Home Music Reverse-Angle Double Vision: The Comet/Poppea

Reverse-Angle Double Vision: The Comet/Poppea

by thenowvibe_admin

If you like opera, how about two at once? If you don’t like opera, how about two at once? In The Comet/Poppea, Yuval Sharon, the ever-inquisitive director and rethinker of the art form, presents double the bill in half the time. Even the audience is bifurcated, moved out into the wings of the Koch Theater’s stage, leaving the auditorium vacant. There are some lofty concepts whirling around this production, and the actions (both of them) revolve, too, taking place on a slow-spinning turntable. A curved wall splits the circular stage: On the yin side, Claudio Monteverdi’s 17th-century masterpiece L’incoronazione di Poppea plays out in a white-tiled spa fitted out with a two-person bathtub and encrusted with white plaster flowers. You get half a minute of early-Baroque splendor before both set and singers disappear from sight, though not out of earshot. On the yang half of the stage, George Lewis’s recent setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” sidles into view. Sharon has theories about how juxtaposition sharpens perception, but in my plodding way I prefer a little less confusion: I love Poppea and was intrigued by The Comet, but the combo struck me as a perverse tasting-menu pairing, like roasted asparagus and lychee ice cream.

The performances, part of the American Modern Opera Company’s summer residency at Lincoln Center (the Run AMOC Festival), are not quite simultaneous or alternating but instead overlap, with a harpsichord providing the silvery thread between the disparate styles. Sometimes we get a whole aria from Poppea or a stretch of Lewis’s intensely agitated orchestration, sometimes just a line or two. The whole 90-minute mashup ends with a fractured version of Monteverdi’s exquisite duet “Pur ti miro”: four characters, two stories, two sets, and two time periods landing on the same melodic sighs for two halves of a divided audience.

Monteverdi’s work is about the amorous doings of the emperor Nero and his bride, Poppea. Spoiler: Despite various attempts to foil their love, they wind up melodiously together. There’s no mention of the flames that would devastate Rome two years after their marriage. In The Comet, a poor Black man and a rich white woman stumble across each other in a glamorous Jazz Age restaurant after a hunk of ice from the heavens has wiped out most of New York. Spoiler: Despite their conviction that they are literally the last humans alive, they don’t wind up together. There’s plenty of fine singing on both sides of the partition. Kearstin Piper Brown as Poppea and Anthony Roth Costanzo as Nero headline a supple cast that does justice to the woven texture of Monteverdi’s score. Davóne Tines as Jim in Comet stalks the silent restaurant, hauls out the bodies of asphyxiated diners, swigs a bottle of Champagne, and, in his rich, lively baritone, intones the mantra “Yesterday they would not have served me here.” It’s not clear whether he utters the line in mournfulness or triumph.

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But the production gets in the way of the music. As cast members drift away from each half of the audience, their singing becomes muffled — or it would, if not for the amplification that denatures timbres and throws all the voices through the same overhead speakers, so it’s difficult to tell who’s singing what or where. The chamber orchestra sits upstage and nearly out of sight, except for the conductor, Marc Lowenstein, who appears on a scattered set of monitors so the singers can keep track of the beat as they orbit. The dislocations and displacements — dramaturgical, visual, musical, acoustical — add up.

Sharon draws inspiration from Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness: the psychological challenge facing Black Americans to be full participants in a racist society and at the same time members of a separate culture. “Thinking about double consciousness led me to imagine the constantly spinning turntable, where a Black science-fiction story and a Monteverdi classic opera could perform simultaneously, giving the audience a constantly alternating back-and-forth between two worlds,” Sharon writes in a program note. This sounds plausible in theory but comes off as arbitrary, since he could have slapped together virtually any two racially tinged ingredients. The works he picked have little in common except the sense of an ending and the conviction that love can flare amid calamity. Sharon, who founded his own L.A.-based company, The Industry, and is now artistic director of the Detroit Opera, has thought deeply about the genre and has a track record of successful experiments and innovations; last year he published a manifesto, A New Philosophy of Opera. “The goal,” he writes in the note for this production, “is the transformation and expansion of the operatic form, which we force open to investigate its anti-elite potential — pointing out its tendencies towards exclusion while offering up a counterproposal.” That’s where he loses me: I doubt this convoluted and fragmented expression of abstract ideas is the most effective way to challenge the perception of elitism.

The Comet/Poppea is at the David H. Koch Theater through June 21.

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