Long Beach Opera played the nomad once again on Saturday night, this time presenting a performance on the seashore. Specifically, the venue was Harry Bridges Memorial Park, a grassy area next to the water a few hundred yards from the Queen Mary and across it from illuminated downtown. Plastic folding chairs served as arena. A small portable stage, a stairway in the middle of it and some banners turned it into a theater. The cool air and light breeze after a blistering day were a bonus.
The work at hand was Peter Lieberson’s “King Gesar,” written in 1991 and envisioned as a kind of “campfire opera.” It tells the story of an epic hero, from birth to apotheosis, in the cultures of Central Asia, here, more or less, focusing on his Tibetan incarnation. Lieberson, who died in 2011, was a Tibetan Buddhist.
“King Gesar,” only about 55 minutes long, is not really an opera at all, but a “monodrama” for narrator (who occasionally sings) and a small instrumental ensemble. Andreas Mitisek, the company’s artistic director, and stage director and production designer for “Gesar,” fleshed it out a bit, adding a second narrator and a pair of dancer/narrators, who stylishly acted out the tales in mime, which in the end seemed wholly appropriate.
The performance was quite effective. Lieberson’s music is craggy and 12-tone (i.e. Schoenbergian), but he varies it with simple and folksy tonal passages as well as some purely rhythmical music, almost bare of harmony. The narration, sometimes in rapid-fire rhythm, sometimes free and once in a while breaking into melody, is in sharp relief to the instrumental component, which juices it and colors it much as a movie score might, really.
The octet of instrumentalists performs on a pair of pianos, clarinets, percussion, trombone, horn, flute/piccolo and cello, the textures continuously and atmospherically varied. Lieberson breaks boulders, paints stars and gallops; the epic tone, not expressionism, is convincingly evoked. Something of the grittiness of Stravinsky’s “L’histoire du soldat” was also brought to bear, at least to this listener’s ear.
It is difficult to find a truly quiet place in outdoor Southern California. (The desert would probably do.) In the park we got recorded pop music wafting quietly from across the water, helicopters and planes, and the hum of nearby traffic. It was neither ideal nor terribly amiss (the performers were all amplified), but a blank canvas of complete silence would have, no doubt, allowed a greater spell of magic.
Roberto Perlas Gomez, a regular with the company, espoused the narration with robust fortitude and nimbleness. Danielle Marcelle Bond, as the other narrator, at times in unison with Gomez, was also on her toes, and the feminine voice somehow provided a different perspective on the tale. (The recording, which includes Emanuel Ax, Peter Serkin and Yo-Yo Ma among the performers, uses a male narrator.) Javier Gonzalez and Kelly Ray were the dancers; their miming of the exciting horse race and of a goddess’ counsel to Gesar (in silhouette) was enchanting.
Douglas Penick’s libretto strikes the right high and formal tone and is high calorically metaphorical; it’s difficult to keep up with it but it remains forceful. Kristof Van Grysperre, the company’s new associate conductor, led the ensemble with pugilistic power and sensitivity.
It was all done on a shoestring, as often with this company. But the piece was fitting to the budget and the spirits were willing.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com
