Opera Parallèle & Cal Performances: La Belle et la Bête

Several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, Opera Parallèle presented Philip Glass's operatic take on Cocteau's magical fairy-tale film from 1946, La Belle et la Bête; I missed that production but fortunately a revised version was given a two-day run in Zellerbach Hall (I saw it last night) under the auspices of Cal Performances. Opera Parallèle has now performed all three of Glass's Cocteau operas (the other two are Orphée & Les Enfants Terribles); La Belle et la Bête is a bit different from the other two in that rather than a stand-alone stage recreation of the film, it is meant to run alongside the original as an alternative soundtrack (& in fact it is available as such on the Criterion blu-ray release of the film).

The Zellerbach stage was set with six different screens, three on top & three below. Their sizes & the line-up were balanced but not symmetrical; the middle screen on the top, the largest of the six, showed Cocteau's film. The smaller screen below usually showed the film as re-shot with OP's personnel (chiefly baritone Hadleigh Adams as the Beast/Prince & Avenant & soprano Chea Kang as Belle). The two screens flanking the top screen showed fragments & close-ups of the Cocteau film & the two flanking screens on the bottom showed other OP performers (chiefly mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis as the stepsisters & baritone Aurelien Mangwa as Belle's father, her brother Ludovic, & the moneylender) or appropriate scenes related to the mood or setting of the scene (such as re-creations of the stone faces with blinking eyes from Beast's castle). The screens each had an ornate frame, as if around an artwork, while the top center screen, the movie screen, had none, making it look like a regular movie screen, while the others with their fancy frames reminded us of the artistic eye & placement guiding everything we were seeing, a note of the artificial & aesthetic which reinforced Cocteau's plea, at the beginning of his film, that we have the conscious sophistication to watch it with the unsophisticated but therefore farther-seeing eyes of a child open to magic.

In addition to the action being shown on the screens, the performers also enacted some of the scenes on stage, often alongside their filmed selves or Cocteau's originals. One of the beauties of the staging was how it reflected the film's intentions; in the scene in which Belle first enters the Beast's castle, in which she floats weightlessly down dim & eerie halls, Kang somehow managed to recreate the effect without camera tricks, moving with incredible dancer-like lightness down the stage along with Josette Day's original on the screen above. The interplay between the original film, the OP re-creations, & the physical performers was so seamlessly done that it seemed inevitable; it's only later, when the inevitable noise & distractions of the after-theater world start to rub away at the enchantment, that you realize how incredibly difficult it must have been to pull all of this off, how much work & organization it takes to get so many different components both mechanical & human (the different sets of films, the lighting, the singers, the orchestra) to click into place with dream-like inevitability.

It has been years since I last heard a recording of this opera or last saw the movie (that happens when you're overloaded with movies & music). I had forgotten how marvelous the score is. As is well known by both those who love & those who dislike this composer (I'm in the former camp, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to this performance, particularly with its ridiculous 8:00 PM start time), his music has a very distinctive & even unmistakable sound; but though the whole opera "sounds like" Philip Glass, each scene reflects an appropriate, often strikingly distinct, mood: uncanny, yearning, threatening, frightening, touching, elevating. The segments of the score move along with cinematic speed, like camera cuts. Certain melodies that are on the border of big Romantic tunes regularly appear & float off before they develop too far, reminding me of the unresolved musical longing in Tristan without ever echoing or parodying that distinctive score. (One of these tunes in particular, one that lent a touch of the "exotic" to the score, reminded me of one of the Borodin tunes used in the musical Kismet). Glass has written a number of fairy-tale chamber operas (The Juniper Tree, The Fall of the House of Usher – the latter is of course based on Poe's "horror" story, but is a sibling of the fairy-tale world) & he is adept at creating memorably unworldly worlds. There is a wide range of moods produced from a relatively small orchestra, one that is mostly keyboards, percussion, & wind instruments (no strings! as a friend in the mezzanine reported to those of us below). The final moments, with the transformation of Beast into Prince, are accompanied by what sounded to me like an organ, offering that instrument's sacred & otherworldly aura for his apotheosis with Belle.

As usual with Opera Parallèle, Nicole Paiement conducted, & as usual, she led a clear & beautifully judged rendition; Brian Staufenbiel was, again as usual for OP, the director & the guiding hand behind the production concept, &, again as usual, thought & care had gone into a visually arresting & creative presentation (aided by the production design & film work by David Murakami). Delphis & Mangwa brought distinctive edge & depth to each of their characters. Kang & Adams were both superb. Her clear & lovely voice echoed & reinforced the distinctively innocent & loving Belle. Adams was a virile & anguished Beast, his voice skillfully softening as Beast is tamed by love or raging up as he is threatened. You realize how insightful & controlled his performance is at the end, when he resumes human form as the Prince, & though the handsome Adams looks appropriately princely there is a very slight, very subtly & astutely judged, sense of self-pleased placidity, a touch of royal entitlement, that reminded me of the story that when Garbo first saw Cocteau's film, she is said to have slumped down in her chair & murmured, "Give me back my Beast."

I also have to note the astonishing work by Sharon Peng & Natalie Barshow in recreating respectively Beast's make-up & his & Belle's sumptuous costumes for the stage & OP film scenes.

