Chorus Pro Musica goes to Chichester

Chorus Pro Musica at a previous performance.

I'm quite late with an appreciation of Chorus Pro Musica, and their "Poets and Psalms" program at Old South Church two (!) weekends ago.

I left the program thrilled, frankly, after encountering - in a row - three of the great choral works of the twentieth century: Charles Ives' Psalm 90, Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms (two of these, btw - the Britten and the Bernstein - were commissioned by the same vicar, Walter Hussey, who therefore has his own niche in the cathedral of choral music). There was also a light opener to the program, Night, Sleep and the Stars, by Daniel Gawthrop, from a text by Walt Whitman, which was lovely in its way, but paled next to its fellows in performance.

Taken together these amounted to some very heavy lifting for Chorus Pro Musica, which I suppose is an "amateur" chorus - if by amateur you mean motivated by love, not lucre, as the original Latin tells us.  Their music director, Betsy Burleigh, is obviously a lady of talent and ambition, with a career that spans several chorales and several American cities (word has it, alas, she's moving on soon), and she drew from her assembled forces and soloists (bass David Godkin did particularly well) clear, vibrant tone and reliably secure intonation, even in the tricky passages of the Ives and Bernstein (alas, one sweet voice got a little lost in an exposed passage, but found a way home again).

Like a lot of large, good choruses, however, Chorus Pro Musica grew a little fuzzy when it came to diction (okay, some of this text was in Hebrew) and more importantly the complicated polyrhythms demanded by Ives and Bernstein, which here sometimes lacked a clean, syncopated edge.

But at what point does "good enough" become "great" despite its shortcomings?  Because Chorus Pro Musica often passed that bar, wherever it is.  And the sad fact is that there is no "professional" chorus dedicated to this repertoire - which contains some of the greatest music of the twentieth century.  For some reason choruses aren't "cool," I suppose, so there's no general clamor for this legacy - an attitude which I wish would change (I mean it happened for cupcakes, didn't it, so why not chorales?).

And to be honest you simply cannot discount the experience of hearing a complex statement on faith like Ives's Psalm 90 in an actual church, particularly one as spectacular as Old South.  Legend has it this is the voice of Moses himself, which Ives honors with a musical statement shaped into stern, muscular metaphors - a deep "C," for instance, sounds throughout the piece from the organ (skillfully played by Jacob Street) as a reminder of God's continual presence, and at times, to conjure the many confusing facets of our relationship to the divine, the composer splits his chorus up into as many as 22 separate voices.  Psalm 90 closes with one of Ives' greatest conceits: church bells ring against the dying sound of the chorus, but they're dissonant - a poignant reminder of the flaws of the faithful.

In contrast, Benjamin Britten limns the line between confidence and madness in Rejoice in the Lamb, which is set to a remarkable, and disturbing, text by one Christopher Smart, who wrote it from within the walls of an eighteenth century asylum.  Thus it's no surprise the piece swings from ecstasy ("Hallelujah . . . from the heavenly harp in sweetness and magnifical and mighty!") to crackpot whimsy ("For I will consider my cat Jeoffry . . . for he knows that God is his Saviour,") to piercing cries for salvation from the madhouse ("For I am under the same accusation as my Savior - for they said, he is beside himself . . . and the watchman smites me with his staff!").  Britten loved this text (you can feel it in his attentive settings) - he even asked that parts be read at his memorial service - and it's easy to see why; rarely have essential questions of sanity and faith been probed so naively, yet so powerfully.

Finally there was Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, which has a claim to being the most gorgeous thing this great composer ever wrote.  Perhaps tellingly, its loveliest passages were drawn from melodies he had composed, but discarded, for West Side Story (or the unrealized musical The Skin of Our Teeth); and the text of course is a mosaic of psalms set in juxtaposition - sometimes simplistic juxtaposition, to be honest, but the music always carries us over that bump (below is a rendition of the incredibly beautiful Psalm 23/Psalm 2 "second movement," featuring countertenor Lawrence Zazzo).  The work is famously ravishing throughout, and closes with a hushed fade on the word "unity," as the talented accompanying musicians (not only Street on organ, but Judy Saiki Couture on harp and Craig McNutt on percussion) resolved to a peaceful major chord.  It made a haunting, memorable close to what had been quite a moving concert.  You can hear Chorus Pro Musica next in "A Victorian Christmas," again at Old South Church on December 21.


