“Oh, the lifeless,” the artist Lily Briscoe thinks in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “One pitied them, one brushed them apart, one had even somewhat contempt for them. They’re at our mercy.”
Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (on on the Met by November 9) follows one artist, the actress Margarita Xirgu, as she involves phrases with the demise of one other, the famed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated by Fascists within the early months of the Spanish Civil Struggle. Ainadamar, the place the place Lorca is assumed to have been executed, means the “fountain of tears.” The opera just isn’t about Lorca’s life, as a lot of the promotional materials suggests, however about his afterlife—how he’s mourned and the way he lived on, partially on account of tireless work from Xirgu, who championed his works for the rest of her life.
We meet the actress backstage, about to revive her function of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the identical title for what have to be the hundredth time. Pineda, who was executed a century earlier than Lorca, is an emblem of resistance to fascist and authoritarian energy. She died for her beliefs with out giving up her comrades. Taking part in Mariana Pineda this night sends Xirgu into an prolonged reverie in regards to the conflict and about Lorca, a determine who has dominated her inventive and psychic panorama.
Informed by imagistic visions and in a non-linear trend, David Henry Hwang’s libretto leaves a lot to the creativeness however has a transparent ethical thrust, depicting Lorca’s demise within the method of a ardour play. Brazilian director and choreographer Deborah Colker provides the manufacturing a deft and delightful visible poetry, pouring transferring our bodies and placing vignettes into the areas round Hwang’s phrases. One notably beautiful second noticed white statues pull off their togas to disclose naked legs because the now-women wrap themselves in shawls towards the night time air. The arched again of a flamenco dancer speaks each magnificence and ache. Jon Bausor’s set is gorgeous. A round scrim fabricated from hundreds of strings, just like the trim on the sting of a parasol, encloses the middle of the stage. Projections dance on it, and dancers transfer by the tendrils that recall beams of sunshine and strands of hair and water flowing from the round basin of a fountain. The fountain is all the time there, a reminder of what awaits Lorca. Later, a stream of crimson threads descends from the sky like bloody rain or crepuscular rays of heat solar. These visible ambiguities solely add to the poetic sensibility, the place meanings shift within the blink of a watch or the delicate flip of a phrase.
Golijov’s musical language combines lush romantic passages, digital segments, and environmental sounds, however this rating has Flamenco in its soul. Ainadamar pulses with a visceral depth and percussive fervor. It grooves threateningly, making audible the mounting violence and the sense of unhealthy historical past repeating itself. A big feminine refrain feedback on the motion, repeating their reward of Mariana Pineda; their reminders change into extra jangling, extra dissonant. As Lorca’s assassin, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, veteran flamenco singer Alfredo Tejada (who has sung this function in different productions of Ainadamar) cuts by the feel like a garrote; the nasal, ahead sound that’s acquainted in flamenco turns into downright surprising when set towards the operatic strategy of the opposite characters. Tejada’s voice is an unearthly battle cry, the screech of Loss of life as he bears down upon Lorca. This and different startling, clever selections—the clop of hooves turning right into a energetic percussion riff to the choice to solid Lorca as a trouser-role mezzo-soprano and the chatter of voices that lurk round moments of calm—make for an absorbing, visceral sound world for a lot of the opera. When Golijov turns away Flamenco’s insistent rhythms, nonetheless, the rating can slip right into a wearying stasis; a confession scene that in any other case ought to have been the peak of pressure felt extra pensive than horrifying.
Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya drove the orchestra ahead with gusto at any time when he may, permitting the percussion and brass to shine. However the stability was off all through the night, largely a results of Golijov’s often difficult vocal writing, which units soloists in difficult ranges after which doubles down the big choral, orchestral and digital forces round them. Unaided by rating or conductor, the singers have been pressured by the overloud sound mixing to shout or just to stay unheard.
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As Margarita, Angel Blue felt considerably underutilized till the opera’s last quantity. Her heat, beneficiant soprano is greatest when she’s allowed to soar above all of it. Blue’s chest voice is highly effective however much less expressive; fortunately, the ultimate trio allowed her voice to succeed in heroic heights. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack introduced a buttery, weak sound to Lorca however equally strained towards the orchestration. Rounding out the most important characters as Nuria, considered one of Margarita’s college students who turns into the bearer of each Lorca’s and Xirgu’s legacy, is Elena Villalón, whose silvery, lucid sound was a welcome addition.
We meet Lorca as a mirrored image, a picture within the mirror of his actress-muse Xirgu, and the image we get leaves a lot out of the body. It isn’t a biography, as that may doubtless deal extra particularly with Lorca’s homosexuality, his collaborations with different distinguished artists like Dalí or his personal fashion and works. As a substitute, we glimpse him in obscure flashes as Margarita struggles to tug aside the person and the martyr. Lorca by no means comes into the image as a full individual, even when his presence (or actually, his absence) haunts Margarita. Equally, if Lorca is glimpsed darkly by Xirgu’s trying glass, then Margarita herself is relegated to all the time mirror and repeat Lorca and the character he creates for her. By the tip of the opera, Margarita Xirgu dissolves solely into Mariana Pineda, an apotheosis directed by the spirit of Lorca himself.
When Lorca sings of his want to put in writing about Mariana Pineda, he does so from an impulse to humanize her, taking her from statue, picture and icon to flesh, blood and bone. He denies a political motive in favor of a private one. Little does he know, as Xirgu herself factors out, that Pineda’s destiny—each execution and subsequent transfiguration from individual to image—can also be his personal. However in rendering all three figures as the last word image—Christ—Ainadamar can not resist the inevitable pull of myth-making, as actual occasions change into historical past, and historical past turns into artwork.
Colker ends her manufacturing with considered one of Lorca’s poems, spoken by Nuria, as if to handle this very pressure. These traces particularly struck me: “My silken coronary heart/ Is stuffed with gentle/ the misplaced tolling of bells/And bees and lilies.” The pleasure of listening to Lorca’s voice—the one time we entry his phrases outdoors of Margarita’s reminiscence—felt marvelously refreshing. Because the lifeless Lorca was allowed to talk once more, we have been lastly on the mercy of the poetry.
