorca goes back to his writing incidental music for Lorca’s plays in the ‘80s, and who began the opera 20 years ago -- approaches the life through three of the plays. The poet introduces and interacts with his characters in vignettes from “The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife,” “Yerma” and “Blood Wedding.” Death and the Moon dance. Fate sings.

Each act is devoted to a play, and each has a musical style fashionable in Lorca’s day. The first is neoclassical, in the manner of Manuel de Falla; the second turns to Richard Strauss; for “Blood Wedding,” Krouse offers an unabashedly melodramatic gloss on Puccini. The ever-derivative score is also drenched in the inflections of Spanish folk music. When it sounds like Puccini, it sounds like Spanish Puccini.

Such wrenching the clock back is bucking trends and the times. At an institution that presents some of the most advanced theater in America, boasts a cutting-edge art department and made Peter Sellars a professor, Galban’s clumsy, amateurish production is a curious advertisement for operatic aspirations.

UCLA Opera does have promising singers to show off. Amplification was used (despite the small, live space), but Kyung Chy’s high notes in the “Yerma” excerpts were the real, sparkling thing. “Blood Wedding” featured veteran soprano Juliana Gondek, who heads the school’s voice department and made a powerful presence as the Mother. Evan Hughes, who seemed more a sullen Kafka then a lurid Lorca, handled difficult music easily. Many able singers might also have been capable of theatrical stretching had they been asked.

There was less promise in the banal dances by Mari Sandoval, who also appeared as Death. And the orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, was not yet ready Thursday.

One theme of “Lorca, Child of the Moon,” the composer writes in his program notes, is the conflict of women “with the rigidity and repressiveness of Spanish society.” Might not that be a battle cry for the cast? I doubt that these students would put up with a hairstylist who made them look bad. They certainly shouldn’t accept an academic department that does.

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‘Lorca, Child of the Moon’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Westwood

When: 7:30 tonight and 3 p.m. Sunday

Price: $20

Contact: (310) 825-2101