The West Edge Opera festival started for me with Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon), the mariachi opera composed by José “Pepe” Martínez to a text by Leonard Foglia.
My Sunday afternoon visit was also my first time at West Edge's new performance location, the Scottish Rite Center on Lake Merritt in Oakland; they performed there last summer, but I had not resumed post-lockdown concert-going then. It looks as if the wandering troupe has finally found a workable venue; the building is grand enough for any opera & eccentric enough to fit the West Edge aesthetic. The auditorium is up on the fourth floor, with a convenient arrangement of lobbies outside, including one where West Edge can offer its signature free wine before the performance & during intermission (donations are always accepted but not required). It's a convenient walk from the Lake Merritt BART station – just 10 minutes, straight down the street – & I was able to visit the Oakland Museum beforehand. & it's always lovely to be on a lake.
Cruzar has been making the national rounds, though I believe this was the Bay Area premiere. I will say that I like mariachi music but my association with it is mostly with inconsiderate neighbors & ruined weekends; having mariachi blasting into your house from blocks away is certainly better than having to put up with rock or rap or suchlike, but I object to all overamplified music, particularly when it mostly reaches me as a nonstop series of monotonous thumps. This performance was, in fact, amplified, but it's different when it's something you've chosen to hear. But there were problems with the amplification, which seems to be the inevitable sentence one writes after any amplified performance. I don't really understand why they didn't just give us natural sound; certainly most of the voices could carry to the back reaches of the auditorium.
The opera itself is fairly short (maybe roughly an hour?), so Mariachi Azteca, who accompanied the opera, gave us a concert beforehand; they were arrayed around the stage in their vivid & elegant costumes while singers came out for their various numbers. They were more like a jazz ensemble than I had expected; various instrumentalists were highlighted in turn, as were the singers, some of whom were also in the opera, including the main singer for the concert, tenor Moisés Salazar, who got his start in his family's mariachi band. The unfortunate amplification kicked in at the worst possible time, as Salazar introduced his first music teacher, his father, & they sang together, but accompanied by the high whine of a wayward system. It was really too bad, at such a moving moment. But I enjoyed the concert quite a lot, & it was clear a lot of the audience was thrilled.
There were no surtitles for the mariachi concert, I assume due to its perhaps semi-improvised nature. It turned out, when the opera started after the intermission, that I had trouble reading the surtitles anyway (as did some others around me). I don't know if it was the way the light was hitting the screen or what, but they were quite washed out, & unfortunately my Spanish isn't strong enough to do without them, though I could pick out some key words. I didn't have this problem with the other operas, so I don't know what was going on there.
The opera itself turned out to be almost surprisingly moving. It is more in the nature of a fable, or an archetypal incident, than a drama about individuals; a man, Laurentino, is dying, & in flashback we find out that he left Mexico to earn money in the United States, leaving behind Renata, his beloved wife, & their young son Rafael. They try to join Laurentino but Renata dies in the desert crossing as her helpless son looks on; he is taken back to Mexico & raised by her family. In the present, as Laurentino is in his final days, his second, Mexican-American, family works to reunite him with Rafael. I usually don't read an opera's plot synopsis until after I've seen it, if I read it at all, as I like whatever surprises the work on stage can give me, but even without knowing how deeply sadness runs through this story I had wondered how mariachi, which strikes me as essentially, for lack of a better word, life-affirming (this might just be my ignorance of the style) could convey the darker, deeper emotions that are almost required in opera.
The creators of Cruzar solved that by framing a potentially tragic story as one of acceptance & reconciliation, with joyful scenes (Laurentino & Renata's wedding, for example) highlighted. The guiding metaphor is the butterfly, its fragility, its rebirth into beauty (fortunately, given the surtitle situation, mariposa is one of the Spanish words I recognize, as well as corazón). Director Karina Gutiérrez used the space well, with Laurentino's death bed (from which he arose for the flashbacks) right in the center of the stage, keeping us in mind of his impending passing. Baritone Efraín Solís was Laurentino, & to anyone who's seen him perform (to take just one West Edge example, his memorable Golaud from 2018's Pelleas), it was no surprise that he held the stage with magnetic warmth; you could feel he loved this material. The rest of the cast kept up with him, though: Kelly Guerra as Renata, Moisés Salazar as Laurentino's old friend Chucho, Sergio González as the adult Rafael . . . all excellent.
The opera was strangely powerful. I was deeply moved by it. I wondered if this was just the inevitable reaction to any story of loss & the hope for reconciliation, themes which became ever more present, & even omnipresent, as we age, but I think it went beyond that (I recently saw for the first time the Pixar film Coco, which deals with some similar themes, & I was considerably less moved). It was just that magic operatic union of suggestive words, powerful music, & committed performers. But of course, in life, at least for me, the understanding, forgiveness, & reconciliation (whether with the living or their spirits) that we hope for turns out not to be a lasting feeling. Spurred on by fiction, I had always imagined a certain finality there, but the hard-won, struggled-for sense of reconciliation recedes & old angers, fears, & frustrations rise back up to the surface; & then you work through those again to reconciliation, but then that recedes (again) & the waves keep washing over you until you, too, are worn down & swept out to some metaphysical sea.
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