Yesterday Opera Parallèle released to YouTube a video of a double bill of one-act operas performed at Z Space in April of 2013. The major work on the program was Leonard Bernstein’s 1952 “Trouble in Tahiti,” for which he wrote his own libretto, structured in seven scenes for two characters (businessman Sam and his wife Dinah) and a “Greek chorus” trio for soprano, tenor, and baritone. This was preceded by Samuel Barber’s nine-minute “A Hand of Bridge,” composed in 1959, which served as an overture of sorts, this one involving two unhappily married couples. Barber’s libretto was written by his life partner, Gian Carlo Menotti.
Both of these operas are “contemporary,” set in the seemingly prosperous suburbs that emerged across the United States following World War II. The key adverb there is “seemingly;” and both librettos explore the emergence of darker currents on angst long before Mad Men developed its more extended narrative on the same theme. Viewed in the context of that more epic miniseries, one may say, at least to some extent, that brevity is the soul of wit.
That certainly is the case for “A Hand of Bridge,” which may still hold the record as the shortest opera that is regularly performed. I can certainly attest the “regularly,” since I had several opportunities to see this opera presented as an end-of-term offering at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). Each of those performances had its own unique approach to staging; and, collectively, those offerings remain some of my fondest memories of SFCM offerings.
As the title suggests, the opera is structured around playing a single hand of bridge, including both bidding and then playing the cards themselves. As the game proceeds, each character lapses into an aria of interior monologue. The first to sing is Sally (soprano Krista Wigle), who happens to be the “dummy” for this particular hand. She is followed by her husband Bill (tenor Andres Ramirez), who is preoccupied with his mistress Cymbaline (an amusingly wry choice of name by Menotti). Next comes fault-finding Geraldine (mezzo Lisa Chavez) and finally her husband David (baritone Eugene Brancoveanu), whose grasp has fallen far short of his reach.
Director Brian Staufenbiel kept the staging of this opera appropriately minimal. Unfortunately, the capture technology did not serve the production particularly well. It was hard to tell when the problems were due to diction and when they were the results of poor microphone placement, but too many of the libretto’s subtleties never came across with the necessary impact. Nicole Paiement, on the other hand, conducted with just the right sense of balance between instruments and voices.
The minimality of “A Hand of Bridge” contrasted sharply with “Trouble in Tahiti,” whose use of projected media threatened to overwhelm the libretto of the opera itself. The stage consisted of a rotating platform with different portions allotted to the setting for the different scenes. This may have worked effectively during the performances at Z Space, but it emerged more as interference in the video document. Chavez and Brancoveanu returned as the key protagonists, Dinah and Sam; and both of them delivered solid diction for the most part. Only in Chavez’ account of the Trouble in Tahiti movie did the diction lose much of its focus while contending with overload from both the media and Bernstein’s instrumentation.
Linda Chavez as Dinah describing the Trouble in Tahiti movie in front of the movie itself (photograph by Steve DeBartolomeo, courtesy of Opera Parallèle)
This is probably where I had my strongest disagreement with Staufenbiel’s approach to staging. Both the text and the music for Dinah’s account (“What a movie!”) are so vivid that projecting a reconstruction of that movie (with Dinah and Sam in the leading roles) came across as “wasteful and ridiculous excess” (as William Shakespeare would have put it). The impact of “Trouble in Tahiti” comes from how a light touch in the music barely conceals the darkness of the narrative. The media overload captured in this video ended up undermining both the music and the narrative, which seems particularly unfair when the composer and the librettist are the same person!
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