Six ghostly figures in white robes and veils beckoned us into the inner sanctum with a sustained, sung tone. They would be our guides for the next 90 minutes, leading us at turns alluringly, imploringly and fearfully, through the rooms of the medieval structure and the stages of a dream.
The setting was The Met Cloisters, a small fortress of a building constructed in the 1930s on the Nelson Rockefeller estate which is now home to The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection. The occasion was the premiere performance of Primero Sueño, an opera by Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera based on 17th-century verse by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a writer and scholar in New Spain, currently a part of Mexico.
At the center of the story – and the center of the song cycle – was the wondrous voice of Magos Herrera. The story is an episodic tale of a sleepless night and a quest for knowledge, some of which was not obtainable by humans, some not allowable for women. The Spanish text was projected in English (nicely rendered in script) and translated in the program, but Sor Juana’s weary yearning was more than evident in Herrera’s embodiment, in her and Prestini’s score, in the thick harmonies of the chorus and in the stone chambers of this little castle in upper Manhattan.
Efforts had clearly been made to keep the mix as natural as possible while affording quick changes from room to room. The singers and two musicians – Celso Duarte and Luca Tarantino playing harp, theorbo, guitars and percussion – moved wirelessly through the rooms without a glitch, but it seemed altogether unnecessary. Surely people played instruments in the 13th-century rooms after which the building was designed without need for a boost. Amplification, unfortunately, is almost always the default, the question asked being not one of ‘should’ but ‘how’.
Dance, costumes and masks, puppets, lighting, projected animation, all came together mostly quite well, although with all of those elements at play, the production design didn’t need any pushing, and sometimes seemed a bit much. Illuminated discs on the chests of the chorus (the Leipzig vocal sextet Ensemble Sjaella) served as amplifiers but looked like extraterrestrial embroidery frames. The dreamlike encounter with Death might have elicited a bit more terror, it being Death and all. These wouldn’t be central concerns but were heightened by the surround sound making the production feel more like a movie than being transported to the past. On the other hand, the enormous gold eyelashes, worn like eyeglasses by the singers in the final scene, were oddly appealing.
Midpoint, the music turned folkloric: clapped percussion and cajón, quickly strummed charango and a convincing flamenco impression on the theorbo. Costumed dancers appeared, spirits soared and Herrera, already confident in her role, grew impassioned. By the finale, it was chaotic revelry as our heroine roused from the dream and realized she is fully awake and fully aware as a human in the world.
The Italian-born Prestini and Mexican Herrera have worked together before and Herrera has served on the Artistic Advisory Board at the Brooklyn venue National Sawdust, which Prestini co-founded. Their merging of the European Baroque with centuries-old American tradition in a 2oth-century building styled after an ancient French nunnery was rich with religion and drama, with life and death. It was timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City.
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