Anthony Gatto Takes on Gertrude Stein

courtesy of Naxos of America

Tomorrow New Focus Recordings will release Anthony Gatto’s reworking of his fully-staged opera The Making of Americans into a “radio opera” setting. The original opera was premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2008. The opera takes its title from a “novel” by Gertrude Stein of the same name. As usual, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for the new album.

As Gatto puts it in his booklet notes, the version on this new recording “compresses, excerpts, and transforms my original opera.” It is worth nothing that all three of those processes may be viewed as consistent with Stein’s own approach to writing. The abridged Harcourt edition, published in 1934 after the first publication in Paris of the entire novel almost a decade earlier, included, on the title page, the subtitle The Hersland Family. The narrative covers the lives of a single generation of that family, Alfred, his wife Julia, his sister Martha, and his brother David.

However, as those familiar with operas based on Stein texts by Virgil Thomson and Al Carmines probably know, Stein was rarely content to write straightforward narrative. Thus, the narrative itself is frequently dispatched to the background while Stein plays out extended and heavily repeated tropes. In her day Stein’s repetitive techniques were frequently derided, very much in a spirit similar to the attacks on the “repetitive structures” of Philip Glass.

In this context Gatto did Stein a great service by incorporating recordings of Stein reading passages from her novel. The attentive listener quickly appreciates that, while the words may be repeated, the inflections of Stein’s delivery weave in and around the words themselves with virtuoso qualities that can be traced all the way to the solo violin music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. As a result, listener attention is similarly drawn to the techniques of the seven vocalists in their delivery of Gatto’s libretto.

The accompanying booklet includes the complete libretto of this new revised version. Initially, I was concerned that the text itself was too rich for radio listening without a libretto at hand. However, when reflecting on the “secondary” role of the narrative itself and the significance of imaginatively inflected renderings of the text, I found that there was little need to keep consulting the libretto while listening.

Such awareness of vocal sonority is enhanced by Gatto’s use of limited instrumental resources. The strings are the members of the JACK Quartet: violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland. They are complemented by the four Zeitgeist musicians: pianist Shannon Wettstein, Patrick O’Keefe on bass clarinet, and two percussionists, Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd. There also appear to be brief electronic interjections, but it would not surprise me to learn that these were defects in the recording process.

Given that this week began with my impressions of annoyance with the production of Thomson’s second Stein opera, The Mother of Us All, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I have to say that The Making of Americans left me with the comforting feeling of an ensemble that knew how to get things right.