opera

‘Incarnate: Memories, Dreams and Desires’

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Fresh Voices Raised in San Francisco

What do you do when confronted by six women in black singing with piercing operatic intensity, “We are the warrior girls of Zena planet”?

You listen, bien sur!

And listen the audience did, to this lively excerpt from composer Steven Clark’s rock opera, The Amazons of Planet Zena, the closing piece of Goat Hall Productions’ Festival of New Works: Fresh Voices XV. With wacky tongue-in-cheek, the singers paced through harmonic delights, stating their claim to be Queens of Space and peppering their vocal space odyssey with vocalese riffs of “mo, mi, mu, ma, me, meh.” On a wall to their left, supertitles floated above planetary landscapes of rock and sand, the vast universe stretching out like a star-woven black carpet into the Beyond.

I can hardly wait for the full opera’s debut.

Fresh Voices, where this interplanetary romp appeared on Friday night, is an annual cabaret opera presented by mezzosoprano Harriet March Page. Now in its 15th year and funded in part by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Fresh Voices fills a need for aspiring opera and musical professionals to present their compositions and their voices without going through the narrow selection process of the large opera houses. Modestly produced, it’s a people’s opera and a wellspring of exciting ideas and appealing talent unlike anything you are likely to see on the mainstream stage. It has all the exuberance, unevenness and thought-provoking power of avant-garde experimentation.

Designated “Incarnate: Memories, Dreams and Desires” the evening’s program was divided into three sections, each headed by a short song written by composer Frank Johnson, who also served as the evening’s principal accompanist.

The first two excerpts were from Carol Collins’ Baltimore Crazy Quilt and John Bilotta’s Rosetta’s Stone. Both operas dealt with Alzheimer’s and its devastating attack on the self with touching grace. Bilotta’s opera, co-written with Norwegian composer Jostein Stalheim, is based on a concept by Oded Ben Horin and realized by librettists Ben Horin and John McGrew. In the opera, the parts of the brain – Amygdala, Cortex, Thalamus, Cerebellum and Brain Stem – are represented by different singers. The trope may sound forced but it works well, especially in choruses as the singers create wayward and chaotic moments, each singing their own line while gathered around the confused sufferer.

The second section of the program presents the dream of religion, specifically Christianity, in excerpts from John McGrew’s Raising a Messiah and Matthew Owens’ City of St. Francis. Based on the novel Jesus Was Tall and Well Spoken by Barry Leonardini, McGrew’s opera is a satiric piece about two fisherman looking for a better way to make a living. Owens’ brings the failure of charity closer to home by looking at the homeless of San Francisco. A young man looks for his father who he believes has gone astray in the streets of the city. Based on the composer’s walks with the Night Ministry of San Francisco, a charitable organization that sends priests to comfort and aid the urban lost and abandoned, the opera uses a variety of musical genres in its portrayal of the individuals who make up the city’s homeless.

The section opened with Mark Alburger’s Fallen Angels, a series of short portraits of iconic women, using the language and music of a vast panoply of writers and artists from Mozart to Dixieland. It was snappy and disarming and enhanced by a variety of images projected on the wall to the side of the stage. My only objection to the performance of this and the closing Amazons of Planet Zena was the difficulty of looking at the projections while looking at the singers. A mishap of inadequate funding.

The event, being cabaret style, allows the audience to choose between seats in conventional rows or individual cabaret tables with a plate of treats and a glass of Champagne. Either way Fresh Voices is well worth the time and effort, so keep an eye out for this beguiling annual event.

—Jaime Robles

Photo: Composer Steven Clark directs the Goat Hall Productions’ Fresh Voices singers in Amazons on Planet Zena at the San Francisco Community Music Center. From left to right: Alexis Lane Jensen, Meghan Dibble, Raiña Parks, Jill Wagoner, Paige Patrick and Kat Cornelius.