There’s a small and intriguingly private sub-genre of operas about composers. One thing is at all times up when one composer offers with one other composer’s life and music.
Topics have included Carlo Gesualdo, the sixteenth century madrigalist who murdered his spouse and her lover. César Franck and others obtained a kick out of Alessandro Stradella, the Baroque opera composer who tried to embezzle the Roman Catholic Church. Rimsky-Korsakov turned to Mozart and Salieri.
Within the fall, Los Angeles Opera will premiere Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Hildegard,” in regards to the Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Within the meantime, UCLA offered the West Coast premiere Sunday of Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” on the Nimoy Theater, with performances via Thursday.
Omar Ebrahim as Schoenberg and conductor Neal Stulberg in Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” at UCLA Nimoy Theater.
(Taso Papadakis / UCLA Herb Alpert Faculty of Music)
Machover, who directs the Opera of the Future group at MIT’s Media Lab, says he was drawn to the concept after he realized in regards to the outstanding 1935 assembly of Schoenberg and MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring “The Good Earth.” The uncompromising German inventor of the twelve-tone music had simply fled Nazi Germany, and the assembly grew to become a battle of excessive artwork and leisure.
Schoenberg and the films finally went of their unbiased instructions, however the composer did turn out to be deeply built-in in L.A. tradition, dwelling throughout the road in Brentwood from Shirley Temple, instructing at USC and UCLA, taking part in tennis with George Gershwin (whom he adored), feuding with neighbor Thomas Mann (who opposed Schoenberg’s improvements) and hanging out with the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin.
Machover’s opera begins and ends with Thalberg as a framing devise. The 90-minute opera is mainly a phantasmagoria of how Schoenberg obtained right here.
The very good libretto by Simon Robson (based mostly on a situation by Braham Murray) is a intelligent sequence of brief flashbacks of Schoenberg’s life, with movie accompaniment. Some are real looking, some fanciful. The three characters are Schoenberg, Boy and Lady. Boy and Lady symbolize all of the characters in Schoenberg’s life with many a virtuosic costume change. We witness Schoenberg, who was born 150 years in the past, beginning out as a cellist and self-taught progressive composer in his native Vienna and Berlin. He flees the Nazis and, through Paris, Boston and New York, lastly settles in Los Angeles in 1934, the place he stays for the remainder of his life.
Transferring scenes reveal his private life and its connections along with his music, however as he reaches the New World wacky ones start to creep in. He turns into Groucho and SuperJew. The movies, that are cued as if musical components, run the gamut of cinematic types and intervals. They embody historic documentary scenes, fashionable enactments, cartoons and graphics.
Machover’s rating for 15 devices is its personal complicated delirium. An inconceivable composer to pin down, Machover has written a conventional grand opera akin to “Resurrection,” based mostly on Tolstoy’s novel, and “Brain Opera,” which is simply that, utilizing electrodes in your noggin. A skilled cellist, he’s snug with acoustic devices but additionally can’t wait to get his palms on no matter loopy invention the Media Lab’s irrepressible tech visionaries give you subsequent.
Musically and dramatically, “Schoenberg in Hollywood” has Schoenbergian denseness together with new-world electronics. Machover is especially efficient in evoking each the trauma and the exhilaration in Schoenberg’s non secular progress as he reinvents himself after horrors of World Conflict I, by which he fought, and once more when confronted with new horrors of World Conflict II.
The commanding efficiency by the UCLA Herb Alpert Faculty of Music ensemble, performed by Neal Stulberg, makes the excessive/low dichotomy irrelevant, main us to a profound center floor. Choreographer Karole Armitage, who bases the Nimoy manufacturing on the unique one she created for Boston Lyric, operates, nevertheless, on extremes. Schoenberg comes throughout as both self-knowing prophet or goofball. Whimsy and wit turn out to be foolish. Marx Brothers, Wild West and SuperJew stagings are saved solely by the music.
Omar Ebrahim’s imposing and magnificently sung Schoenberg is well-suited for visionary gravitas, much less so for slapstick. Anna Davidson and Jon Lee Keenan, as Lady and Boy, activate a dime. They transfer with dancers’ ease, permitting Armitage to create a way of circulate within the episodic opera. They will do foolish, but additionally much more. Davidson was notably gripping as Schoenberg’s first spouse, Mathilde.
In some methods, Armitage appeared to be compensating for the small, naked Nimoy stage. Schoenberg little question attended motion pictures in what’s now the Nimoy, which was a movie show till its current renovation as a performing area for UCLA. It’s an intimate area, which meant that Armitage needed to do with out decor, and which can have led her to overemphasize theatrics.
Amplification added a complication. The sound stage was too loud for vocal subtleties and too flat for cautious instrumental and digital music steadiness.
Nonetheless, Schoenberg wouldn’t be Schoenberg with out obstacles to have triumphantly overcome. He modified music in Vienna and Berlin. He thrived in L.A. as composer, instructor and inspiration, becoming in as he wanted to. He remained true to his (12-tone) faculty but additionally, when it happy him, went rogue. Schoenberg even wrote a terrific MGM-style Hollywood Bowl fanfare that for no good cause by no means will get performed.
Might “Schoenberg in Hollywood” be a wake-up name? Shockingly, Schoenberg stays starless on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame.