The audience . . . they were generally attentive, though I could hear some whispering & someone down the row from me kept pulling out his or her phone & flashing some light (checking the time?). Those were relatively minor things; the opera, done without intermission, was about an hour & forty-five minutes, which is not a long time in a movie theater but which for some reason seems like a long time for people at a live performance (it doesn't help that Zellerbach is an uncomfortable hall). But though the audience seemed appreciative, giving the performers well-deserved & hearty applause at the end, they also seemed, as a whole, & I realize I'm sliding out onto some thinnish ice here, not quite to get the mood & therefore the meaning of the piece. There was quite a bit of laughter at various points that struck me as appreciative but uncomprehending, starting with the scene in which Belle's Father, who has wandered into Beast's castle, sits down to dinner & is unnerved by the disembodied hands that hold the candelabras down the hall & that serve him at the table. Cinematically these are fairly simple tricks, but effective nonetheless, if you enter into the unreal enchantments of the tale. (I will say that I find such tricks, not just from Cocteau but even more so in the films of Méliès, far more beautiful, moving, & effective than the shiny plastic fakery of computer-generated effects in current films.)

Maybe the audience laughed because they were expecting Mrs Potts, Lumiere, & Co to launch into Be Our Guest? I don't say this to be dismissive of the wonderful Disney version of the story, but though the animators clearly studied their Cocteau, their film has a different mode & mood. There was also quite a bit of laughter, not quite mocking but also not quite comprehending, of various love-story lines at the end, & I was at a loss to figure out what was supposed to be funny. This is a fairy tale, not a sitcom or a Hallmark "romance". During the scene in which the guileless Belle is led into giving her siblings some of the Beast's magic secrets, a woman in the row in front of me whispered (very loudly whispered) that Belle was . . . she said either stupid, or a fool, or a word to that effect. Reading innocence & trustfulness & guilelessness as stupidity is exactly the attitude Cocteau asks us to consciously though perhaps only temporarily renounce while watching his enchantments. He is very clear in his statement at the beginning of his film that he wants the audience to approach this story with an openness that draws on a purity & innocence usually crushed out by or at least hidden away from the social & adult world. We are certainly meant to appreciate the sophistication of all the artists involved, the silvery cinematography, the lovely surrealist touches, the artificiality of our suspension, which is perhaps only temporary, of our usual civilized skepticism. But it is only by doing so that we can truly grasp the anguish of Beast's dark & deliquescent heart, & the beauty of Beauty coming to love him.

sketches for Gesualdo, Prince of Madness

Last Friday I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for Opera Parallele's "opera lab" first public presentation of Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, based on the life of the Italian Renaissance composer, with music by Dante de Silva, libretto by Mitchell Morris, and graphics by Mark Simmons. The performance was held in the smaller recital hall there, which was packed. As usual with Opera Parallele, Brian Staufenbiel handled the staging and Nicole Paiement conducted. An electronic keyboard stood in for most of the orchestra, but there was also piano, percussion, and, for that distinctive Renaissance sound, a theorbo, along with a trio of women singers, to evoke the madrigals Gesualdo wrote for women's voices.

The opera is in two acts; the performance, which started late, lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. The first half tells the notorious story of Gesualdo's murder of his wife and her lover when he caught them in bed together. The second half shows the aftermath: Gesualdo, struggling with obsessive memories of the murdered pair, withdrawn into a private world of musical calculations, is married for political reasons to a different young woman, who, advised by a cunning old attendant, is plotting her own way to freedom. The plot is as lurid as anything John Webster might have come up with, complete with adultery, murder, mad scenes, cross-dressing, and deadly herbal poisons, and is a reminder of the reason so many Jacobean tragedies take place in Italy.

But the emphasis isn't so much on the violence as on Gesualdo's distracted mental state; there is frenzied music, but also disquieting, plinking sounds reminiscent of a brain being picked at and over obsessively. There aren't really stand-alone arias; the dialogue flows on as in Wozzeck. Complex ensembles evoke Renaissance madrigals, and the music sounds contemporary with both us and the characters on stage.

Opera Parallele's stagings are always stylish, adventurous, and experimental. The idea for this one is that the "staging" will actually be a projection done in the style of a graphic novel. I assume in the finished version the singers will be in the pit or otherwise out of sight, but I might be wrong about that. I also don't know if the finished version will have continuous movements (as in an animated film) or "panels" that give way to other panels, with some interior animation, which is what we saw on Friday.

It's an interesting idea, and in some ways is the ideal of a certain type of opera creator (or fan): the characters will always look as they do in the drawings, without the variations and chance qualities that you get with different individuals (particularly in opera casting, where voice and not appearance is the primary concern). But I like seeing the different qualities different performers bring to a role; I was thinking about this when Nikola Printz started singing Artemisia, the older lady-in-waiting – I could tell immediately from the way she darkened her voice not only that she was singing a different character from before, but the type of guarded, calculating character this woman was. It played off in interesting ways against the singer's youthful appearance and Louise Brooks-style hairdo. But on screen Artemisia will always have the same dour, dessicated look. The drawings are very well done but personally I prefer a more stylized look (the style here is similar to the fairly realistic style used by Dave Gibbons for Alan Moore's Watchmen).

In addition to Printz, the singers were Daniel Cilli as Carlo, impassioned and convincing as both killer and composer, Michelle Rice as his first wife Maria, Maya Kherani as his second wife Leonora, Andres Ramirez as Maria's lover, Chris Filipowicz as a male servant, and Sarah Eve Brand, Lora Libby, and Rachel Rush as the female trio. Though there were projections there were no surtitles (a printed libretto was provided). I had little trouble understanding the words, though, except for some of the ensembles and the higher-lying voices, which are where I usually have trouble. Keisuke Nakagoshi played piano, Adam Cockerham played theorbo, McKenzie Camp played percussion, and Eva-Maria Zimmerman handled the keyboard. It was difficult to believe they'd only been playing this piece together for a week or so.

The opera has been in development for several years, but the company has only recently started working on it as a group. I look forward to seeing the finished version, or other intermediate stages. There was a Q-and-A session afterwards with the artists, followed by a reception, but I was unable to stay for either. Perhaps if I had I would have seen Axel Feldheim, who was there, though sadly for me I missed him.