Euro-Trash, in a good way, perhaps…well, o.k., it worked

Ok. This is Europe. Got to remember that. Opera goers (many of whom look so conservative!) like their opera edgy. And so we had a quite edgy outing of two works that are way out on the fringes of the repertory: Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il Prigionero and Manuel De Falla’s La Vida Breve. On the whole, I was pleased I went and while neither opera totally wowed me, the committed performances and stagings made for an engrossing evening.

First the stagings. Christopher Alden did both. The stage therefore was drenched with bright light often and we saw his trademark clock on the wall in Prig (and it was keeping perfect time). In Prig, we were in a sterile white room that opened with the eponymous prisoner hooded a la Abu Graib. The white walls working with the blue and red mop buckets drove the point home. This piece about a prisoner who thinks he is to be freed but in fact is to be tortured further is timely and the references could hardly be forced when they would be occurring to many members of the audience already. Turning the supposed grant of freedom into a delusion that the prisoner has, Alden took some liberties with the plot. But such liberties were not damaging to the bummer impression this opera means to make.

In Vida, the staging was limited to the workshop in which the Salud works (see plot summary in a post from a couple of days ago). Cleverly, Carmela and her wedding to Paco sort of magically appear as they are needed according to the plot and it works if you are ready to surrender to the unreality and go with it (I was ready to do so). He solved the problem of Salud keeling over dead by having her cut herself up and show up to the wedding bleeding. That was disturbing. But, you know, Paco pumps and dumps her and she is unbalanced anyway. That is disturbing too. Alden is right to go for the disturbing in the plot and to make us uncomfortable. I think what he came up with works. He also integrated the two singers into the plot, as a transvestite garment seamstress and lounge-lizard wedding singer respectively. That was smart. Carmela was one cool cookie of rich spoiled girl and contrasted so tellingly with the insecure and manic Salud. Not knowing the opera well, I was briefly afraid that the transvestite seamstress was Salud and that Alden had done something really EDGY [Salud does not sing that much at the beginning]. While it would have been an interesting approach to the opera, I am glad he did not do this.

The operas themselves are both interesting. Prig is 12-tone but it is lyrical at times. But, still, there are a lot of angular lines in the singing and a lot of shrieking so it will never be a fav. But I must admit that the orchestration was always interesting and I bet I would enjoy his purely orchestral music. Vida had some very fine Spanish music (as was to be expected) and it included one of the best dances you will ever hear in any opera, period: the jota from act 2 (which Alden refused to allow any choreography for--- a decision I can respect in the context of the rest of his staging of this opera). It also has a really nice love duet in act 1.

William Lacey’s conducting was superb. The singing was nothing to write home about. It was all adequate and fine. The lead in Prig at the end of the opera took off all his clothes and we got to see his backside. That woke some people up. He was kind of hunky. I needed no awakening but I did sit up straighter.