http://www.sfcv.org/ A Night at the Opera, Starring Death! By George Thomson A bombed-out, apocalyptic cityscape. Abundant and graphic violence. Sadomasochism. Dark yet "relevant" political humor. A woman wielding a spit. A man wearing false breasts. Humping of impressive geometrical variety. Just another night at the opera these days, you might think. Except that it's not Abduction from the Seraglio, or Un ballo in maschera, or a bold new take on Iolanthe. No sir: last Friday night at the San Francisco Opera, traditionalists could not cavil; all these things were supposed to be there, in the long-awaited American premiere of Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre. With a performance of the revised 1996 version (imported from the Royal Danish Opera Production of 2001) the San Francisco forces served up an evening that was musically vital, though its longueurs managed to prove that Regieoper can screw up even works that are nearly brand-new. But of course, in this case, not many would be the wiser. Ligeti's opera, based on a 1934 play by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode and sung here in the tangy English version of Geoffrey Skelton, is set in a mythical "Breughelland" peopled by the craven, the debauched, and the hopeless. The two main characters are the unlikely duo of Nekrotzar, grim avatar of death and destruction who takes his work seriously, and Piet the Pot, the local wine-taster who from all appearances takes his work rather too seriously. These two wend their way through a series of tableaux: a pair of enraptured lovers searching for a secluded place; the jaded love 'n' torture relationship of an astronomer and his dominatrix-housekeeper; a petulant prince and a Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee pair of politicians; an apocalypse that . . . no wait, is it really?; and a finale complete with live-and-love moral. The lovers return at the end, unaffected in their bliss by the intervening cataclysm. It's light on plot, for sure. To keep the audience interested, it relies as much on the sheer audacity of its black humor and bizarre slapstick as it does on the music. Ligeti, whose vocabulary probably doesn't even include the word "whatever," keeps these elements under characteristically tight control. For every passage in the score that delineates a separate but almost identical line for each single player (resulting in some unbelievably small print) there is a correspondingly precise prose instruction concerning gesture, staging, action, timing, or character. They are of a piece: the admonition to the third harmonica player "When breathing in the player must concentrate on the lower note E-flat, often hard to produce" and that to the singers seeking "A grotesque and charged contradiction between the animated action and the music which seems to come from behind double-glazing." Or perhaps they are not. The first admonition is musical and thus is to be followed. The second species of instruction sounds like . . . well, direction, as in Director; it is thus, apparently, taken to be totally optional - depending on the Director's concept - and can be followed or ignored as desired. In this production a lot of these were ignored, mostly because Director Kaspar Bech Holten had a big idea: Apocalyptic horror? Comedy? Art Spiegelman! Comic Strip! It's a fetching concept, one played out with glorious visual appeal in the set design of Stefan Aarfing and the lighting of Jesper Kongshaug. The sets included ingenious trompe-l'oeil skyscrapers and the inside of an observatory, manipulating geometry to create illusions of depth, with a bit of a nod to Roy Lichtenstein in one scene. Trouble is, people don't move a whole lot in comic strips. What we got was a lot of very listless motion, negating many of Ligeti's earnest exhortations to violent, exaggerated gestures. Consequently, some of the slapstick came off as agonizingly dull, and the sexual violence downright desultory, even prudish (last season's Alcina was so much hotter, for gosh sakes). No naked Venus here (Ligeti did provide for the option of having a striptease artist mime the part; surely they could find someone in San Francisco . . .); we got a nearly fully clothed Venus, though with some uncovered breastage so that the line about her being "topless" would still make vague sense. Another comic-strip conceit was the annoying use of frames, thought-bubbles and captions. As Piet the Pot sings, cackles and spits out an utterly preposterous cadenza, a thought bubble lowers to Nekrotzar's head saying: "Is he nuts?" Lame! Most egregiously, a chorus at one point was enclosed in a big white frame on the stage with the caption "Meanwhile, outside . . ." This was the chorus that Ligeti asks to have sung from the house (preferably scattered throughout and dressed like the audience); their pleas to be spared from the coming apocalypse thus lost the powerful audience identification that Ligeti intended. Shrinking from the concept, though not from the music This was but one lost opportunity of many. Over and over the singers were made to play for titters rather than the nervous laughter engendered by utterly over-the-top violence (have these guys never seen Itchy and Scratchy?). Dialogue was "updated" and topicalized; thus we got the "Patriot Act," "girly-man" and the "war on terror," raising these banalities to the level of the surrounding allegory, where they sat uncomfortably. It would be easy, watching it all for the first time, just to blame the lame gags on Ligeti's European sensibility, or quixotic sense of humor; but he had a lot of help, for which I wonder if he is grateful. At least he could be grateful for the care and attention lavished on his music by conductor Michael Boder, the Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and a phenomenal cast. From the opening prelude - a toccata for sixteen car horns - to the tightly wound canon and passacaglia with which the work concludes, Boder and the orchestra gave a performance of passionate commitment, embracing every gnarly twist and turn with gusto. The one extended orchestral interlude, after the putative apocalypse, was a masterpiece of murmuring, shimmering texture, especially coming after a blistering display of sextuple-forte power from the entire pit. A cast of characters Willard White, in neon mohawk and looking like an overstuffed Dennis Rodman, played the eventually ineffectual destroyer Nekrotzar with an appropriately bizarre sort of sepulchral allure. His antagonist Piet was sung, screamed and acted with boozy fervor by Graham Clark; his exultant cry of "bulls--t!" was one of the evening's most refreshing moments, as it turned out. The almost otherworldly lovers Amando and Amanda, whose blissful and lyrical music is sometimes so exquisitely jarring, were sung by sopranos Sara Fulgoni and Anne-Sophie Duprels. The S-and-M couple of the second scene, Mescalina and Astradamors, were sung in broad style by Susanne Resmark and Clive Bayley. The apparition of Venus in that scene, Caroline Stein, reappeared in the third scene as the secret police chief Gepopo, giving the star performance of the evening. Not just the Queen of the Night on acid, this was Zerbinetta on PCP, utterly fearless, completely improbable, bizarrely, heroically compelling. Countertenor Gerald Thompson sang the role of her boss, the spoiled-boy Prince Go-Go, with appealing petulance, though his maturity level seemed to veer a bit carelessly from infantile to adult. His minions the unctuous White and Black Politicians (the White Politician in whiteface, but the Black Politician in . . . whiteface? Another punch pulled?) were sung with glee by veteran John Duykers and a terrific newcomer, Adler Fellow Joshua Bloom. The Opera Chorus, disposed throughout the stage and behind (but not in the House, unfortunately) sang expertly, and performed the requisite carousing and humping with, alas, practiced charm. Violinist Laura Albers was the only member of Nekrotzar's onstage infernal musical retinue in the third scene (Ligeti asks for four instruments, including a piccolo, a clarinet and a bassoon; ah well . . .); she played the strolling fiddler from Hell with aplomb. As I was leaving I heard a costumed reveller - they were in the audience in suspicious profusion - telling her acquaintance, "he really loved it . . . now we'll have to take him to a real opera." Real or no, it is not all that it might be, but it is nonetheless a triumph for the company and still a great evening's fun. Le Grand Macabre continues at the Opera House on November 5, 9, and 13 at 8 P.M.; on November 18 at 7:30 P.M., and on November 21 at 2 P.M. (George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Virtuoso Program, San Domenico School, living in Novato. His website is at georgethomson.com) (c)2004 George Thomson, all rights reserved Janos Gereben www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask]