As at its 2015 Dallas Opera premiere, Everest got a rousing ovation Friday night at the Winspear Opera House. The audience included some 500 opera administrators and other personnel attending the national conference of Opera America.
The one-act, 70-minute opera, with libretto by Gene Scheer and music by British composer Joby Talbot, dramatizes a tragic 1996 climbing expedition on Mount Everest. Among the climbers who lived to tell the story was Dallas pathologist Dr. Beck Weathers.
Fully staged in 2015, Everest was revived this time in a one-night, semi-staged performance. With the orchestra onstage, the climbers, in heavy gear, clambered on foreground black boxes. Upstage projections designed by Elaine J. McCarthy portrayed the vastness of the mountainous space and nuances of light and weather.
Both the opera performance and Talbot's new Everest Prelude performed beforehand were dedicated to the late Dick Bass, who with his wife, Alice, made major contributions to the opera's commissioning and original production. Music director Emmanuel Villaume conducted both.
At Everest's staged premiere I found it hard to connect with singers far upstage who were so heavily attired that I couldn't tell who was who or who was singing at any given moment. It struck me as an opera that really wanted to be a movie with closeups. This time, with director Leonard Fogia staging the action mainly on the front of the stage, one could see faces and better imagine the human dramas.
In art as in life, we all have our blind and deaf spots, and maybe I'm congenitally immune to the genius of Everest. But even in my third experience, I still found it too dramatically static and ultimately uninvolving — and I say that as someone who adores Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. I just couldn't relate to this particular quest for adrenaline highs, and I don't find the music compelling.
The Texas twang that Kevin Burdette affected for Weathers was unnecessary and certainly unflattering to his normally handsome bass. Andrew Bidlack sympathetically portrayed the expedition leader Rob Hall, but his tenor sounded pinched in the frequent high writing.
Michael Mayes supplied a wondrously rich baritone for the doomed Doug Hansen, and John Boehr sang sonorously in two lesser roles. Soprano Sarah Jane McMahon portrayed Hall's wife, Jan Arnold, with Julia Rose Arduino as Weathers' daughter Meg.
Aside from a romantic duet between Hall and Arnold, the vocal writing mostly goes anonymously in one ear and out the other. The chorus, in Greek fashion, comments and poetically ruminates on the action, with some piquant harmonies here and there, a couple of snowslide glissandos and some whispered effects.
The orchestra makes much of onomatopoeic effects — subterranean rumbles, windy whooshings, glints and glistenings — along with patches of hypnotic minimalism. An astonishing amount of the music doesn't even vary in pace.
Alas, it was more — or, rather, less — of the same in the new 13-minute Prelude, which sounded like a sketch waiting to be filled out. It accompanied dramatic projected excerpts of the 1924 documentary The Epic of Everest, about the George Mallory/Andrew Irvine expedition.
Formerly the classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell now covers the beat as a freelance writer.
