LCCE’s Disappointing Operatic Muddle

Last night at Z Space, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) presented the first of two performances of Dorothea and Artemisia, named after the leading characters in two one-act operas, both being given world premiere performances. The first name in that title is that of Dorothea Lange, who was the only character in Christopher Stark’s “micro opera” “From the Field.” The intermission was then followed by “Artemisia,” a longer (75 minutes) composition by Laura Schwendinger, whose cast included not only the title character, the seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, but also a few of her contemporaries and subjects from her paintings “brought to life.”

The more coherent of these two offerings was “From the Field.” Stark worked with a libretto by his sister Megan, which unfolded a narrative of timely agitprop in which Lange’s efforts as a photographer turned out to be secondary. If we were still a society whose sense of history extended further back than the emergence of 4G technology, our culture would have grasped the significance of a title that would have been more appropriate for Stark’s opera, “How the United States Government Created the Dust Bowl.”

Lange’s contribution to this story involved her documenting photographs of the aridity of the American West to support John Wesley Powell’s proposal for a vast irrigation project. Congress, under the influence of powerful businessmen who could not have cared less about Lange’s photographic evidence and Powell’s logical reasoning, failed to approve Powell’s plan under the jingoistic logic that the American farmer could grow anything anywhere. Catastrophe ensued, leaving John Steinbeck in its wake to document the consequences.

In this context it seemed a bit inconsistent to have Lange as the only character. We see her taking photographs and then working in her darkroom (one of those concepts that is probably as alien to the current generation as is the idea of a buggy whip); but her words lend little, if anything, to the libretto’s narrative. Indeed, words only really signify in the final scene, which is a filmed interview with climate scientist Steven Running, discussing the consequences of global warning.

However, if there was not that much to what unfolded on stage, the thickly interleaved textures composed for violinist Anna Presler and cellist Leighton Fong provided just the right context for the urgency of the narrative. Lange’s part was sung by Nikki Einfeld, whose delivery tended to establish a still center around which Presler and Fong energetically orbited. Thus, while the whole affair may have been political didacticism, Stark’s musical approach to the didactic still emerged with a coherent logic given a compelling execution by its performers.

Gentileschi’s 1610 Susanna and the Elders (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

On the other hand both the music by Schwendinger and the libretto by Ginger Strand were so all over the map that it was unclear what motivated them to begin their project in the first place. The basic narrative seemed to explore a parallel between Gentileschi’s first known painting, Susanna and the Elders (shown above); and her own rape by Agostino Tassi. That parallel is realized by having both Susanna and the two Elders (one, sung by Jonathan Smucker, also taking the role of Tassi) come to life.

This idea is clever enough, even if Strand’s approach to the libretto tends to play fast and loose with what little we have by way of historical record. Unfortunately, the libretto itself tends to harp on its basic ideas about the difficulties of a woman being an established painter in the seventeenth century with so much repetition that the overall result is tedious, rather than provocative. As a result, Schwendinger’s score muddles its way through the scenario with the same incoherence encountered in the text. After over an hour of these ponderous repetitions, once came away with a deeper appreciation of how much Stark and his sister had managed to express in so little time.