Los Angeles Opera has been making a foray in recent seasons into what can most conveniently be called alternative opera. This is a way for the company to reach new audiences, try out new things, perform in different venues. It is a healthy and welcome thing.
Last season we had Patrick Morganelli’s “Hercules vs. Vampires” (a blast, synced to a Mario Bava film) and David T. Little’s “Dog Days,” which I didn’t see. Later this month we’ll have Philip Glass’s “Dracula” at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel. Thursday night we got the West Coast premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s “Song of the Uproar” in the REDCAT theater.
These operas don’t have to have the mass appeal that the company’s mainstage productions of grand opera must have to cover costs. The small REDCAT (at the back of Disney Hall) was full Thursday and the audience sat with seeming contentment through the hour-and-ten minute “Uproar” and applauded warmly at the end.
Based in Brooklyn, a hotbed of new music, Mazzoli completed “Uproar” in 2012, when it was given its premiere at The Kitchen in New York. It is inspired by the journals of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman born in 1877 who abandoned Europe for Algeria, dressed as a man, converted to Islam and fell in love with an Algerian soldier, before she died in a flash flood at the age of 27.
In many ways, it’s the classic tale of a Westerner finding herself in an exotic locale and culture. With her co-librettist Royce Vavrek, filmmaker Stephen Taylor and director/choreographer Gia Forakis, Mazzoli has fashioned a multimedia affair starring a single singer that unfolds in a series of tableaux.
Mazzoli’s music for “Uproar” is a kind of modified minimalism, repetitive and basically tonal, but also rhythmically and metrically syncopated and mounting to considerable complexity and dissonance. The orchestra consists of double bass, electric guitar, clarinet and bass clarinet, piano, flute and piccolo, but there are also pre-recorded elements – chanting voices, scratched-record sounds, seagulls, waves.
The character of Eberhardt sings simply and lyrically, but repeats short scraps of a phrase for emphasis before moving on, in time-honored minimalistic fashion. A “Chorus of Isabelles,” five singers dressed first as Victorians then as Arabs, provides a counterweight to Eberhardt’s meditations and outpourings.
Taylor’s film is archival footage that suggests character, location, time and mood; it is black and white, sliced and diced, projected on scrims, curtains and a screen. Forakis has everyone move about and express themselves in hieroglyphic movements and poses, which these days seems clichéd.
It’s a lot going on for what is essentially a rumination on Eberhardt’s life. At any rate, the dramatic apparatus rather overwhelmed the tale; or perhaps it was just that it was difficult to decipher the sung words. Supertitles or a printed text would have been welcome.
Heavy amplification, though providing a certain whooshy reverberation, sapped intimacy and beauty of tone. Mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer, who created the role, sang Eberhardt with confidence and poise and liquid phrases. The chorus and orchestra performed ably, Steven Osgood conducting.
In the end, “Uproar” proved tedious for this listener, feeling a good deal longer than its running time. But then not everything in L.A. Opera’s experimental initiative is going to work. Experiments are like that.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com
