Opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Osvaldo Golijov’s first opera, Ainadamar, was showstopping from its opening strains. Dynamic soprano Angel Blue, in the lead role as Margarita Xirgu, stood over a flamenco chorus of 18 women in pastel dresses moving in a circle around her. She was dressed all in black, the chorus in pastel dresses, and almost disappeared among them on the dark stage. But her voice easily projected through.
That opening ballad repeats at the beginning of each of the three scenes, or ‘images’, in the wonderful, frightful, single-act tragedy. Ainadamar premiered in 2003 at Tanglewood; the four week Met Opera run is its second staged revision. A fine cast recording won Grammy awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2006.
The libretto by David Henry Hwang tells the story of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s life through the eyes and voice of Xirgu, his longtime star, and in so doing recounts the persecutions of and attempts to flee Franco’s rule. Golijov and Hwang make a great team. Golijov even translated Hwang’s text into Spanish for the performance, and his rich, nuanced score – with the drama of an orchestra and the intimacy of a small café combo – calls to mind Bernstein or Bizet or even Brecht and Weill, as the scenes call for, while also feeling very contemporary, complex and layered, but never fussy.
The story revolves around Margarita. Blue shone throughout. Daniela Mack (in a bold bit of casting) was a powerful Lorca and the company and chorus all became a convincing community; the feeling of kinship came across strongly, even across the decades of the story. Jon Bausor’s set design is less convincing. A huge circular scrim houses the action and works well enough as taberna and battleground, but huge images projected onto it of Margarita and of children during the war at times make the stage feel all too much like a museum exhibit.
Deborah Colker's show, already seen at Scottish Opera and Welsh National Opera is ambitious and it works incredibly well, covering 40 years of upheaval in 80 minutes. The storytelling is at least as emotive as it is narrative, directly confronting death and loss in sharp and weary pains. At times, the summation of the hard spectacle becomes spectacularly unmoored, the stage lights glowing red and white and the scene losing the specificity of history, stabbing with abstracted high drama.
Nearly all of the cast and crew were making their Met debuts: from director and choreographer Colker and conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya to Bausor and the lighting, production and sound designers, to every one of the chorus and dancers. A very evident newfound spirit of inclusivity permeates scheduling at the Met and across Lincoln Center. Ainadamar makes plain the rewards of opening the doors.
