Such appears the query we’d ask Matthew Aucoin of his Eurydice, which not too long ago concluded a reliable and thought-provoking run at Boston’s Huntington Theater courtesy of Boston Lyric Opera. An adaptation of Sarah Ruhl’s well-assembled play – itself a beacon of twee rituality – Aucoin’s setting of the Orpheus fantasy acquainted to operagoers approaches the play from Eurydice’s aspect: right here, her father prepares her a room within the underworld and reminiscence of the residing world turns into a contraband forex as deceased souls have their reminiscences wiped by a dip within the Lethe. And when Eurydice is quickly scooped up from the underworld by Orpheus, her father then has to mourn in reverse — mourn her absence from demise — in one of many play’s extra poignant and thought-provoking crosscurrents.
It’s vital that Ruhl initially refocused this fantasy in a straight-play format; if Orpheus is the musician par excellence, Ruhl ascribes to Eurydice a verbal energy to enrich Orpheus’s musical acumen that each ties the play firmly to its medium but inevitably gestures in direction of an incompatibility between the 2 (that maybe opera can treatment). However Ruhl’s Orpheus is a punk whose curiosity in Eurydice’s phrases simply belies an curiosity in her boobs: “Orpheus by no means favored phrases. He had his music,” she says. She quotes him once more: “Phrases can imply something. Present me your physique.”
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Clearly Aucoin loved the problem of wrestling with a supply materials that so naturally suggests opera but pits us firmly in opposition to music and his through-composed rating is richly citational (I clocked Vivaldi, Wagner, and Coldplay, although I’m certain I missed others – and probably the most ceaselessly recurring motif, an eighth-note sequence, has intervals harking back to the second in Salome when Jochanaan emerges from his cistern) and unmistakably composerly. However whereas I believe all of the musical shoutouts that emerge from a this layered orchestration are speculated to push in opposition to this judgement, in a rating as self-consciously musical as this one, they only appear ornamental and self-congratulatory.
“Don’t you assume that you’re having fun with your grief just a bit bit an excessive amount of?” Hades asks Orpheus when he arrives to the Underworld; we are able to ask the identical about Aucoin and his personal rating, a rating that vacillates between pursuit and encounter whereas circuitously probing clichés like “What’s it like to like an artist?” By the tip, Orpheus is again within the underworld, assumedly post-maenads, and might’t decipher the letter Eurydice has written him. It’s the primary time we hear him with no signal of his countertenor double, a form of floating indication that Orpheus shouldn’t be a whole musician with out a feminized (ie. Treble) complement (and that’s to say nothing of Eurydice!). Because the opera ends in a form of anticlimactic silence, the musician to finish all of them finally ends up being not Orpheus, however Aucoin.
But pretentious as it’s, Eurydice remains to be a pleasing approach to spend just a few hours and Ruhl’s libretto shouldn’t be with out its genuinely shifting moments. That BLO’s performances occasioned the newly commissioned chamber orchestration (together with Opera Grand Rapids) presents Eurydice a simple off-ramp into the regional circuit, is a welcome factor for any up to date opera. And BLO’s efficiency was, largely, gratifying. Having the composer conduct his personal new association—I didn’t see the Met run, however discovered this model fairly satisfying, if barely underpowered at sure moments, just like the Act I dance–was a real luxurious.
Sydney Mancasola is admirable as Eurydice, in the end not a very grateful half. She was tireless in her music’s relentless octave jumps together with her opalescent soprano sustaining a baleful magnificence even in her higher reaches. She has an affecting chemistry together with her father, Mark S. Doss, whose bass-baritone is unsteady and turned chalky the decrease he went. Elliot Madore’s seaside bum Orpheus has an impenetrable high quality and he hammers his voice into tensile phrases successfully however with out a lot nuance.
The opera’s most memorable innovation – the three bureaucratic stones on the gates of the Underworld that bicker and remark like a Greek refrain – have been the successful trio of last-minute substitute Vera Savage, Neil Ferreira, and Maggie Finnegan. Although as Hades, David Portillo will probably be extra remembered for his outrageous drag queen costumes reasonably than his singing – and the much less stated about his temporary retreat into falsetto, the higher. Talking of which, countertenor Nicholas Kelliher, who voices Orpheus’s double, sings with line however little definition. The identical might be stated of Douglas Fitch’s manufacturing (he claims credit score for staging, set, and costumes) which meanders together with the rating.
This efficiency – which I caught on Sunday – heralded the tip of the mainstage season for BLO which can resume fully-staged performances within the fall underneath the brand new creative route of Nina Yoshida Nelsen (who was concerned with Madama Butterfly final fall).
Images: Nile Scott Studio
