Tobias Picker’s “Thérèse Raquin,” which launched the new year for Long Beach Opera on Saturday at Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, is not an easy piece to sit through. You get the feeling, partway in, that you’re supposed to just listen to it like a man and to do so because it’s good for you, like eating raw broccoli.
The opera, from 2001, is based of course on Émile Zola’s gritty novel of the same name, wherein a pair of illicit lovers murder the woman’s husband and then go mad and kill themselves, so it’s not as if it was envisioned as a pleasant night at the theater. It’s supposed to be dramatic and psychologically gripping, one suspects, and perhaps some listeners will think it was. For the most part, I found it merely grueling.
At any rate, Picker’s “Thérèse Raquin” is more of a sung play than an opera. Gene Scheer’s libretto is very talky, and the singing is prosy, the characters in conversation with each other, trading angular melodic lines. Even the arias generally move the story along rather than finding a still place for a character to reflect or express emotions, out of time. One ends up wondering why a good deal of “Thérèse Raquin” has to be sung at all, what is gained by it.
Picker’s music – he’s a student of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, it’s worth mentioning – is a rich mixture of the Second Viennese School and neoclassical Stravinsky, more tonal in the first act and then largely atonal after the murder, acidic and jagged and stinging.
The orchestra mulls over complicated mixtures of rhythms and colors, the instruments sometimes used at the extremes of their ranges. The singers, too, range widely above, in long, craggy lines. There are few places for a listener to rest, and it all gets wearying after a while.
There is much to admire and some truly effective moments – the hard-hitting murder, for one, the orchestra like a battering ram; the ghost aria for the murder victim for another – but one misses a truly theatrical sense of pacing and, frankly, anyone to root for, or at least sympathize with, in the drama.
Perhaps if the performance was better. Always courageous, Long Beach Opera seemed to have bitten off more than it could chew on this occasion, particularly in the pit. Performing Picker’s reduced form of the opera, conductor Andreas Mitisek and the 18 players in the orchestra were hard-pressed a good deal of the time, scrambling hectically, ill-balanced and sketchily-pitched.
Soprano Mary Ann Stewart didn’t have an easy time with the title role either, though maybe no one could, it jumps around so much. She revealed a rich-colored voice, though, a tasteful musicianship, and was most forceful up high. Tenor Matthew DiBattista was an outstanding Camille Raquin, the invalid murder victim. His brilliantly focused tenor gave tensile strength to his phrasing; his aria as a ghost in Act Two was the most dramatic and fully distilled singing of the night.
Baritone Ed Parks made Thérèse’s lover, Laurent, comfortable in his own brutish skin, and his singing was aptly tossed off. In smaller roles, company regulars Suzan Hanson (Madame Lisette Raquin) and Ani Maldjian (Suzanne) were brisk and proficient. Zeffin Quinn Hollis (Olivier) and John Matthew Myers (Monsieur Grivet) also worked effectively.
Director Ken Cazan moved the action out of the 19th century to post World War II, to no discernible advantage, though the rest of his directing was well managed and stayed out of the way. The sets, colorful banners and small installations that could be moved on and off stage quickly, did their job without much fuss, though had little to say in terms of oppressive atmosphere.
Contact the writer: 714-796-6811 or tmangan@ocregister.com
