Tragedy Makes for the Peak of Drama
‘Everest’ tells the true story of
three climbers trapped on that mountain in a blizzard in May 1996.
By Heidi Waleson
Dallas
‘Everest,” a remarkable first opera
by the British composer Joby Talbot, which had its world premiere at the Dallas
Opera on Friday, forges art from a contemporary tragedy. Based on the true
story of three climbers trapped on Mount Everest in a blizzard in May 1996 (the
expedition that was chronicled by Jon Krakauer in “Into Thin Air”), this
70-minute juggernaut makes you feel disturbingly in the moment, living—and
dying—along with the characters.
Gene Scheer’s taut, streamlined
libretto, drawn from interviews with survivors, focuses on two situations: Rob
Hall (the expedition leader) and Doug Hansen push on to the summit even though
Doug is unwell, and Beck Weathers stays behind and gets lost. The fragmentation
of the narrative builds suspense, and the stories are welded together by a
chorus that echoes and questions the climbers. It also counts out the minutes
of that fateful day—“2:59. 3:06. 3:12”—a flat rendition of time ticking away,
when every second matters for survival. Only at the end do we understand,
chillingly, that the chorus represents the spirits of those who have died on
Everest, and that “it’s time to add another name.”
This is no heroic narrative. The
motivations of the climbers are often dark: Doug sings, “I wanted the pain of
wanting this to go away forever”; Beck relates how only extreme activity can free
him from the “black dog” of depression. Yet we also hear the ecstatic side of
the journey from the hallucinating Beck, who talks about the stars being so
close that it is “like walking inside the Milky Way.” The people back
home—Beck’s young daughter, Meg, and Rob’s pregnant wife, Jan—supply another
perspective on these driven men, and how far away they are from everyday life.
The opera begins with the sound of
static, and then a single pitch rises gradually out of the orchestra, led with
verve and precision by Nicole Paiement. Snippets of music come together into a
groan, like the ominous voice of the mountain. Mr. Talbot has a gift for
tension and pacing, and he knows when to let the orchestra roar and heave (the
repeated percussive figure as the storm hits), and when to make it beautiful
(the arpeggios as Beck describes the sunrise). He also knows when to rein it
in. When Rob calls down to the base camp, “Can anyone hear me?” the orchestra
goes silent. Doug is dead; it is clear that soon Rob will be too.
The excellent cast made fine work of
Mr. Talbot’s expressive vocal writing. Andrew Bidlack’s sweet tenor brought a
touching vulnerability to Rob. The opera’s most devastating passage was his
final telephone conversation with Jan, the powerful Sasha Cooke, as he is dying
on the mountain, when the two let go of their anguish to simply comfort each
other. Kevin Burdette was colorful as Beck, who, against all odds, saves
himself; Craig Verm was effective as the failing Doug; and Julia Rose Arduino
was a piquant, jump-roping Meg, whose image draws her father back from the
brink. Solo moments with chorus, and ensembles such as the quartet of Rob,
Doug, Jan and Beck singing “Too easy to die,” made for additional vocal
variety, and the contrast of in-the-moment suspense with Beck’s surreal
imaginings built a sense of complex, all-encompassing tragedy.
Leonard Foglia’s staging brilliantly
captured the immediacy and peril of the piece. The singers had to clamber
around Robert Brill’s towering, suspended set, made of large cubes jumbled atop
each other, and you could feel their difficulty in getting from one to the
next. Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections of contour maps, swirling snow flakes,
even colored microscope slides (Beck, a pathologist, has a delirious aria about
them) animated the scenes, as did Christopher Akerlind’s moody lighting and
David C. Woolard’s apt costumes.
Although it is relatively short,
“Everest” needed no companion piece, but the company chose to open the evening
with Act IV from Alfredo Catalani’s “La Wally” (1892). The surface
commonalities between the two (there’s a mountain, and people die on it) could
not make up for the weakness of the earlier opera and the startlingly
amateurish quality of its production.
“La Wally” is a verismo diva vehicle
and the company decided to graft its most famous moment, the Act I aria “Ebben,
ne andrò lontana,” onto the beginning of Act IV to give the soprano more to do,
and perhaps to remind us of the 1981 cult movie “Diva” in which it played a
central role. The original soprano and tenor both dropped out of the project,
requiring some last-minute replacements, and while Mary Elizabeth Williams
acquitted herself respectably as Wally, Rodrigo Garciarroyo bellowed and
wobbled fearsomely as her sometime beloved Giuseppe. Anthony Barrese was the
tub-thumping conductor. Director Candace Evans was presumably responsible for
the semaphoric acting style; the “Everest” design team supplied an amateurish
collection of slopes that looked like high-school sets; and Wally appeared
perilously underdressed for mountaineering in an evening gown and cloak. If
nothing else, this dubious exercise demonstrated that a well-executed
contemporary opera is much more exciting and immediate than the artifice of
bottom-drawer 19th-century repertoire.
Ms. Waleson writes about opera for
the Journal.
No comments:
Post a Comment