LOS ANGELES - During the opening bars of "Ainadamar," you catch your
breath and, seemingly, hold it for 70 minutes.  The audience tonight in
Disney Hall, at the West Coast premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's opera, did
even better, sitting silently after the music ended, before exploding
in a 10-minute ovation, both scaring and delighting the shy young composer.

Ainadamar is the Moorish "fountain of youth" near Granada where Federico
Garcia Lorca and others were executed in 1936, at the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War.  Unlike another recent work about the poet, Nilo
Cruz's complex, lengthy "Lorca in a Green Dress," the opera doesn't deal
with his psychological/political history, but presents characters and
relationships and, above all, feelings.  The music has many sources -
from flamenco to early lush Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss at maximum
intensity - but "Ainadamar" is all of one piece and it's all Golijov's.

The 2003 work, first performed at Tanglewood, is a glorious contribution
to the genre of musical theater.  Its simple melodrama, gripping
story-telling, powerful sense of sorrow, deeply-felt tragic conclusion,
leading to rare, true catharsis put it in the same class with Sondheim's
"Passion." (That opera is called a musical, while "Ainadamar" is presented
as an opera, although it's clearly a zarzuela.  Categories don't matter,
whatever makes you hold your breath does.)

One can only hope that Peter Sellars, who attended the performance,
has no designs on it.  Text (by David Henry Hwang) and music fuse so
perfectly, with such impact, that "a big production," a la Sellars, could
only damage it, even if it had such a stellar cast as tonight's, even
if conducted with such fervor and excellence as Miguel Harth-Bedoya led
the Los Angeles Philharmonic on this occasion.

Dawn Upshaw, in one of her most striking vocal/dramatic performances,
sang the role of the actress Margarita Xirgu, about to go on stage, but
feels lost in her memories of Lorca, whose "Mariana Pineda" became her
most famous role, whose death haunted her through her life.

Lorca himself appears in Xirgu's fantasy, sung by Kelley O'Connor, a
very young contralto with an astonishing voice.  Think of a male alto
and tweak the sound to make it a female bass-baritone...  with some great
high notes.  And yet, neither the strangeness of O'Connor's voice nor
the trouser role representing Lorca's sexual ambiguity matters.  She
*is* Lorca, and it will be next to impossible to find someone else sing
the role.

The brilliant coloratura of Amanda Forsythe, as the young Margarita,
completes the trio of leading singers - and it is a trio they sing near
the end of the work, bringing the "Rosenkavalier" finale to mind, albeit
placed firmly in the Spanish idiom.

There are numerous small roles and a sextet of young women participating
in and commenting on the action.  Staged on a platform above the orchestra,
the production - while made effective through the power of the work and
of the performances - pointed at a weakness of the otherwise near-perfect
Disney Hall.

With the orchestra front-and-center, and the singers behind the musicians
(and the soundtrack that's used from time to time), it's a "reversed
Bayreuth" sound, inevitably masking the voices.  Future concert performances
- and there are sure to be many - will have to deal with the problem of
placement.  Or, "Ainadamar" will be presented in an opera theater,
possibly as part of a double- or even triple-bill...  perhaps with works
by Granados and Piazzolla, for a great Hispanic musical orgy.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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