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 received 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,” concerning the Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Within the meantime, UCLA introduced the West Coast premiere Sunday of Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” on the Nimoy Theater, with performances by 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 thought after he realized concerning the outstanding 1935 assembly of Schoenberg and MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring “The Good Earth.” The uncompromising German inventor of the twelve-tone system had simply fled Nazi Germany, and the assembly turned a battle of excessive artwork and leisure.
Schoenberg and the films in the end went of their impartial instructions, however the composer did develop into deeply built-in in L.A. tradition, dwelling throughout the road in Brentwood from Shirley Temple, educating at USC and UCLA, enjoying 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 received right here.
The excellent libretto by Simon Robson (primarily based on a state of affairs 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 characterize 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, by way of Paris, Boston and New York, lastly settles in Los Angeles in 1934, the place he stays for the remainder of his life.
Shifting scenes reveal his private life and its connections together 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 parts, run the gamut of cinematic types and durations. They embody historic documentary scenes, trendy enactments, cartoons and graphics.
Machover’s rating for 15 devices is its personal complicated delirium. An unattainable composer to pin down, Machover has written a standard grand opera reminiscent of “Resurrection,” primarily based 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 in addition 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 religious progress as he reinvents himself after horrors of World Conflict I, through 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, carried out 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 develop into 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 move within the episodic opera. They’ll do foolish, but in addition much more. Davidson was significantly 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 stability.
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) college but in addition, when it happy him, went rogue. Schoenberg even wrote a terrific MGM-style Hollywood Bowl fanfare that for no good motive 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.