The most gorgeous thing Bernstein ever wrote?  Possibly.

Titania in her bower in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Right now Hub audiences have the unusual chance to take in the second of two genius-on-genius Midsummer Night's Dream mash-ups: after Boston Ballet's splendid mounting of Balanchine's version last month, we can now savor Benjamin Britten's gorgeous response to the same masterpiece at Boston Lyric Opera (through this weekend at the Schubert).

It's pretty much agreed that both these derivative works are masterpieces in their own rights - and what's more, they serve as conceptual bookends for their expansive source. Balanchine stresses the romance and structure of Shakespeare's mother of all romantic comedies (and all but ignores its goofy "mechanicals"); Britten, meanwhile, emphasizes the work's infinite variety rather than its unity - musically, he conjures a different sound-garden, in fact, for each "cast" of characters.  And surprisingly he punches up the comedy, particularly the baggy-pants stuff; indeed the mechanicals are all but center-stage much of the time, and their travesty of the "tragedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe becomes the opera's hilarious climax.

It's here that the BLO soars to the same brilliant level it achieved in recent productions of Agrippina and The Emperor of Atlantis (it occurs to me that comedy may be their strong suit). But at first it seems director Tazewell Thompson and set designer John Conklin are a little lost in the woods themselves, and it takes the production a long time - indeed, the entire first act - to come together. The singing, however, is first-rate throughout, and Britten's instrumental writing is so lustrous that classical fans may not mind the conceptual confusion unfolding on stage.

No doubt Thompson and Conklin thought they were simply taking a note from Britten's own approach: just as the composer devised individual sound-scapes for Midsummer's different characters, so Conklin and Thompson seem to have concocted a separate look for each as well.  (Perhaps they also think that the "contradictions, confusions, and disguises" that afflict the play's characters should afflict the audience, too.)  Thus the lovers are roughly Edwardian, while Oberon and Titania seem more historic and fanciful; meanwhile the fairies look to be modeled on the Boy Scouts.  Odder still are the many design gambits Conklin offers and then discards: the general mood is mod and coolly geometric, but sometimes the furniture grows or shrinks like decor from Alice in Wonderland, and when the mechanicals wander through the forest, the trees are labeled "TREES" (apparently because Bottom and his crew are so literal-minded).  The moon remains an organizing motif, at least - but when things grow more surreal after Bottom's transformation, even it gets tricked out with a Man Ray photograph - again, just in case we don't "get it." 

A few of the contradictions and confusions in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo(s) by Erik Jacobs.

These ideas aren't "wrong," exactly, it's just that they keep calling attention to themselves, and begin to seem too clever by half - and that makes the opera feel disjointed and slightly incoherent, when actually Shakespeare's complex text and Britten's delicately ambiguous music are both highly unified beneath their surface effects.  (For the record, the opera's underlying style is something like Purcell gone modern - and it's worth noting that this is a rare case in which a Shakespearean opera is based on Shakespeare's own text, a stunning achievement in and of itself.)  There are some lovely vocals to savor, from the sweet countertenor of John Gaston's Oberon to Nadine Sierra's languidly plush turn as Titania, to Andrew Shore's robustly rendered bully of a Bottom.  And the children of the PALS Children's Chorus charmed whenever they sang.  Still, the performances somehow couldn't make much headway against a persistent sense of conceptual drift; and it didn't help that stage director Thompson and new music director David Angus both favored a very measured pace - which only gave us plenty of time to wonder what, exactly, they were getting at.

