Whither new American opera? The question was in the minds of many recently in this city as its leading opera companies, the Florentine Opera and Skylight Opera Theatre, presented premieres of works by two rising young American composer-librettists, Lowell Liebermann and Richard Wargo.
The fact that Milwaukee, with a fraction of the resources that much bigger cultural centers such as Chicago possess, was able to mount the North American premiere of Liebermann’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” and world premiere of Wargo’s “Ballymore” more or less simultaneously says how seriously the musical community to our north regards contemporary opera. By shameful comparison, Chicago Opera Theater, which has been in business since 1974, has yet to produce a single premiere; nor has the company ever commissioned a new stage work.
In a model display of cooperation, the Florentine and Skylight surrounded the “Dorian Gray” and “Ballymore” premieres with ancillary events. Liebermann and Wargo took part in a symposium on new operas and American composers. The Milwaukee Art Museum hosted a panel discussion/preview of Liebermann’s opera and displayed Ivan Albright’s painting used in the 1945 MGM film of the Oscar Wilde novel. And Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, gave a talk.
Marc Scorca, executive director of Opera America and moderator of the new-opera symposium, voiced much of the wisdom U.S. opera producers should have taken to heart many years ago. Opera companies, he said, have been far less adventurous than symphony orchestras when it comes to taking a chance on new works by living composers. The operatic repertoire must expand if it is to attract a younger, committed public and retain the interest of an older audience that is tired of the same recycled diet of “Bohemes” and “Traviatas.” Gifted American composers who have a flair for writing operas are out there, if only the theaters are willing to get behind them and nurture their efforts.
Skylight demonstrated just that kind of willingness in 1997 when it joined with the Opera Company of Philadelphia to have Wargo develop “Ballymore.” Less than 10 years earlier he was a struggling composer. But word of his musical gifts reached Joan Lounsbery and Richard L. Carsey, Skylight’s managing and artistic directors; they had a success with his earlier opera, “A Chekhov Trilogy,” and soon after extended him the first commission in the company’s 40-year history.
Their championing of the 41-year-old Pennsylvania native has paid off. “Ballymore” still has a few rough edges, but the opera already stands as a highly accomplished piece of work, both funny and poignant, blessed with a quirky charm. And the Skylight production gave it the kind of tender loving sendoff composers dream about but seldom receive.
“Ballymore” is based on “Lovers,” a pair of one-act plays by Irish playwright Brian Friel. Ballymore is the fictional town in Northern Ireland that serves as the 1960s setting for each one-act opera. The first, “Winners,” is about two teenagers, Mag and Joe, engaged to get married but fated to drown in a boating accident. The second, “Losers,” concerns the middle-aged couple Hanna and Andy, whose attempts to build a nest are constantly thwarted by the demands of her religious mother.
Friel’s use of language is as rich as a pint of good Irish ale, but in sticking close to the original texts Wargo has given himself a tough musical challenge. He has met it shrewdly, translating the excited prattling of Mag (Lyric Opera Center alumna Alicia Berneche) and Joe (Jeffrey Picon) into an effective, if perhaps overly wordy, parlando style. Picon’s doomed schoolboy, along with Neil Michaels and Hillary Nicholson as the ballad singers, are capable performers, but it is Berneche’s affecting Mag who drives the simple but touching story.
“Losers” is the stronger of the two halves, an inspired cross between knockabout farce and biting religious satire. Wargo orchestrates the piece masterfully, propelling the action along with an eclectic score that mixes popular and classical elements (the act opens with a rhumba and ends with a “Vatican fugue”). A superb ensemble of singing actors headed by the wonderful Leslie Fitzwater, Marni Nixon (yes, Hollywood’s veteran off-screen singing voice), David Barron, Jennifer Clark and Berneche makes this an evening of sublime delights.
Wargo has been named resident composer for an indefinite term and has been given the means to create his next opera, a much larger-scaled piece, “Sive,” based on a play by John B. Keane. Wargo is actively shopping around for a big opera company willing to take over the project. Lyric Opera, are you listening?
If “Ballymore” seeks answers to the whither-American-opera question in the Sondheim wing of the American musical theater, Liebermann’s “Dorian Gray” rummages for clues in the dusty attic of the operatic tradition.
The central problem with Liebermann’s work, however, lies not with the music but in his adaptation of Wilde’s text. The author’s faded, fin-de-siecle parable of youth, beauty and overripe decadence plays better on the page than it does on the operatic stage, where its melodrama feels creaky and contrived.
Liebermann has pared the novel down to a two-act opera of 12 tautly constructed scenes, each based on a successive note of the 12-tone row that functions as the work’s unifying device. Paradoxically, he may have pared away too much: The narrative seems schematic, the characters two-dimensional. Wilde gives us irony and subtext; Liebermann gives us neither.
This is unfortunate, because the 37-year-old New Yorker clearly is a talented composer with good dramatic instincts. His through-composed score radiates a lush, old-fashioned appeal that plunders unashamedly from the great tonal tradition that has sustained opera from Monteverdi to Richard Strauss.
Florentine Opera mounted an honorable production, enlisting the conductor (Steuart Bedford), set and costume designers (Stephen Brimson Lewis and Jon Morrell) and one of the original singers (John Hancock as Lord Henry Wotton) from the 1996 Monte Carlo Opera premiere.
The part of Dorian, containing juicy stretches of vocal display studded with high notes, well suited the blond good looks and firm, healthy tenor of Mark Thomsen. But this was a one-note portrayal: Thomsen’s Dorian was your basic tenoral cad, hardly the monster of elegant depravity Wilde (and presumably Liebermann) had in mind.
Florentine Opera brought in two experienced sopranos, Erie Mills as Sibyl Vane and Nancy Shade in the bit part of Dorian’s favorite prostitute. As the actress Dorian seduces and abandons, Mills often sounded fluttery and edgy in a sketchy role. Shade delivered a lusty Cockney cameo. Hancock, sporting a Wildean Buster-Brown hairdo and withering sneer, sang strongly as Dorian’s evil genius.
And so new American opera continues its march, sometimes stumbling, but moving ever onward toward the millennium. Liebermann is far from the first promising operatic composer to come a cropper his first time out. Give his “Dorian Gray” an E for honest effort. But if you want to sample the young American composer’s art at its most inventive and beguiling, listen to James Galway’s recent BMG/RCA Victor disc of Liebermann concertos for flute, piccolo, and flute with harp, or a Hyperion CD of his two piano concertos, dashingly played by Stephen Hough.
