Personal power in modern opera

Andriessen: “Writing to Vermeer”

Susan Narucki and Barbara Hannigan, sopranos. Susan Bickley, mezzo-soprano. Schonberg and Asko ensembles. Reinbert de Leeuw, conductor. (Nonesuch)

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Golijov: “Ainadamar”

Dawn Upshaw, soprano. Kelly O’Connor, mezzo-soprano. Atlanta Symphony. Robert Spano, conductor.

(Deutsche Grammophon)

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TWO important recent operas have simultaneously found their way onto vital high-profile CDs, beautifully produced. They have in common beguiling sensuality and original, compelling drama that relates art to politically frightful times, distant from but not entirely unlike our own.

In “Writing to Vermeer,” the Dutch painter of luminously quiet domestic scenes is placed in the context of 1672, the Dutch Year of Disasters (flood, French invasion, terrorist murder, the collapse of the tulip market). “Ainadamar” revolves around poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s assassination in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.

The situations of these two great artists were radically different. For Vermeer, painting and home life served as an oasis from the horrors that surrounded him. In Louis Andriessen’s opera -- for which the artist, filmmaker and writer Peter Greenaway wrote the libretto -- Vermeer is doted on by his wife, mother-in-law and model, the three main characters of the opera.

Lorca, on the other hand, was killed by the Falangists for the antifascist character of his writing. But, in a sense, domesticity is also the theme of Osvaldo Golijov’s haunting opera. Lorca’s home and homeland had too strong a pull for him to abandon them.

Still, the two operas are very dissimilar, dramatically and musically.

Andriessen is Holland’s leading composer, an antiestablishment Minimalist who has become so influential that the establishment keeps attempting to lasso him in. Two years ago, New York’s Lincoln Center built a festival around his music, and it proved a highlight of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox festival in March.

On the surface, “Vermeer,” which the Netherlands Opera premiered in 1999, is one of Andriessen’s least threatening, least in-your-face scores. At its heart is a deep, deep lyricism. Echoes of early Dutch music run through it. It opens in gorgeous grace. Lush strings (instruments seldom special to Andriessen, who tends to favor harshly urban brass and winds) sing.

Greenaway’s epistolary libretto consists of fictional letters by the three women at home in Delft to Vermeer, who is off visiting The Hague. They tell him of daily life. The children squabble. A subtle, sensual eroticism runs through exquisite prose. “Such kissable lips,” Vermeer’s wife, Catherine, writes of the model, Saskia. “I could kiss her myself. And I know you have thought the same.”

Complex symmetry underlies all aspects of “Vermeer,” perhaps as a way to keep Greenaway’s fetishistic obsessions (fluids, some bodily, among them) in check as well as to maintain Andriessen’s loving male gaze on these three women in the artist’s life. In the notes to the CD, Andriessen speaks of how close he feels to a painter “who fixes on his canvas brief, ‘stolen’ moments that are eternally beautiful.” If music can reflect that glow of Vermeerian light, this is it.

And then there is the world outside. Andriessen took what struck me when the Lincoln Center Festival presented Greenaway’s production six years ago as a wrong turn by having a young Dutch composer, Michel van der Aa, add more violent electronic music interludes to represent the turmoil of the outside world.

On this recording, however, the electronic music seems a necessary frame for Andriessen’s domestic sugar and erotic spice. The violence, in the end, inflames Andriessen’s lyricism, although it cannot destroy its inner calm. The performance on the recording is stunning in every aspect.

Golijov’s stormy first opera has a much less confident structure than that of Andriessen’s serene masterpiece. After the “Ainadamar” premiere at Massachusetts’ Tanglewood Music Festival in 2003 and the subsequent Los Angeles Philharmonic performances, the opera was substantially rewritten for the Santa Fe Opera. It is that new version from last summer that was recorded by the Atlanta Symphony, which will perform “Ainadamar” in concert at the Ojai Festival next month.

The revisions came at the behest of director Peter Sellars. For his Santa Fe production, he had librettist David Henry Hwang simplify and add more historical context to an overly fussy narrative. Lorca’s death is remembered by his favored actress, Margarita Xirgu, at the moment of her own death in 1969. And so powerful a vocal and dramatic presence is Dawn Upshaw’s Xirgu that we experience Lorca’s death through her own.

Golijov, who was born in Argentina and is now a Bostonian, has become famous for his Latin charisma, which is once more splashed all over this enormously appealing and highly theatrical score. There are arias of showstopping Straussian beauty for both Lorca and Xirgu that are sure to have a life of their own. A strong Spanish flavor pervades all the music, and Golijov has some interesting electronic effects of his own, such as a machine gun fugue.

Kelly O’Connor, a dark, alluring mezzo who was plucked from the USC student vocal program to create the role of Lorca, is a find. And the conductor, Robert Spano, gets lovingly inside the music.

But this is one opera that may be best conducted from the outside. Spano’s performance lacks the more direct, more instinctive dramatic fervor that Miguel Harth Bedoya brought to both Walt Disney Concert Hall and Santa Fe. The Atlanta musicians play impressively but not with the lived-in quality that Reinbert de Leeuw’s players bring to “Vermeer.”

I’m sorry Deutsche Grammophon didn’t just film Sellars’ Santa Fe production. The results would have been worth it if only for the magnificent backdrop by the Los Angeles muralist Gronk, to say nothing of Upshaw’s remarkable stage presence.

But having these operas side by side on CD, without their visual elements as distraction, does help reveal striking similarities, despite their stylistic differences. Both composers allude widely to musical styles. Andriessen goes so far as to quote and deconstruct John Cage, Stravinsky, Webern and himself. Golijov’s music is so drenched in his far-flung influences -- from Latin America, from Eastern Europe, from American avant-garde and populist traditions -- that separating them out is as thankless and boring a task as it is in, say, Mahler.

In the end, Andriessen and Golijov make whatever moves them entirely their own. Their wide-ranging tastes give each a vast dramatic flexibility. Yet these two operas are ultimately powerful because they are completely personal.