A heartbroken Thisbe (Matthew DiBattista) mourns the fallen Pyramus (Andrew Shore).

Luckily, things turned a corner at intermission; Britten's music gathers more dramatic momentum, and Conklin settled on a design motif, and the lovers got a wonderfully punchy scene to strut their stuff (that's Chad A. Johnson, Heather Johnson, Susanna Phillips, and the clarion-voiced Matthew Worth, above).  Best of all, the mechanicals did a boffo job with "Pyramus and Thisbe."  It's a little surprising to realize that Shakespeare actually invented "camp" some four hundred years ago with this little skit (it even includes what may be the stage's first drag queen), but Britten understood its true nature all too well, and offers up a hilarious parody of classic bel canto opera, complete with a mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor (above left), in which Lucia is a brawny lad with a mop on his head (played originally by Britten's lover/librettist, Peter Pears).   Here the whole sequence was pure perfection - balancing beautifully Shakespeare's point about perspective being everything in romance with his deeper affection for the faith that makes all romantic (and artistic) feeling possible.  And thus somehow Britten and Boston Lyric Opera brought off the depth of this great work as few theatrical productions do, making this Midsummer something of a dream in the end.

Boston Lyric Opera breaks out

The sacred meets the profane in The Turn of the Screw. Photos by Jeffrey Dunn.

It was nice to see that with The Turn of the Screw, local critics have once again caught up with me (sorry for the self-congratulation, Bill!). About a year and a half ago I began raving about Boston Lyric Opera, and let's just say I was met with polite disdain - one critic actually snickered at my enthusiasm; didn't I realize how out of step I was? Now, of course, everyone thinks BLO is brilliant - one reviewer has even said their transition began "about two years ago!" Oh, well. This whole process moved faster for BLO than it did for the Boston Ballet, so maybe that's progress!

But back to The Turn of the Screw, which proved deeply satisfying both musically and intellectually. The work is putatively sourced, of course, in the famous Henry James novella, which cleverly hinges on the question of whether a pair of sexually-charged ghosts haunting a governess's charges are, in fact, "real," or just products of her own repressed psychology. Composer Benjamin Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper gave the screw an extra twist, however, by nearly-explicitly linking the material to Britten's own life and issues, and BLO seemed unafraid to let this very loaded scenario unfold onstage.

Britten, of course, was a (semi-) closeted gay composer who notoriously surrounded himself with boys, both on-stage and off. From Peter Grimes to Death in Venice, every single Britten opera pivots on a young boy (all in all, he wrote them into some 30 works), and Britten spent his life - which he shared with tenor Peter Pears - perennially involved professionally and psychologically with one young man after another. Boston's own Benjamin Zander was one Britten protégé, as was the movie actor David Hemmings (who originated the role of Miles in Turn of the Screw).

All this only sets Britten squarely in a long line of artists obsessed with very young men or women in a troubling way (Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Dodgson and J.M. Barrie come immediately to mind, not to mention Michael Jackson, Bill Wyman and Roman Polanski!). But before we actually make that leap to the likes of Roman Polanski, we have to remember that even though it's undeniable Britten was possessed by an infantile psycho-sexual complex, none of "Britten's boys" ever accused him of abuse (his adult lover Pears, it seems, operated as a kind of chaperone). When librettist Eric Crozier fell out with Britten, in fact, it was over his emotional, not sexual, connection to the boys. And indeed, the composer's history was one of sometimes abruptly dropping his young charges once their voices broke, or some other even purer boy soprano appeared on the scene - which was psychologically crushing to his former favorites. So it's not a pretty picture, even if it was a perversely chaste one.

