Rupert Christiansen, Usher House
If necromancy, inbreeding and ancestral curses float your boat, then Welsh National Opera’s double bill could be for you. It presents two one-act operas, both adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothick chiller The Fall of the House of Usher, and both in their different ways interesting failures.
Poe’s text offers little in the way of narrative: its theme is the degeneracy of an old noble family, whose last survivors are visited by an innocent narrator in their ancestral home. Here the latter encounters Roderick Usher, some sort of psychotic genius obsessed with his enfeebled sister Madeline, who at the climax meets her fate, possibly at the hands of a sinister doctor with a black-arts agenda.
Gordon Getty, whose family foundation has paid for these premiere performances, reasonably presents the narrator as Poe himself and attempts not unsuccessfully to build the hints, ambiguities and loose ends of the original into something resembling a conventionally structured plot.
Using an unabashed tonal idiom, he sets the text in a steady arioso without obvious lyrical highlights: despite some monotonous recourse to overemphatic phrase endings, it does the job adequately and not inexpressively. The orchestra has a harder job of breathing some rhythmic life into the metrical plod, as the orchestration runs riot and the device of creating drama by stabbing sforzando chords increasingly grates. The net effect is dull.
But oddly not quite as dull as what follows: Debussy’s La Chute de la maison Usher – a project over which he laboured intermittently for a decade but finally abandoned (perhaps because he realised it sounded excessively like his previous opera Pelléas et Melisande and wasn’t going anywhere).
What WNO offers is the British premiere of Robert Orledge’s scholarly but speculative completion of the surviving sketches. Compared with Getty’s honest mediocrity, Debussy’s instrumentation and harmony is marked by lightning flashes of genius, but the monologue in which he portrays Roderick Usher is interminable. The overheated prolixity of what follows drove me close to screaming-point and others to a surreptitious early exit.
David Pountney contributes an intelligent, unfussy staging which makes canny use of video projections of deserted baronial halls, and the singing of Jason Bridges, Benjamin Bevan and Kevin Short for Getty and Robert Hayward, William Dazeley and Mark Le Brocq for Debussy is excellent.
Lawrence Foster conducted: unhelpfully, he seemed perversely determined to underline the unsubtlety of Getty’s score.
John Allison, Plump Jack
It cannot be easy being a venture capitalist and philanthropist – once listed by Forbes as America’s richest man – and expect to be taken seriously as a composer. Equally, it can’t be easy for artists or record companies, however serious, to resist any offers of working on such a man’s music. So it is also difficult to overlook these issues when approaching this new CD of Gordon Getty’s opera Plump Jack, which unbiased ears will probably hear as no worse – and no better – than many contemporary operas. Plump Jack scrapes into the ‘contemporary’ category, however, only on account of being written (in stages) over recent decades. Getty is a ‘neo-con’ composer, whose style here ranges from harmless film music in the unduly long overture, to sub-Wagnerian recitative for most of the vocal scenes.
Basing his opera on Shakespeare, Getty is of course pitting himself against Verdi. Getty’s opera is stuffed with period-evoking quotations, and even this shortened ‘concert version’, squeezed on to a single disc, feels long and unmemorable.
Brian Hick, Usher House
Edgar Allan Poe has cast his shadow across many artists in the early twentieth century, particularly in the cinema. It is strange therefore that there should have been so few attempts to draw out an operatic version of The Fall of the House of Usher.
WNO have recently drawn together two settings – Gordon Getty’s one act opera and a reconstruction by Robert Orledge of Debussy’s remaining fragments. Neither is totally satisfactory. Gordon Getty bases his approach on a new text which relies heavily on dialogue – not a feature of the original – and music which is supportive but unmemorable.
Paul Corfield Godfrey, Usher House
[Debussy's The Fall of the House of Usher] was coupled with a complete treatment of the same subject by Gordon Getty under the title Usher House, here receiving its world première in a co-production with San Francisco Opera where it is scheduled to be staged next year. Getty, who has constructed his own libretto, made a valiant attempt to impose a more logical structure onto Poe’s original, furnishing some explanations for example onto the origins of the house itself (and incidentally explaining its collapse at the end) as well as past background on the characters. This involved the creation of two new characters: Doctor Primus, Madeline’s sinister physician who eventually is revealed as the incarnation of the original Usher: and Edgar Allen Poe himself, acting both as narrator as in the original story and also as a romantic interest in his relationship to Madeline. These additions and explanations worked well, but they also had a downside in the result that (as with the Debussy) there was rather too much text to be delivered as sort of recitative over the expressive orchestral backdrop. One longed for more lyrical expansion, but such moments were relatively rare; one also noticed that the English surtitles did not always agree with what the singers were delivering from the stage. Possibly the differences were the result of alterations during rehearsal, and one might tentatively suggest that some further amendment and pruning of the text might be beneficial without jeopardising the rationale behind the plot....
