Even earlier than information of his dying broke Thursday, the spirit of director David Lynch hovered over the Prototype Pageant. For 12 years, this annual showcase of experimental opera and musical theater has obeyed a Lynchian aesthetic, with works that reveal emotional extremes and blur the boundaries of actuality.
However this yr’s pageant, which ran by way of Sunday at areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn, included an overt homage to Lynch, full with the severed ear and crawling ants that in “Blue Velvet” beckoned throughout a suburban meadow to a hidden thriller. Right here they appeared within the gothic rock opera movie by David T. Little “Black Lodge” as a part of the hallucinations of a tormented soul.
Not each present at this yr’s pageant was as darkly surreal as “Black Lodge.” Stylistically, the works embrace references to hip-hop, the Seaside Boys, Urdu ghazals and psychedelic Cuban blues. However what makes Prototype such a generative pressure in opera is its deal with the human voice in all its magnificence and strangeness.
Black Lodge
Billed as a gothic industrial rock opera, “Black Lodge” was written for the distinctive voice of Timur Bekbosunov alongside together with his glam rock band the Dime Museum. The work takes the type of a track cycle, tracing the nightmarish journey of a psychotic thoughts caught in a liminal state between life and dying. The libretto is by the poet Anne Waldman, who channels the author William S. Burroughs along with Lynch and others.
In 2022 The Black Hut was launched as a hallucinatory movie directed by Michael Joseph McQuilken, starring Timur who’s subjected to elaborate creative types of torture involving potter’s clay and knitting needles. At BRIC in Brooklyn, the movie was proven in a live-screen model with costumed musicians on stage. The presence of those musicians hardly made a dramatic impression – McQuilken’s movie is simply too efficient by itself – however their dwell efficiency revealed the music’s shattering ferocity. Timur’s voice is a marvel of expressive intonations, from golden falsetto and the velvet of a wolf in sheep’s clothes to pained screams and eerie breaths.
In a grove
The spotlight of the pageant was “In the Grove” by Christopher Cerrone, a haunting psychological thriller with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann at La MaMa. (This manufacturing had its Pittsburgh premiere in 2022.) The opera relies on a narrative by Ryunosuke Akutagawa which chronicles the lethal encounter between an outlaw and a married couple from varied factors of view, together with that of the murdered husband talking by way of a medium. Every retelling deepens the thriller of how the person died and what transpired between the girl and the stranger.
The opera is ready in a forest in Nineteenth-century America ravaged by forest fires. The primary sounds are an digital fog that swirls like a sonic illustration of the dry ice enveloping set designer Mimi Lien’s slender catwalk, intersected by movable glass. The music (carried out by the Metropolis Ensemble) grows out of this white noise. Over the course of the opera, because the characters give their testimonies, the tense-toned music behaves like a mass that rises and falls, ponders and pounces, however by no means subsides.
Stylized but sensual, the vocal strains slide throughout the floor of this instrumental texture. The vocal writing has an old style magnificence that’s artfully distorted at essential moments by digital processing. Typically it is just a slight tremor or bending of the pitch that reveals the intervention of machines. However when baritone John Brancy, darkly erotic because the outlaw, offers his testimony, his low notes reverberate with a nightmarish hum.
The excellent forged additionally included tenor Paul Appleby’s booming lyricism, Michaela Bennett’s luxuriously cool soprano and Chuanyuan Liu’s iridescent countertenor as monk and medium. The rating is eerily indifferent from the singers: although particular person devices could double a line and even an remoted be aware sung by one of many characters, the music does not reveal whether or not it believes—if we must always imagine—anybody.
Eat the doc
The one world premiere this yr was Eat the Doc by composer John Glover and librettist Kelly Rourke. It’s primarily based on 2006 a novel by Dana Spiotta about two anti-Vietnam Warfare activists, Bobby and Mary, who go underground after one in all their explosive gadgets kills an unintended goal.
Just like the novel, the opera jumps forwards and backwards between the Nineteen Seventies and the late Nineties, when new protest actions—towards capitalism, local weather change, meat—boil round Bobby and Mary, ultimately forcing them out. Spiotta’s ebook is full of a taut irony that cuts by way of the narcissism of pupil politics even because it raises tough ethical questions. In opera, this rigidity offers solution to a cheerful eclecticism of opinions and musical kinds that by no means fairly coalesce into perspective.
Within the novel, the Seaside Boys take the central position of showing the middle-aged Mary’s identification to her record-loving teenage son. Glover’s rating—for rock band, piano and acoustic strings—evokes pop idioms whereas politely sidestepping direct citation. The forged, usually multi-generational, appeared to maneuver out and in of pop and classical sound manufacturing with ease, with standout performances from tenor Michael Kuhn and bass-baritone Paul Choe Min-Chul Ahn. However as a result of these forays into pop vocals require shut amplification, situations of extra operatic singing sounded awkwardly compressed by the sound know-how.
The story unfolds in fast-paced scenes inside one set, an anarchist bookstore (designed by Peiyi Wong). Glover’s music strikes at a practical clip from one set quantity to the following. These are often songs with a catchy refrain wherein varied characters insert strains revealing data or private ideas. However as a result of these numbers are sometimes written as pastiche, the connective tissue of the rating, the music that ought to be Glover’s most genuine, fades into the background.
A nation of optimistic vibes
A extra pointed name to activism was Sol Ruiz’s Constructive Vibe Nation, a “guaguanco rock opera” offered within the extra intimate Dorothy B. Williams HERE. This staged track cycle loosely tells the story of a time-traveling citizen of a future Miami with a successful mixture of Caribbean rhythms and lavish steampunk costumes.
Sung principally in Spanish with projected translations, the songs discover intergenerational trauma and therapeutic, arming Ruiz’s character with ancestors to take care of local weather change, colonialism and technological overreach, amongst different ills. What holds him collectively is her voice: loud and guttural, it splits in a flash into anguish, anger or ecstasy.
Evening administration
Later within the week, HERE hosted Pakistani American singer-songwriter Arooj Aftab, who carried out her Grammy-nominated album Evening Reign alongside picks from earlier recordings in a cabaret setting. Aftab can also be a gifted and seemingly reluctant comic who retains his viewers at arm’s size with biting humor and disarming self-awareness.
Whereas most of her songs are in Urdu, Aftab gives neither summaries nor subtitles. It was her means of defending herself from exoticism, she stated, and in addition to, she added, all she ever wished was to be handled like Billie Eilish. This left the non-Urdu audio system to deal with the pure intoxicating sound of the music with its mixture of South Asian classical singing and jazz shimmering with the surprising mixture of bass, drums and harp.
from telecine
One other memorable stylistic mash-up got here within the type of “from telecine”, a 10-minute hip-hop opera video produced by Catapult Opera. In it, bass-baritone and composer Harry Laurent trains his gaze on the cut up consciousness of a black man, torn between bloody vigilantism and self-discipline. The combo of classically skilled singing and rapping, a few of which is illuminated with choral textures, works splendidly on this context of a dream sequence the place the strains between sleep and aware inside dialogue are blurred, a spot the place David Lynch would really feel proper at residence you might be
