An opera based on a painting based on an ancient Greek myth. Contemporary? Absolutely.
A new treatment of “Europa and the Bull” opened the first day of Sonic Harvest, an annual festival of original works for chamber music and voice. Held this past Saturday and Sunday at Berkeley’s Crowden School, composers, musicians and singers were on hand for some serious fun.
Before Saturday’s concert, conductor Jonathan Khuner spoke with composer Peter Josheff and his co-librettist and soprano Eliza O’Malley about Europa, their hour-long chamber opera. Their collaboration began around a painting of the famous Greek myth by O’Malley’s grandmother, Mary Holmes (1911 – 2002), a prolific artist and arts educator who helped to found UC Santa Cruz. The opera, based on the story of Zeus taking the form of a bull and carting off a Phoenician princess, was written for last year’s festival and retrospective honoring Holmes.
In Josheff and O’Malley’s hands they sought a balance between a god’s unpredictable passion and a young woman’s sexual awakening. “Unlike the usual abduction and ravishment,” wrote Josheff, “this painting seems to tell a story of love.”
The music, written for soprano, tenor, strings and clarinet, followed that sympathetic posture, with delicate shifting textures and long vocal phrases. Josheff performed on clarinet and bass clarinet, and his librettist and partner, O’Malley, sang the part of Europa.
Cellist Victoria Ehrlich bowed rising passages against Dan Flanagan’s rhythmic violin arpeggios, followed by clarinet runs tinged with the pentatonic scales of an ancient Greek village. Anchored by double bass Richard Worn, their deft weave left room for vocals. As O’Malley sang of Europa’s dream the music turned bright and childlike, and then into a bouncy dance with violin pizzicatos and cello triplets. From “talky” to sharp leaps and then into long simmered notes, O’Malley extended speech into the country of myth, as Europa considered her fate.
Michael Desnoyers sang difficult parts with ease as Zeus and the Narrator, a pristine tenor with an effortless sound, making odd intervals sound fresh. He ranged from cool top notes to deep in baritone country, translating a god’s passion, guile, restraint and ultimately, love.
Holmes might have argued that the capacity for love is what ultimately distinguishes us from… well, scenery. And that this mortal capacity is what Europa could teach a divine Bull.
In Sunday’s concert, Desnoyers returned for a song cycle of six poems, The Cauldron, also composed by Peter Josheff, to the poetry of Carol Vanderveer Hamilton. Here Desnoyers’ focused beauty was a dependable road through a shifting landscape of violin and guitar textures, quirky and sometimes soaring. Violinist Terri Baune was dizzying in her different roles – from impresario to seductress – with sharp strokes, grim pianissimos, acid harmonics and soft waves. David Tanenbaum’s guitar added a modern continuo line, with chords and arpeggios to support the poetry.
Like the music, the poetry slid out of one’s grasp, not quite direct text nor dream nor birdcall, but some word-sculpture that could be all three.
The guitar was even more prominent in Allen Shearer’s The Leaves of Another Year, his setting of four Robert Frost poems, perhaps because of its odd combination with clarinet. Josheff supplied a rich clarinet timbre, with Tanenbaum shimmering through in a pointillist sweetness. Over these, Shearer sang the text with questioning phrases answered with questions, a throaty candor on the poetry of leaves and death.
In this lovely trio we could see one of the collaborations that create festivals like Sonic Harvest, namely when composers also perform with each other. The other is a collaboration that is personal as well as artistic: Josheff and O’Malley are one of the founding couples of this Festival, and Shearer and his partner and librettist, Claudia Stevens, is another.
Sunday’s concert began with Ann Callaway’s Four Elements for Horn and Piano, executed prodigiously by pianist Karen Rosenak and Alex Rosenfeld on French horn. While Callaway often airs new work, this vital piece was written early in her career, and we are the richer for having had the opportunity to hear it. Each movement described an element: “wind” called for sweeping strokes across the strings inside a piano, dusting us with metallic clouds of sound. “Water” plinked out notes in near-random pairs with magical properties, as elusive and particulate as wavicles. “Earth” was darkly powerful and a testament to the petite pianist’s muscular authority, and “Fire” interchanged flurries of chords with a walking bass line, intense and rhythmic.
Throughout, the two very different instruments created such warm and surprising textures – water drops and milky horn lines, bass rumbles and brass muted into silver – that it was almost… well, consensual.
Following this, pianist/actor Claudia Stevens performed Aria da capo by Carlton Gamer. The oldest piece on the program, this 1952 work was calculated to bring a reaction. Loosely based on Edna St Vincent Millay’s absurdist anti-war play, Stevens played piano passages while posing odd phrases like “molecules of air… molecules of air… and champagne bubbles!”
At one point she pulled out a handgun and tucked it into a red armband, then pulled on a commedia del’arte-style mask, all the while playing and speak-singing terse pronouncements. It was powerful but dated. During the applause, a cellist in the row in front of me muttered to a violinist, “She should have done that in the original Klingon… or German,” perhaps a dig at the difficulty of mixing subtle art with grimmer politics – and yes, there were many musicians in the audience.
For an encore she performed “Sanft mit Empfindung” (“Quietly with feeling”) also by Gamer, and its soft progressions, dance-like stumbles, and simple octaves were absolutely enchanting.
From abduction to love and from leaves to dusk, this year’s Sonic Harvest was a bountiful feast.
—Adam Broner
Photos from top, of Eliza O’Malley, Peter Josheff, Ann Callaway, and Allen Shearer and Claudia Stevens.