The filmed settings for the Debussy were even more spectacularly successful in the Getty. Careful thought had obviously gone into the selected scenes from Penrhyn Castle, and the video designer David Haneke displayed a real flair for reflecting the atmosphere of the score. The very opening, with the viewer drawn into a carriage approaching the Usher House, immediately grabbed the attention even before the music had started with the realism of the illusion conveyed. Indeed when the orchestra did enter, there was almost a suggestion of an atmospheric film score simply accompanying the visual images on stage. This however was only a fleeting misapprehension, as the music rapidly developed an independent character of its own in which the live characters blended almost seamlessly into the filmed background. This imaginative use of projections (echoing a suggestion made by John Culshaw in Ring Resounding as long ago as the 1960s) was a real revelation in showing just how successful the technique can be if it is done as well as this. One would now like to see such back projections used in other productions, especially those which portray nature in a manner which has seemed to become a closed book to so many modern directors. It was a far cry from David Pountney’s usual style, and it worked superbly. The eye and ear were constantly enchanted, in fact, and the score seemed to display a distinct progress from Getty’s earlier opera Plump Jack (which I reviewed on CD last year for this site) both in its sense of dramatic pacing and in the greater unity of the musical whole. Unlike Plump Jack, which was written in a piecemeal fashion over a number of years, Usher House progressed inexorably from its atmospheric opening to its overwhelming conclusion. One hopes that the production will soon find its way onto video (possibly during its run in San Francisco?) as both an enchantment in its own right and an example to others....
I should perhaps mention that this review is based on the second performance of the double bill (I was otherwise engaged two days earlier on the opening night – see my review for this site of the BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales in the Brahms German Requiem). Unfortunately the double bill is only being given once more in the current WNO season, on 20 June in Birmingham. It deserves to be revived; the audience at this afternoon performance was substantial and enthusiastic.
Matthew Richard Martinez, Christmas Carols
’Tis the season. Yes, the weather has cooled, the days are short, and the signs of Christmas can be heard and seen all around. And while it can be comforting to reacquaint yourself with your favorite Messiah or Bach Cantata, finding some new music to celebrate the season can be even more rewarding. This music here in December Celebration is especially new. All new music from some of the most important American composers such as Jake Heggie and William Bolcom. This compilation of new carols is more than intriguing, it’s downright captivating.
It’s interesting how there is an unmistakable Christmas “sound” in music where the Currier and Ives pours from the music. And one of the most reassuring aspects of this disc is how that sound pervades these pieces in different ways. There are simple and effective ways of accomplishing this, of course, by utilizing existing texts and melodies in new arrangements as Heggie and Getty have done, but also in original pieces such as the opening The Christmas Life by Mark Adamo where the wistful side of the Christmas season is in the forefront. Wendy Cope’s poem is brought to life in fleetingly warm flashes that dissipate to more unsettled colors by Adamo. It is not all that unlike the melancholy “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Meet Me in St. Louis. It is a reminder of the frigidity of the season. Likewise in Luna Pearl Woolf’s How Bright the Darkness, an impressively vivid piece for women’s choir, baritone solo, strings, percussion, and harp. Wolf’s orchestration and harmonies paint the sparseness of nature. It is a piece where the listener can actually hear the sounds of nature on the darkest day, the solstice.
Joan Morris’ and William Bolcom’s Carol is a cheery, strophic piece for chorus and piano where, with text by Kenneth Grahame, the altruistic goodwill of the season is uncontainable. The ever-youthful Gordon Getty accomplishes much the same with his Four Christmas Carols, a vivacious collection for women’s chorus and orchestra, that captures the youthful wonder of Christmas.
Jake Heggie, perhaps the most recognizable of composers represented here, contributes On the Road to Christmas, a six song cycle for soprano and strings. Those familiar with Heggie’s music will find his theatricality ever present here which has some mixed success in this piece. The opening, “The Night is Freezing Fast” is unsettled and pulsating. “The Car Ride to Christmas,” with poem by Frederica von Stade, is a bumpy journey that recalls and bounces through a stream of consciousness childhood memory. Heggie and the listener are on more comfortable ground in the remaining songs including a charming setting of Emily Dickinson’s “The Road to Bethlehem.” A Heggie text, “Christmas Time of Year,” is a song that could pass for one of the great American standards, and a sincere conclusion. Soprano Lisa Delan, a singer of innate dramatic ability and an immediately winning sound serves these songs with dedication and musical ease.
Delan is joined by Lester Lynch, a powerful baritone, for David Garner’s Three Carols. Garner, a composer I wasn’t familiar with, makes a strong case for himself with one of the most distinguished contributions on this disc. Three Carols, a piece for the two soloists, oboe, frame drum, and strings, is an exceptionally original piece that converges several styles throughout. Most beneficially, the piece enjoys the profoundly clever lyrics of Thomas Breidenthal, who tells of the nativity from the first person of the participants, from the obvious Mary and Joseph, to the less obvious donkey, cow, rooster, etc. The first song, “Posada,” tells of the holy family’s arrival in a simple verse-chorus style. The second, “Magnum Mysterium” is a refreshingly non-saccharine, rhythmic telling of the birth with several verses, each attributed to a different animal in the manger, and the refrain returning to the catchy “O magnum mysterium” motive. The final song, “Jesus’ Song,” is from the savior’s first person point of view, awestruck at all the wondrous things going on around him. It is a clever, thoughtful, and ultimately, touching Christmas perspective.
That thoughtful perspective is brought to life throughout this disc. Conductor Dawn Harms leads the Volti Chorus and Musicians of the New Century Chamber Orchestra with assuredness, but also with a strong sense of purpose through each of the unique pieces. December Celebration, rounded out by John Corigliano’s rollicking Christmas at the Clositers and Gordon Getty’s serene arrangement of Silent Night, is a triumph of purpose, giving new meaning to the sounds of the season.