And somewhere Britten knew that - at least based on the evidence of The Turn of the Screw. For he and Piper all but drop the crux of the novella - whether or not "Miss Giddens" is "imagining things." In the James original, we never leave the governess's perspective, and only see the ghosts from her P.O.V.; in Britten, the ghosts have their own, individual scenes with the kids - and even a long scene by themselves. They're real all right. And BLO stage director Sam Helfrich took this new twist and ran with it all the way to the basement of the Park Plaza Castle (BLO's temporary digs for this production), where his Quint and Miss Jessel hung out in utterly quotidian dishabille, smoking cigarettes and lazing on a four-poster. We knew this was happening beneath us because the images of these almost too-too-solid lovers were beamed onto large video screens before us (see above), so that we were watching both the opera's text and subtext simultaneously.

This troubled many critics, but I don't think they were being too perceptive. It's true that Helfrich's gambit undercut the spookiness of the Park-Plaza-Castle setting, and robbed the ghosts of the eerie glamour they enjoyed in such sophisticated entertainments as The Innocents (at left), Jack Clayton's brilliant film version of the story. But it matched precisely Britten's intent: to give a dislocated sense of double meaning to everything in the opera. Indeed, this may be the most inspired example of what Wagner called gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork," I've ever seen: the staging precisely mirrored not just the dramatic idea of the piece, but its musical idea as well.

Why is this so? Because Britten's score floats between two worlds, too. The composer opens The Turn of the Screw with what sounds like a standard Schoenberg-style tone row, but configured so that its permutations remain tonal throughout the opera - in fact, they float between two keys (A minor and A-flat major, according to Bettina Norton and Michael Kennedy). So as you can see, there's a whole lotta duality goin' on, which is why the combined video-and-live-action effects were so weirdly resonant.

What gives an added horrific sheen to the proceedings is that what shards of actual melody Britten gives us are often based on children's songs, or what sounds like sacred chant; the final effect is of dislocated sacred music cast over utterly profane action, through which James's tormented governess floats helplessly, like a disembodied conscience. Is it too much to map this weirdly contradictory atmosphere to Britten's own situation? Not when the ghosts seem more interested in young Flora and Miles than each other, I'd argue, and when the tenor, Vale Rideout, not only sounds but even looks a bit like Peter Pears. Thus it was hard not to read this Turn of the Screw as not so much an adaptation of James as an evocation of the Britten/Pears environment - devoted to sacred innocence, but underpinned by a sexuality only just kept in check; onstage we may have been watching two little children singing with aching purity - but behind them we could also make out two corresponding slatterns making love on a bed.

It's frankly hard to imagine any local theatre company (particularly the gay ones!) making a statement this sophisticated about a situation so politically and morally fraught; that alone made The Turn of the Screw memorable as an occasion of truly adult theatre. That the evening was also gloriously sung, and ably played, was to me the icing on the cake. Soprano Emily Pulley, a regular at the Met, proved scarier in her intensity than any of the supernatural forces she battled, and came apart utterly convincingly, even while deploying a flexible soprano of both richness and power. Meanwhile veteran mezzo Joyce Castle (at left, with Pulley), who is celebrating 40 years on the operatic stage, provided a sturdily sympathetic Mrs. Grose. As Quint, Rideout was vocally almost eerily appropriate, as noted, and bravely edged toward a sense of perversity that seemed malevolent yet oddly vulnerable. There was less to do for Miss Jessel, but Rebecca Nash, making her American debut after a series of raves in Europe, revealed a commanding soprano that justified the hype. Young Flora was played by the adult Kathryn Skemp, who was nevertheless physically and emotionally quite convincing as a young girl; alas, at times her trained soprano sometimes overwhelmed Miles, but generally one could feel her keeping in appropriate balance. On the night I attended, I caught the self-possessed Ryan Williams as the possessed little boy, exuding a confidence which made his piping treble all the more poignant. In the "pit," as it were (the orchestra was visible throughout - another good idea), Andrew Bisantz conducted sensitively and with a strong sense of drama.

Overall this was a triumph in just about every way, and gave some idea of what Boston Lyric Opera, with the greatest resources of any opera company in the city, can do with sophisticated repertory. The wonderful Ariadne auf Naxos is next, and something tells me tickets are already going fast.