The annual conference of Opera America, held in a different city each year, typically attracts some 500 administrative and artistic personnel from opera companies around the country. This week, the Dallas Opera is hosting the conference, adding special performances also open to the public. There are also excursions to sample the Fort Worth Opera Festival.
Thursday night's offering, at the Winspear Opera House, was Arjuna's Dilemma, by American composer Douglas J. Cuomo. The libretto, excerpted from the Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita, is an extended battlefield dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and the god Krishna. The six singers and 12 instrumentalists (winds, string quintet, piano and percussion) were lighted tightly onstage, with evocative projections on an overhead screen.
Arjuna prepares for battle against usurpers of his kingdom, but he hesitates upon recognizing relatives, friends and teachers arrayed against him. Appearing first as Arjuna's charioteer, Krishna urges the prince on to battle, but Arjuna demands more and more assurance. Finally, after Krishna reveals himself in all his godly glory and terror, Arjuna arms himself with resolve.
Best known for composing the theme to Sex and the City, Cuomo draws on backgrounds in both jazz and ethnomusicology. In Arjuna's Dilemma, the music all but seamlessly mingles traditional Indian vocal and instrumental idioms with jazz, alternatively tautly rhythmic and dreamily improvisatory, with patches of quasi-minimalist patterns.
Caftan-clad Tony Boutté portrayed Arjuna, singing his Sanskrit musings and pleadings in a beautifully liquescent tenor. Krishna was sometimes personified by the Afghan singer Humayun Khan, in a mix of fluid yodeling and rapid patter. Otherwise the deity's words were sung in English, by various combinations in a chorus of four excellent female voices: Katrina Galka, Audra Methvin, Alyssa Martin and Lindsay Ammann. Ammann's lower register, downright mannish but beautifully finished, was particularly impressive.
Since nothing actually happens in the 80 minutes of Arjuna's Dilemma, this quasi-oratorio presentation, visually enhanced and modestly amplified, worked just fine. (The 2008 premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was staged.) I might not rush out to experience it again, but its imaginative eclecticism certainly maintained musical interest, and it was most persuasively executed.
Principal guest conductor Nicole Paiement coordinated everything with a stick technique both fastidious and finely expressive. Pete Brewer supplied the sometimes flamboyant tenor saxophone effusions, although their dramatic significance wasn't clear. William Cusick's projections — sands of time, roiling seas, clouds and blazing sun — were effective. Translations of Arjuna's words and thoughts appeared on the upstage scrim, Krishna's on the usual overhead supertitle screen.
UPDATE: _10:39 a.m. May 5, to add details about Pete Brewer.
Formerly the classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell now covers the beat as a freelance writer.
Plan your life
The Dallas Opera presents a semi-staged version of Joby Talbot's Everest, with a new Everest Prelude, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, and the films Magic Piano and The Chopin Shorts, with pianist Derek Wang, at 2 p.m. Saturday. A final performance of Norma will be at 2 p.m. Sunday. All performances at the Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora. Everest $15 to $17; Magic Piano/The Chopin Shorts $10; Norma $19 to $199. 214-443-1000. dallasopera.org.
