THE OTHER OPERAS IN NEW YORK- NOT AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE:HEIDI WALESON
http://online.wsj.com/articles/opera-review-the-passenger-at-the-park-avenue-armory-also-reviewed-the-tsars-bride-and-lucrezia-borgia-1405464100?mod=Life_and_Culture_newsreel_3
Out of the Proscenium, Into the Void “The Passenger” was powerful in Houston. It’s even stronger in New York
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s haunting opera, “The Passenger,” a meditation on guilt and memory in the context of Auschwitz, was written in 1968 but was not staged until 2010. It is now making up for lost time. After touring Europe, David Pountney’s production was mounted by the Houston Grand Opera in January. Last weekend, the Lincoln Center Festival brought the staging, with the same HGO forces, to the Park Avenue Armory.
Zofia Posmysz, a Polish Catholic who spent three years in Auschwitz as a political prisoner, wrote the radio play and novel on which the opera is based. Traveling on an ocean liner 15 years after the end of the war, Liese, a former SS overseer in Auschwitz, thinks she sees Marta, a prisoner in whom she had taken a particular interest, and whom she thought dead. The encounter forces Liese to dredge up her repressed memories and to confront her own complicity in evil.
Powerful in Houston, the production was even stronger here. Removed from the enveloping, protective proscenium into the cavernous Armory space, it felt as though these heinous events were taking place in the void, where insignificant human beings must battle to preserve a semblance of humanity and a moral compass or, conversely, can wield power without fear of reprisal.
Thus, in Johan Engels’s set, the all-white ship floated serenely above the dark hell of Auschwitz, with its barracks and railroad tracks, and spotlights streaming straight down from the ceiling intensified the nightmarish qualities of the production and the opera itself. The orchestra, incisively led by Patrick Summers, was placed beside the set rather than in a pit. Removing that usual division between the audience and the singers gave their performances a stunning immediacy; the necessary amplification was barely noticeable. Among the excellent performers, the soprano Melody Moore came into her own as a passionate, full-voiced Marta, for whom memory becomes an ecstatic, affirming vehicle for survival.
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In the Lincoln Center Festival’s other opera offering this year, the Bolshoi brought no sets and costumes from Moscow, but its concert performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride” (1899) at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday afternoon was still a grand affair. Based on a play by Lev Mey, the opera, a Russian classic little heard in the U.S., imagines the scenario behind the premature death of Ivan the Terrible’s third wife. It is a colorful story in which Gryaznoy, one the Tsar’s marauding oprichniks, or secret police, falls in love with Marfa, a merchant’s daughter. No matter that she is engaged to her childhood sweetheart, Lykov, or that she is on the Tsar’s list of marital possibilities, or that Gryaznoy’s mistress, Lyubasha, will not tolerate being cast aside. Poison substituted for a love potion has a cascading effect, resulting in the deaths of all four principals.
The robust sound of the Bolshoi Orchestra and Chorus, led by the veteran Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, brought an especially dark, weighty hue to this tale. The whole musical environment of the piece emphasizes the violent savagery of Russia under Ivan, not just in the jingoistic choruses of praise, the unsettling orchestral fanfare that accompanies the appearance of the Tsar or the cacophonous sound of the oprichniks going off to do some massacring.
Only the bright voices of the doomed innocent lovers lighten the texture. Lykov (tenor Roman Shulakov) has an elegant aria that praises the civilized nature of Germany and suggests that Russia could learn something from it, and Marfa (soprano Uliana Alexyuk) has a mad scene that is an escapist fantasy.
The composer’s trademark gift for color does occasionally shine elsewhere, as in the swirling motif when the poison is added to the betrothal wine, and celestial harps that accompany Marta’s madness. But the central confrontation between Lyubasha (mezzo Svetlana Shilova) and Gryaznoy (baritone Alexander Kasyanov) is long, lugubrious and very Russian. One wonders how Verdi would have written it.
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