My third Sunday afternoon at West Edge Opera was spent with Stravinsky's Le Rossignol (The Nightingale) & Schoenberg's Erwartung (Expectation), both conducted by Jonathan Khuner (who also prepared the orchestral reduction for Erwartung) & directed by Giselle Ty. When I first saw the West Edge 2023 schedule, this was the offering I was most excited about, as, contrary to the bizarre complaints that are, or used to be, common about the iron & unforgiving grip of Modernism on the concert hall, chances to hear music like this live have been relatively scarce even over my decades of dedicated concert-going. This lack is especially gaping when it comes to live performances of Schoenberg's music, though I did hear Erwartung live once before, in 1986 at the Boston Symphony, with Seiji Ozawa conducting & Hildegard Behrens as soloist (a combination which a friend of mine felt was echt '80s, & in retrospect I guess it was).
The set for Le Rossignol
Musically the afternoon was outstanding. The sets & costumes for Nightingale were as gorgeous to look at as the music was to hear. I was a little less happy with the staging. I remembered enough both of Andersen's source story & the libretto to follow the action in broad outlines, but from a stage story-telling point of view it wasn't always quite clear who was doing what & why. (This is a frequent occurrence with opera direction, though; there does seem to be a presumption that we're all so familiar with the story that the staged action can take off in sometimes fanciful directions.) There seemed to be some sort of ecological theme added on; in the lobby beforehand, as I was finishing my glass of free wine (a lovely & generous feature of West Edge performances) a petite young woman with a plastic garbage bag came up & offered to take our trash. Her hair was short & particolored & she looked as if she had stepped freshly from the world of anime. It turns out this was none other than our Nightingale, Helen Zhibing Huang, & once the show started I realized that the trash-collection was more thematic metatheatricality than mere housekeeping. But the significance was still unclear to me. One problem is that, as with Zambello's "American" Gotterdammerung, in which the deterioration of the environment is also shown by piles of plastic water bottles, those piles, stacked up & lit dramatically, tend to look on stage like a glamorous modern art installation rather than mere trash.
That didn't matter much, though. Huang had an exquisitely crystalline, though also strong & flexible, voice, suitable for the famously captivating song of the Nightingale; no wonder she entranced the surprisingly young & hunky Emperor (Patrick Scully) (or has the Emperor Altoum from Turandot just conditioned me to assume that stage emperors of China are wizened elderly men?). The whole cast was strong: Kevin Gino as the Fisherman, Kristin Choi as the Cook, Alice Chung as a formidable Death, Chung-Wai Soong as the Chamberlain, Wayne Wong as the Bonze, & David Ahn, Michael Kuo, & Brieanne Martin as the Foreign Emissaries. It was a feast for eyes & ears.
The set for Erwartung
Erwartung is a one-woman show, & Mary Evelyn Hangley as the possibly delusional, possibly wandering, possibly murderous woman was a tower, shaping the dramatic action easily for the duration of the monologue's roughly 30 minutes. I had found the staging for Rossignol, though not always clear as to action, quite enjoyable to watch, but I found the staging of the Schoenberg disappointing. It was set in a hospital, which I think restricts & guides our assumptions & reactions too narrowly. There were dancers, & though some friends of mine objected to them, I did not (& one of them danced wearing eyeglasses, which you seldom see & which I liked). But some of the dancers entered smoking cigarettes, which I guess is to show us they're figments of the woman's imagination, as it's been decades since smoking was allowed in hospitals, but I have a visceral dislike to smoking on stage; as it's generally unnecessary, as well as tacky & conventional, and, again, defining the figures as imaginary limits our possible interpretations of this piece's ambiguous interplay between subconsciousness & outward reality. But given the power of Hangley's performance & the gorgeous playing Khuner elicited from the orchestra, it was easy enough to ignore the stage trappings. On the whole the double-bill was an excellent end to an outstanding festival.
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