La Reina: old-fashioned melodrama meets modern grit at InsightALT

The InsightALT festival of masterclasses, symposiums, and opera performances concluded on Monday with La Reina, a dark, sensual opera for which I'm tempted to coin the term neo-verismo. Composed by Jorge Sosa with a libretto by Laura Sosa Pedroza, the opera was heard in a "first draft" version scored for piano and electronics; the eventual scoring is planned for chamber orchestra and electronics. Mila Henry was the able and energetic pianist; Andrew Bisantz conducted, holding all the elements together, and impressively realizing (I thought) dramatic tension and musical nuance. Sosa named his greatest influences as Saariaho and Messiaen, but I couldn't help hearing this lush, varied score and shamelessly melodramatic plot as reminiscent of Puccini. The opera's topical relevance was singled out twice for praise in the talk-back session (and by opera-goers decades older than I.) I was glad to have this evidence--as well as that of the enthusiastic, even rowdy audience applause--of excitement for a new opera that creatively engages and comments on a complex social problem. The score is rich, allusive, and even playful; the use of musical motifs helps clarify the multilayered relationships among the often dissembling characters. The electronics, here cued by the composer, were used to create a variety of textures, sometimes providing echoes of motifs or phrases, sometimes gunshots and sirens, sometimes a deliberate, deliberately overwhelming cacophony. Sosa Pedroza's bilingual libretto, meanwhile, is vivid: poetic and gritty by turns, shifting from the clichéd language of the newsroom or the clipped exchanges of drug bosses to lyrical sweetness for a love duet, and quasi-mystical imagery for the dialogues between Regina Malverde (the "queen" of the title) and La Santa Muerte, an ominous and otherworldly tutelary spirit.

Something rich and strange: Adès' Tempest at the Met

Opening of the Tempest  Photo (c) Met Opera/Ken Howard

In the mythical, mystical world of Thomas Adès' Tempest, there are rich aural experiences associated with the island and its denizens: wild storms and eerie calm; smooth, politic betrayal and innocence so profound as to be unwittingly cruel. Allusive orchestrations are given unexpected twists. In the overture--a tempest that drew on the storms of operatic history while possessing a distinctive texture--there were echoes of late romanticism in the brass, and perhaps inevitable reminiscences of the sea interludes from Peter Grimes. The orchestra is also used creatively to evoke different characters and their emotional states (sometimes in ways that seem at odds with the doggerel libretto.) Caliban, on the rare occasions when he isn't in coercive situations, has some of the most beautiful music in the opera. Ariel gets unearthly winds, Ferdinand and Miranda gracefully intertwining lines, the courtiers of Milan and Naples more formal exchanges structured around declamation. These rich dynamics (which cannot be easy to create with both precision and impulsive energy) were richly realized by the Met orchestra under the baton of the composer. Despite all this excitement, the dramatic pacing of the opera seemed uneven to me. After the stormy beginnings, the action seemed somewhat becalmed until the second act. My perception of this, however, may have been adversely affected by the production, which had Miranda and Prospero sitting alone on a slightly raked stage for most of Act I, where others came to join them. The prompter's box, of course, belongs to Prospero.

Robert Lepage's production (located often inside a model of La Scala as it was in the eighteenth century) was not infrequently thoughtful, but it was not coherently so. Many of its most interesting ideas appeared in the final tableau, where I saw for the first time serious engagement with the reasons for presenting the drama inside an opera house. The chorus exults in their pardon: do we go to the opera to get our sins forgiven? Do we need to go through the harrowing of hell to receive this absolution? Ferdinand and Miranda are radiant and radiantly illuminated on the stage. Is this what we want to be promised--the future of the young lovers--at any cost, and no matter how artificially engineered? Here (at last) it became fully apparent that Prospero's theater is a trap to him as well as to those he manipulates with and in it. For the most part, however, I couldn't see that Lepage was doing much beyond spatially confusing the narrative. If layering of narratives was going on, I couldn't make it out: however artificial the tableaux he stages, Prospero's dilemma, and his corrosive anger, are stunningly real. Some of the incoherencies must be attributed to the plot as well as the production. Why is the full court of Naples (and Milan) under sail? And why does Prospero drown them only to resuscitate them? The further question raised by Lepage's production--what does this say about the reanimation of the dead by theatrical art--was left hanging. Caliban also fared badly; the production clad and choreographed him as a simian savage, and the rest of the island inhabitants fared not much better. (I literally cringed during some of the dance sequences; postcolonialism takes harder work than casual appropriation of stereotypes.) The libretto, too, though significantly altered from the Shakespearean plot  (and replacing his verse with halting rhymes) has Caliban as lustful, treacherous, gullible, and prey to base desires. Those who denigrate him can of course be viewed as unreliable and manipulative narrators, but this doesn't fully solve the problem. The sea-change the drama undergoes at the hands of Adès and librettist Meredith Oakes creates scenarios rich and strange indeed.