The British musical world has long been looking for a successor to their greatest modern composer, Benjamin Britten, who died in 1976. Last weekend, here at the Aspen Music Festival audiences saw the likeliest candidate–Thomas Ades who conducted his own full-length opera, “Powder Her Face,” in its American premiere at the Wheeler Opera House.
A serious modern opera that has such rhymes as, “In your clutches, Duchess,” is hard to resist, but when these words are put together with familiar and totally unexpected sonorities in a zany plot and are supported by a quirky chamber orchestra-tango-dance- band, you have an absolutely irresistible combination.
“Powder” is Opus 14 for the 26-year-old composer, and may be the work that catapults him to international acclaim. While he hasn’t yet appeared on the “Tonight Show,” USA Today did a laudatory piece on him, an almost sure sign that he is deemed to have star quality.
His opera was one of the main events in a rich weekend that drew standing room only crowds as well as national and international press to the Aspen Musical Festival and School.
Ades (pronounced ah-dess), a conductor and pianist with a brilliant career ahead in those areas, has decided to turn his talents almost entirely to composition. His commissions include one from the Royal Opera at Convent Garden He is the only contemporary composer to receive that honor.
“Powder”is two hours long with intermission and divided into two acts and eight scenes. The 15-piece orchestra is full of clarinets and saxophones but also includes an accordion and an extravagant collection of percussion instruments and effects such as a whip, a pop-gun and a lion’s roar.
The story is based on a seamy, 1950s London scandal involving Margaret, Duchess of Argyll and ending in a well-publicized 1970 divorce. Ades and his librettist Philip Hensher have given the Duchess, sung by soprano Maire O’Brien, high-style and hauteur.
Hensher’s libretto and lyrics are often wicked, full of mordant wit and fiendishly funny. Fiendish may be the operative word here for there is often a streak of malicious cruelty in skewering the certainly absurd Duchess who spends herself into oblivion, trying to maintain her role as an upper-class Brit. Even the “Monty Python” group never had an “upper-class twit of the year” as dim and clueless as the Duchess.
Ades’ music reflects this: The orchestra musically laughs during the overture and the opening scene has a maid continuing a high-pitched, infectious, almost out-of-control laugh. Ades’ music in “Powder” is always sardonic. He moves without warning from tonal to atonal and along the way gives you tea dances, popular songs and tangos. He is a clever parodist, and a post-modernist who uses his enormous talent and inventiveness to amiably send up a great deal of music that went before him.
“Powder Her Face” is a comic opera despite the tragic end of the eventualy penniless Duchess who is being ejected from her hotel and her upper-class life. Here Ades and Hensher are in the same tradition as Mozart and his librettist DaPonte who called “Don Giovanni” an opera giocoso despite the fact that the Don is transported to hell at the end. In “Powder,” after the Duchess has made her final despairing exit, her maid and an electrician strip her bed and do a lewd bedsheet-folding tango.
While there is something exciting going on virtually every hour of the eight-week Aspen Festival, now in its 49th year, the other event that brought audiences and press from all over the world was the 80th birthday celebration of legendary violin pedagogue, Dorothy DeLay. Her students have included most of the young virtuoso violinists of our era.
Many of them came to Aspen last weekend to donate their services in a benefit to honor DeLay. Assembled in Aspen’s Festival Tent were as dazzling a collection of superfiddlers as ever collected in one place.
They gave a nearly three-hour violin jam session. Were they showoffy and competitive? You bet. But when ensemble was called for, it was there. Some highlights: Nadja Salerno-Sonneberg and Robert McDuffie played a movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto; and Sarah Chang played in the Mendelssohn Octet.
Salerno-Sonneberg gave a first rate if flashy performance of Ravel’s “Tzigane.
Chang played a ferocious, steaming Zigeunerweisen by Sarasate, full of left hand pizzicatos and bouncing 16th notes. It was followed after intermission by McDuffie playing some Fritz Kreisler works– “Liebeslied” and “Schon Rosmarin”–with a transparent beauty.
“They don’t write music like that anymore” was the cry that went up, even here, which along with the Ades opera, shows Aspen can still be on the cutting edge while preserving tradition.
