SAN FRANCISCO — John Adams’ operas were anything but ordinary.
His first two works, “Nixon in China” and “Death of Klinghoffer,” set the ground by treating recent historical events with enigmatic new poetry. His next three decades of stage work included reflections on the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, adaptations of Indian folktales, and since 2000 a patchwork of works drawn from a wide range of ancient and contemporary sources. contains four of his works, including the libretto of , poetic and prose.
Adams imbued these texts with eclecticism, and sometimes anti-dramatic artificiality, with music of rapidly shifting colors and energies, tenderness and unexpected, haunting effects. Even if the impact of his work was different, it was like no other composer.
but, “Antony and Cleopatra” The 75-year-old Adams, which premiered Saturday at the start of the San Francisco Opera’s centenary season, has finally become a household name.
He did what many composers before him did for his first opera, created without the cooperation of director and writer Peter Sellers. Adams simply took a great, very solid play from the past (in this case, Shakespeare’s Love and the Tragedy of War), trimmed it down to a manageable size, and scattered interpolations from other sources. .
The result is the most lucid, theatrically straightforward, and the most boring opera of his career. ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ is the least idiosyncratic and least inspired of his nine stage productions to date.
Almost 3 hours of music and a soothing finish. It can be explained by a passage from the play cut for the opera.
That feeling of not fully breathing the play through the music starts from the beginning. As the two lovers and her attendants rush into Cleopatra’s bedroom, we are casually thrust into a frenzy of activity both on stage and in the orchestra. ”
But with a breathtaking pace right from the opening bar, the focus seems to be on getting as much text out of the singer’s mouth as possible, so you really get to sit down with the two main characters and learn about their bond. I can’t feel the depth.
Despite the weathered authority of baritone Gerald Finley and the concentration of soprano Amina Edris, if the strength of their relationship has not been convincingly portrayed, the rapid ups and downs of that relationship have led to their (Edris deserves special credit for stepping in when Julia Bullock, for whom the role of Cleopatra was written, declined due to her pregnancy.)
It largely eschews arias, duets, and other ensembles, and its source is plays that are noticeably less soul-baring monologues. Thoughts and feelings that are the glory of Adams’ best work.
So we never really feel ourselves know We see a lot of these characters, but despite the condensed form, this is a sprawling plot. Caesar, his young partner who governs a It was to be a combination of two ironic people who are unstable and have seen everything.
It’s a tricky piece to tangle with in musical form. Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966. An extravagant Franco rendition of his Zeffirelli weighed in, and it was a notorious fiasco, but was revised— Recordedwhen performed infrequently—revealed a richly fragrant, doable dramatic score.
In its revised form, Barber’s “Antony” is nearly an hour shorter than Adams. Perhaps the main problem with this new opera is the amount of text still left. A virtuoso almost indecipherable when sung, especially given the inherent problems in setting Shakespeare’s verse. Catching it in the super title, lines like ‘Calm Octavia, let your best love draw to the one who does its best to keep it’ are hard to understand at first sight.
Adams has long been considered an interesting master of orchestration, but his work here is surprisingly bland. The timbalom twig is a small but silky-sounding hammered dulcimer that would have been more intriguing if the instrument hadn’t become something reminiscent of the ancient Mediterranean. It is also a central feature of the passionate oratorio “The Gospel”. Another Maria” (2012) and Violin Concerto “Scheherazade.2” (2015). Interludes bridge many of the scene changes, but even though these are generally lively, they tend to feel strangely uncharacteristic and vamping.
There are some effective touches, especially in the more brooding passages that conductor Eun Sun Kim enjoys keeping his heart beating. Octavia, Caesar’s sister, who married Antony at the last minute to cool the hostilities, followed her wedding with Antony in a vocal line surrounded by a halo of mystical and enchanting floating prayer instruments. Reply to The opening of act two aptly depicts the stunned aftermath of Antony’s military disaster, and the mellow music for Cleopatra’s entrance suggests a dreamy, distant foxtrot.
But tenor Paul Appleby’s bright stamina was spared from disturbing his big speech at the end of the job — an empire-building monologue that quoted text from John Dryden’s translation of “Aeneid.” And while Alfred Walker and Hadley Adams are both firmly established as the Roman ruler’s entourage, bass-baritone Philip Skinner as Lepidus is the only one of the cast to be rich and complete. have the ability to sing in both easy-to-understand language.
A non-aggressive rendition by Elkanah Pulitzer (who consulted Adams on the libretto with Lucia Schechner) sets the opera in the 1930s or so rather than in antiquity, winking with Art Deco elements and sexy gowns (by Constance Hoffmann) is doing. A charming Hollywood adaptation of the story of Cleopatra.
Mimi Liang’s preliminary set, brightly lit by David Finn, opens and closes like an opening to reveal and hide the play space, with several large structures reminiscent of pyramids looming behind. Bill Morrison contributed to the lyrically grainy black-and-white cinematic projection of scenes involving sailing ships on the Nile and crowds prepared to go wild by the dictator.
This loose relationship between Caesar and later authoritarian leaders is almost opera’s only contemporary resonance. Sometimes, however, Adams seems content to make an opera that is not “about” other than its plot.
The results of that experiment are thin. But hopefully, this is a transitional task for Adams, moving away from those patchwork pieces with Sellers and toward other styles of librettos that are more compelling than this, adapted or original.
“At my age, you can’t compare yourself to other composers,” he said in a recent interview. “You are being compared to previous works.”
Unfortunately, compared to these earlier works, the true glories of operatic history, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ is a dismal disappointment.
Anthony and Cleopatra
Until October 5th at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. sfopera.com.