Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Ballet presented the penultimate performance of its Lyric Voices program, so named because all three of the ballets presented involved some form of vocalization in the accompanying music. For the final work on the program, Yuri Possokhov’s “…two united in a single soul…,” the vocal presentation took place on stage with the placing of a countertenor in and among the dancers. When this ballet was given its world premiere on March 27, that countertenor was Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, currently a San Francisco Opera Adler Fellow and recipient of the 2019 Jeffrey Thomas Award presented by American Bach Soloists.
However, for the final two performances of “…two united in a single soul…,” Cohen, who has been preparing the role of David in George Frideric Handel’s HWV 53 oratorio Saul, which will be given its first performance tonight by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale, is being replaced by Matheus Coura. Coura is probably best known here for his work with Ars Minerva, with which he sang the role of Teucro in this season’s production of Pietro Giovanni Porta’s Ifigenia in Aulide. As was observed about the premiere of Possokhov’s ballet, the countertenor has to deal not only with navigating a large space populated by very busy dancers but also a rather brutal transmogrification of Handel’s music by Russian composer Daria Novo. Like Cohen, Coura was obliged to wear a headset with a wireless microphone in order to be audible at all in the midst of Novo’s cacophonous mash-up.
In his first performance last night, Coura seemed to fit into his role far more comfortably than Cohen had done at the premiere. This was no surprise. Not only did Coura have more time to prepare, but also had he the benefit of observing in advance how he would fit into both Possokhov’s staging and Novo’s score. As a result, there was a confidence in his execution that seemed more secure than the presence Cohen had established on opening night. It also appeared that he had benefitted from a fair amount of tinkering with the mixing technology, meaning that the overall combination of Novo’s electronics, the orchestral work in the pit (which appeared to owe at least a bit to past Thomas Beecham arrangements of Handel’s music), and Coura’s headset made for a much better integrated and more coherent blend of sonorities.
If Coura had any problem, it was not of his own making. When singing with Ars Minerva, he could follow traditional practices of just intonation, blending his own intervals among those coming from the string section. Novo’s arrangement, on the other hand, called for much larger ensemble of more contemporary instruments, which, out of necessity, was dominated by equal-tempered tuning. As a result, there were clear occasions of uncertainty where Coura had not yet established how to fix his pitch. The good news was that those occasions were few in number.
As a result, Coura’s performance definitely rose above all of the other factors in “…two united in a single soul…” that had made the premiere performance so problematic. Ostensibly based on Ovid’s account of the Narcissus myth, there was little sense of narrative. Instead, costuming was designed in such a way to suggest that every dancer was an image of Narcissus, thus taking the original idea of falling in love with one’s own reflected image and inflating it to the scale of a carnival house of mirrors. This was a clever idea, but it was not strong enough to rise above Novo’s forceful musical rhetoric or any of the sophisticated Handel music that Novo allowed to peek through the curtains of her prevailing din.
The vocal work for the first two ballets on the program, Trey McIntyre’s “Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem” and Christopher Wheeldon’s “Bound To,” was more confidently situated on the pop side. Indeed, McIntyre’s ballet was set entirely to Chris Garneau singing his own music. Given that this music ran the gamut from pretentious to insipid, McIntyre deserves credit for providing an impressive display of technical challenges, all of which were given smoothly confident execution. I just wish that McIntyre had been more imaginative than simply trying to match every vocal gesture with a physical gesture of his own.
Wheeldon’s cell-phone-obsessed dancers (photograph by Erik Tomasson, from the Web page for the Lyric Voices program)
“Bound To” is framed in a for-our-times setting, in which all the dancers are deeply absorbed by (bound to) the screen content of their respective cell phones. Given the titles of the sections between the prelude and postlude sections, it would seem that Wheeldon was longing for the “better times” that preceded cellular technology. Unfortunately, the music did little to reinforce this objective; but the technical execution of the choreography was more than adequate compensation for the shallow qualities of Keaton Henson’s songs, some of which were orchestrated by Matthew Naughtin.
Given the overall title of the program, it would be fair to say that there was very little lyricism over the course of the evening; and, for the most part, the voices tended to detract, rather than enhance.
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