In a warehouse on the San Francisco Marina, in the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition building, three men in yellow workmen’s gloves are dragging a dilapidated 25-foot boat across the concrete floor. They pause and begin to sing, a fourth man standing on the boat sings with them. The voices are beautiful, the harmonies bizarre, somewhat honky-tonk and 100% Kurt Weill. We’re at a rehearsal of Opera Parallèle’s Mahagonny Songspiel.
The San Francisco Bay Area is blessed with a surfeit of excellent singers and instrumentalists, attracted to this musically sophisticated area by the San Francisco Conservatory, the Symphony and the Opera and its esteemed Merola and Adler programs. Both the Symphony and Opera are high-profile organisations that in recent years have had to cater to more conservative audience tastes. Although the San Francisco Opera tries to launch a new opera every few years, these have been for the most part disappointing. High on production and attendant costs, the new fare often lacks the vigour of smaller avant-garde and experimental work. There is nothing in its program comparable to the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, for example.
In answer to a clear need, several excellent smaller houses have popped up in the past decades, serving an audience with more eccentric and edgy cravings. Among those that have survived and thrived are Opera Parallèle, the Paul Dresher Ensemble and the wonderfully idiosyncratic work of Erling Wold, composer, producer of operas and libertine. These three are by no means the only experimental opera and musical theatre groups in the area but they are representative, and they have managed to endure, growing in stature and influence.
Opera Parallèle and Artistic Commitment
Opera Parallèle is the largest and most ambitious of the Bay Area’s avant-garde companies. It lists itself as a professional organisation performing contemporary chamber operas and engaged in creating ‘a new culture of dramatic vocal works’. They strive to perform the ‘most challenging works’ of the 20th and 21st centuries, placing them in smaller venues so that audiences can have ‘an intimate experience of the singers, staging, and orchestra’.
When asked why she followed the path of experimental opera, Artistic Director and conductor Nicole Paiement replied, “I think it’s part of our responsibility, as conductors, not to rely on the past but to see that music continues to evolve”.
“The most important thing”, she adds, “is that the work must be invigorating and include risk. Music used to be at the forefront of the avant-garde in other centuries. You go to a contemporary music concert now, and there are only a few people there. The music seems limited to small circles. And I question that”.
In its staging and concepts, realised by Resident Stage Director Brian Staufenbiel, the company also tries to address current issues through startling combinations. For example, this year’s programme presents a back-to-back staging of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel and Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, the music of one flowing into the other, the language shifting from German to French. The two operas are set in a post-climate change world, where water is a precious resource. Adrift in a poisoned sea the disheveled crew dreams of a “Moon Over Alabama” and “the next whiskey bar”. Landing on a shattered coastline the crew sets up a stage and Les Mamelles begins. The cast shifts from all-black costumes to vivid surrealist-nightmare costumes with shiny red-leather high-heeled boots that lace to the knee. It’s a gorgeous, laughable and brilliant juxtaposition.
“I’m interested in opera”, Paiement asserts, “because it’s a collaborative form. Many different art forms are involved and because of that new musical language is less intimidating. The audience can rely on the eye or be involved with the narrative”.
Opera Parallèle began its opera production career in 2007 with a revival and staging of Lou Harrison’s Young Caesar. Since then, their performances have included Berg’s Wozzeck (2010), Glass’ Orphée (2011), Tompson/Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts (2011), Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (2012), and Golijov’s Ainadamar (2013), among others.
The artistic team, led by Paiement and Staufenbiel, are careful in their choices. “We try to vary our productions and with each new collaboration expand our audience base,” says Paiement. “But I have to say that the artistic quality of each piece is high. It must resonate with us as a great piece of art. We don’t choose a piece just because it’s popular. That doesn’t work.”
Paul Dresher’s Collaborations
As a composer and musician, Paul Dresher practices a variety of musical forms, one of which is experimental opera and music theater. Along with a composition background, Dresher also studied intonation and instrument building with Lou Harrison, and his compositions are often based on instruments he has created. Like Harrison, Dresher is interested in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanaian drumming, Hindustani classical music and Balinese and Javanese music.
A major part of his musical work is produced for and performed by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, one of the Bay Area’s innovative chamber and new vocal music performance groups. The Ensemble, formed in 1984, “commissions, performs and tours a diverse repertory of new chamber works from a wide range of contemporary composers”.
The Ensemble spent its first decade creating collaborative experimental theater/opera productions, involving the Artistic Director Paul Dresher. The best known and most widely toured of these productions is American Trilogy, a sung and spoken soliloquy comprised of Slow Fire, Power Failure and Pioneer. The American Trilogy has achieved over 200 performances worldwide.
The piece, first performed in 1985 during the Reagan presidency, is social criticism with a distinctly American flavour. The main character is a familiar ‘dangerous’ buffoon, whose monologue written by Rinde Eckert and supported by guitar, electronic keyboard and percussion conveys “the darker consequences of American attitudes: the hubris of ‘manifest destiny’, the despoiling of the environment and destruction of indigenous cultures in the name of progress and property, and the obsessive enforcement of power”.
It’s a riveting piece. More along the lines of musical theater than opera, it gives an insight into many of Dresher and Eckert’s works, most of which examine the thoughts of a solitary isolated man who is in some way victimized by his own desire for power.