Last week, when I wrote about the San Francisco Opera opening night revival performance of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, my operative adjective was “torpid.” Revisiting the production yesterday afternoon left me with more positive impressions, but I suspect that those impressions had more to do with technical matters than either the interpretation of the music or the staging of the narrative. Some readers may recall that my wife and I have box seats for our subscription, and I always relish the opportunity to view what is happening in the orchestra pit along with what is happening on the stage. On this particular occasion, both those sites benefitted from my “elevated” perspective.
Where the music is concerned, Sheng has composed for a large ensemble that borders on massive. As might be expected, this included a richly diverse assortment of both Asian and Western percussion instruments, so many that most of them were out of view in the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, being above the pit enhanced the perception of the full palette of sonorities that rose “vertically” to the upper-level seating than “horizontally” to the orchestra rows. This turned out to involve more than just percussion diversity. One of the more intimate moments on stage was accompanied by a ravishing cello solo played by David Kadarauch; and the “vertical aspect” may have had a hand in reinforcing that instrumental moment. Similarly, when experiencing the performance from above, one was more aware of the interplay of brass and winds to evoke the “Chinese rhetoric” of Sheng’s score.
The screen-painting imagery of one of the Dream of the Red Chamber sets (set designed by Tim Yip, (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)
Where the stage itself was concerned, an elevated viewpoint afforded an enhanced impression of how three-dimensional the action was. Mind you, sitting at orchestra level frequently registered convincing impressions of images of both the characters and their settings that could have been painted on a screen. However, that sense of a screen vanished when one could rise above ground level. One could then appreciate interplays among the characters that brought more impact to the staging by Stan Lai.
Thus, for better or worse, this was a situation in which what met both the eye and the ear depended heavily on one’s vantage point. Once both of those senses have been duly engaged, mind is in a better position to negotiate all the convolutions in the libretto that Sheng prepared in working with David Henry Hwang. That said, the narrative still leaves the impression of a soap opera; but there is never a well-defined line that separates literary fiction from soap opera!
This experience reminded me of the adaptation of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, by Jean-Claude Carrière, a drama roughly nine hours in duration that was staged by Peter Brook in three segments. Carrière’s text was subsequently translated into English by Brook, and my wife and I saw that version during the Los Angeles Festival back in the Eighties. About five years later, when we were living in Singapore, we discovered that an Indian television company had turned the whole thing into a soap opera with half-hour episodes. Since we entered those broadcasts in the middle, it was good to recall the full scope of the narrative; but the soap-opera technique worked surprisingly well. This left me wondering yesterday whether Dream of the Red Chamber could be presented just as effectively through the “bite-sized chunks” of soap opera as through the extended durations of grand opera!
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