Russian Surrealist Chamber Opera from Erling Wold

Last month saw the release by MinMax Music of “UKSUS” (vinegar), a chamber opera by Erling Wold. The libretto is a mixture of stories and poems by writers affiliated with OBERIU, an acronym in Russian for “Union of Real Art.” The group was founded in 1928 by Russian writers Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky; and calling it a “union” may well have been a satirical jab at the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The libretto was compiled by the VADA team of Yulia Izmaylova and Felix Strasser with contributions by not only Kharms and Vvedensky but also Igor Bakhterev, Leonid Lipavsky, Marina Malyc, Konstantin Vaginov, and Nikolaj Zabolocky. Most of it is either recited or sung in English, with occasional interjections in Russian and German and a few instances that break down into syllables.

from the Oakland Opera Theater performance of “UKSUS” (courtesy of Erling Wold)

Here in the Bay Area “UKSUS” was first performed by the Oakland Opera Theater late in the summer of 2016. Wold has a gift for expressing wit through upbeat eclecticism; and his score, which floats freely (and sometimes unexpectedly) from one genre to another, meshes excellently with the OBERIU approach to surrealism as represented in the VADA libretto. Nevertheless, as the above photograph from the Oakland performance suggests, this is an opera in which the staging is as important as the music, if not more so. On the other hand the booklet that accompanies the CD includes the entire libretto, allowing the listener to appreciate all of the exchanges between the wordplay (including the texts delivered with a Russian accent) and the music.

As had been the case with the collaboration between Igor Stravinsky and Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, “L’Histoire du soldat” (the soldier’s tale), reduced resources make the listening experience particularly compelling. Indeed, like Stravinsky, Wold scored the music for only seven instruments: clarinet (Beth Custer), trumpet (Chris Grady), percussion (Joel Davel), accordion (Diana Strong), guitar (John Schott), violin (Elzbieta Polak), and bass (Lisa Mezzacappa). The vocalists, in turn, do “double duty” as both narrators and characters, following the tradition of “Story Theatre” developed by Paul Sills half a century ago. Those vocalists are Timur Bekbosunov, Laura Bohn, Nikola Printz, Bob Ernst, Jim Cave, and Roham Shaikhani. Finally, for two of the numbers, the septet is doubled in its resources with the addition of another seven performers: Richard Klammer (trumpet and voice), Stefan Gferer (bass), Primus Sitter (guitar), Emil Kristof (drums), Michael Erian (saxophone and clarinet), Anton Tonč Feinig (electric piano and accordion), and Elisabeth Wöhrer (violin).

The opera is structured into four sections called “Boxes” and numbered from zero to three (yet another instance of surrealist eccentricity). As already observed, the printed libretto allows the listener to take advantage of enjoying the many amusing ways in which the text unfolds. This is potentially advantageous, since a “real-time” delivery of the text may go by too fast for the listener to appreciate many of the games being played. In other words there is more than enough to enjoy in this recording, most likely more that can be apprehended in the immediacy of performance.