Six years ago, as part of Opera Philadelphia’s inaugural Festival O17, the company presented Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda within a Medieval stone cloister at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. During the current Festival O23, the company offers another view of this work, as well as the general use of Christian and Muslim conflict depicted in Renaissance and Baroque music, in Karim Sulayman’s Unholy Wars. This inventive piece centers the experience of the other within the gaze of the white, European composer, while layering the music of Monteverdi, Handel and others with striking pastiche interludes by the living composer Mary Kouyoumdjian.
Sulayman, a tenor whose expressive, reedy sound suits the period well, holds the stage as a narrator of sorts, using music and movement to comment on the action around him. He and director Kevin Newbury present snatches of the Tancredi and Clorinda story with admirable faithfulness – baritone John Taylor Ward and soprano Raha Mirzadegan enact the doomed courtship that culminates in the Christian knight killing his disguised Muslim lover on the field of battle. These brief moments underscore the pervasive focus of forbidden love, war and otherness within the context of Early Modern music, representing a culture fascinated by the exotic.
The physical production comments on the action, with projections by Michael Salvatore Commendatore that depict parched desert sand, intricate cities that rise from nothing, destruction by fire and mirages of water. Kevork Mourad’s set design takes the visual metaphor a step further, with buckets of sand surrounding a thin lip of water, which eventually becomes a baptismal font. The total effect suggests a dreamworld between the reality of battle and the idealized vision of love. By choosing to present the story through a highly artist lens, Sulayman and the designers subtly comment on the lack of verisimilitude that bygone composers used to fashion their stories of the Middle East – it all becomes an invented fantasy.
Ward’s lyrical baritone suits the conflicted nature of the crusader, besotted by love one moment and blinded in war the next. He shows tenderness and fury in equal measures. Mirzadegan’s sweet, feathery tone fits the musical period ideally, and she projected the anguish of the dying Clorinda with a welcome dose of nuance. Sulayman’s overarching presence suggests both a puppet master and a contemporary spectator, at once awed and disturbed by the tale. His use of “Lascia ch’io piangia”, from Handel’s Rinaldo, to comment on the sad inevitability of the action was an inspired choice. Dancer Coral Dolphin makes silent but vibrant contributions throughout the evening, demonstrating an arresting physical vocabulary through Ebony Williams’ choreography.
Music director Julie Andrijeski oversees a stylish reading of the patchwork score, with an eight-person ensemble of period musicians making good use of the intimate acoustics of the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. (The performance is unobtrusively amplified.) Kouyoumdjian’s compositions add an urgent tone to the stately, sometimes placid music of the period. Like Sulayman’s overarching project, they remind the audience that we are still in conversation with these historical works, and that some voices have been left out.
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