FORT WORTH – You could see dozens of operas per season for decades and never experience anything like María de Buenos Aires. But there it was Friday night at Bass Performance Hall, Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla's 1968 "tango opera," opening this year's Fort Worth Opera Festival.
Only about 85 minutes long, in an unbroken succession of scenes, it's hardly an opera in any conventional sense. There's much more talking than singing, the former mostly surrealist-poetic musings by a character called El Duende (The Goblin).
In the scruffier quarters of Buenos Aires, the eponymous María spurns the love of a good man, the balladeer El Payador, to become a prostitute. She's raped and gets pregnant, but El Payador shows up as a redemptive figure.
As dramatically portrayed by actress and Latin TV star Gaby Natale, El Duende is a sinister, gender-switching figure of multiple personalities, everything from a tattered street hag to a bishop in cope and miter. Don't worry about making sense of her free-association words, by the Uruguayan-Argentinian poet Horacio Ferrer. They're jumbles of imagery, evocative if inscrutable, a Spanish-language answer, if you will, to the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé.
Solange Merdinian's María is by turns beautifully seductive, debauched and and perilously vulnerable. With a mezzo-soprano that can take on a brassy edge or descend into mannish depths, she sings in a more popular Latin-American style. By contrast, Luis Alejandro Orozco gives El Payador a gorgeous operatic baritone that can soften into sweet high croons.
The score, of course, is suffused with Piazzolla's gussied-up permutations of the tango, which like María can shift from seductive to sinister. Conductor Scott Terrell led an accompanying onstage ensemble of perhaps a dozen instrumentalists from the Fort Worth Symphony. Prominent parts for bandonéon, an Argentinian concertina, were played by Juan Pablo Jofre.
These are not simple characters or situations, but the jumble of love, lust and violence rings true to 1950s Argentina, the age of dictator Juan Perón. Director John De Los Santos gets the blocking and animation just right, and his virtuoso choreography is splendidly executed by Texas Ballet Theater dancers Alex Danna, Riley Moyano and Paige Nyman.
The production, from San Diego Opera, effectively uses designer Liliana Duque Piñeiro's high rotating slabs, splashed with collages of imagery. Period costumes are by Ingrid Helton. Chad Jung supplies dramatic lighting.
Continuing Fort Worth Opera's commendable commitment to Spanish-language operas, María de Buenos Aires is presented with Spanish texts and English translations projected over the stage. Frustratingly, much of the spoken verbiage never appears. The performance is amplified, probably as it should be. But did it have to be quite as loud as it was on opening night?
Formerly classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, Scott Cantrell continues covering the beat as a freelance writer. Classical music coverage at The News is supported in part by a grant from the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. The News makes all editorial decisions.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. May 5 at Bass Performance Hall, Fourth and Commerce, Fort Worth. $17 to $75. 817-731-0726, fwopera.org.
