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.

Turn of the Screw: What goes on in your dreams?

Divided loyalties: Miles, the Governess, and Peter Quint in NYCO's Turn of the Screw (Photo (c) Richard Termine)

On a cold and rainy night in New York City, an audience "subject to a common thrill," as Henry James put it, gathered at BAM for The Turn of the Screw, Britten's deliciously uncanny twist on James' tale of self-doubt, self-discovery, and the supernatural. Sam Buntrock's production is set in 1982, with the Falklands War on the BBC, and the Governess' haircut modeled after that of Princess Diana. The guardian of the children, glimpsed during the prologue, is a Gordon Gekko avant la lettre, with a sleek desk and a ruthlessly crisp manner. Among other things, this choice refocuses the opera's questioning of gender and gender roles on the artificial masculine/feminine divide. Flora is reprimanded by Mrs. Grose for bowing instead of curtsying; she's flustered; it's Miles, debonair and confident, who models the perfect curtsy for his younger sister. The Governess is sheltered, even willfully persistent in her sheltered outlook when confronted with things beyond her ken. She insists that what she sees must fit into her moral categories, with, of course, disastrous results.

If the production had had less happening, I thought, it would have been easier to focus on the essentials of what it was about. Intelligent and nuanced in detail (how does the Iron Lady on the BBC affect this anxious socialization of appropriate femininity and masculinity?) it contained some ghostly gimmicks which I found distracting. If Peter Quint represents repressed (bisexual?) desire, there's no need for his presence to make the lights flicker and the TV go dark. Aside from these tropes of supernatural haunting, there's nothing to suggest that Quint is a tortured soul; rather, he seems the most self-assured character of the piece. Though Quint himself is not troubled, the Governess is, deeply. Miss Jessel was. Miles, by contrast, though disturbed and frightened by Quint, is also his ally, also the singer of his song. This unsettled, unsettling openness contrasts with the insistence of the others that Quint's ways are other and incomprehensible. In Miss Jessel's address to Flora, in Mrs. Grose's outcry, there are repeated assertions that men and women cannot, must not, should not communicate in the same ways. And this is part of what thwarts the Governess: Miles is (almost) a man; he can often seem it in his preternatural self-possession and suave, even challenging maturity. So how must she treat him? As a child? Or as the always-already sexualized, dangerous Other, the male? Miles' hesitant attempts--sometimes fearful, sometimes precociously confident--to reconcile this perceived dichotomy end in frustration, and the tragedy of a forfeited future.