David Lang’s new opera the loser opened the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night. There’s no doubt that Lang is one of the finest composers of our time, but to pull off great opera, one must have a great director; and this production was missing that vital element to merge the story with the music to not make the performance dull. The opera simply lacked theatricality – that is, drama, comedy, and/or tragedy – and forced this listener to have a long thought as to why the public attends opera and what the purpose opera serves in our society.
Lang is credited for the “stage direction” of the production, and one has to wonder if he was too busy finalizing the music to give any direction. If a professional stage director had been hired, would there have been actual movement? The story was not told visually, which seemed a missed opportunity since the text, based on a novel by Thomas Bernhard, is percolating with such powerful human expressions as jealousy, insecurity and deferred accountability.
Totaling eight scenes separated by subtle shifts in music and lighting, the opera is essentially staged with a narrator, baritone Rod Gilfry, perched atop a tower-like scaffolding built on the main floor of the orchestra section, while the audience is restricted to the mezzanine of the theater. The language used to promote the event to the public read, “He appears to float in the nothingness”, which is a complete lie because in no way does the baritone appear to be floating in any way throughout the course of the opera. Any attempt of a “void” was totally ineffective, and the concept did not transfer to the “stage”; however, it’s not to say it could not have been possible with expert knowledge of production design. The overall result was a ghost of an opera with less action and staging than an oratorio, or a solo recital for that matter, with an unimaginative set that did not live up to its full potential.
As the opera unfolds, the narrator broods over the suspicion that Glenn Gould ruined his chance at becoming a virtuoso and obsesses over the suicide of a fellow pianist and friend Wertheimer. You spend the first quarter of the opera waiting for the prologue to end, but you eventually come to realize that the entire thing is a monotonous dry-recitative with no clear direction. At the three-quarter mark, a pianist, Conrad Tao, materializes on a platform on the distant stage, and you think, “OK, now this will get interesting.” But instead, it’s unclear whether the pianist is an actor or part of the pit orchestra because the nearly-inaudible notes he plays don't quite match up with the orchestra. The last five minutes emulate the voyeurism of an audience viewing a performance, as the narrator listens to Gould’s Goldberg Variations. Uniquely, this final moment allowed an instant to enjoy Lang’s unsophisticated and wholly charming solo piano music.