There’s a small and intriguingly private sub-genre of operas about composers. One thing is all the time up when one composer offers with one other composer’s life and music.
Topics have included Carlo Gesualdo, the sixteenth century madrigalist who murdered his spouse and her lover. César Franck and others bought a kick out of Alessandro Stradella, the Baroque opera composer who tried to embezzle the Roman Catholic Church. Rimsky-Korsakov turned to Mozart and Salieri.
Within the fall, Los Angeles Opera will premiere Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Hildegard,” in regards to the Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Within the meantime, UCLA introduced the West Coast premiere Sunday of Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” on the Nimoy Theater, with performances by Thursday.
Omar Ebrahim as Schoenberg and conductor Neal Stulberg in Tod Machover’s “Schoenberg in Hollywood” at UCLA Nimoy Theater.
(Taso Papadakis / UCLA Herb Alpert Faculty of Music)
Machover, who directs the Opera of the Future group at MIT’s Media Lab, says he was drawn to the concept after he discovered in regards to the exceptional 1935 assembly of Schoenberg and MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring “The Good Earth.” The uncompromising German inventor of the twelve-tone system had simply fled Nazi Germany, and the assembly grew to become a battle of excessive artwork and leisure.
Schoenberg and the flicks in the end went of their unbiased instructions, however the composer did develop into deeply built-in in L.A. tradition, dwelling throughout the road in Brentwood from Shirley Temple, instructing at USC and UCLA, enjoying tennis with George Gershwin (whom he adored), feuding with neighbor Thomas Mann (who opposed Schoenberg’s improvements) and hanging out with the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin.
Machover’s opera begins and ends with Thalberg as a framing devise. The 90-minute opera is principally a phantasmagoria of how Schoenberg bought right here.
The excellent libretto by Simon Robson (primarily based on a situation by Braham Murray) is a intelligent sequence of brief flashbacks of Schoenberg’s life, with movie accompaniment. Some are life like, some fanciful. The three characters are Schoenberg, Boy and Lady. Boy and Lady signify all of the characters in Schoenberg’s life with many a virtuosic costume change. We witness Schoenberg, who was born 150 years in the past, beginning out as a cellist and self-taught progressive composer in his native Vienna and Berlin. He flees the Nazis and, through Paris, Boston and New York, lastly settles in Los Angeles in 1934, the place he stays for the remainder of his life.
Transferring scenes reveal his private life and its connections together with his music, however as he reaches the New World wacky ones start to creep in. He turns into Groucho and SuperJew. The movies, that are cued as if musical parts, run the gamut of cinematic kinds and intervals. They embrace historic documentary scenes, fashionable enactments, cartoons and graphics.
Machover’s rating for 15 devices is its personal complicated delirium. An inconceivable composer to pin down, Machover has written a standard grand opera resembling “Resurrection,” primarily based on Tolstoy’s novel, and “Brain Opera,” which is simply that, utilizing electrodes in your noggin. A educated cellist, he’s comfy with acoustic devices but in addition can’t wait to get his arms on no matter crazy invention the Media Lab’s irrepressible tech visionaries give you subsequent.
Musically and dramatically, “Schoenberg in Hollywood” has Schoenbergian denseness together with new-world electronics. Machover is especially efficient in evoking each the trauma and the exhilaration in Schoenberg’s non secular progress as he reinvents himself after horrors of World Struggle I, by which he fought, and once more when confronted with new horrors of World Struggle II.
The commanding efficiency by the UCLA Herb Alpert Faculty of Music ensemble, carried out by Neal Stulberg, makes the excessive/low dichotomy irrelevant, main us to a profound center floor. Choreographer Karole Armitage, who bases the Nimoy manufacturing on the unique one she created for Boston Lyric, operates, nonetheless, on extremes. Schoenberg comes throughout as both self-knowing prophet or goofball. Whimsy and wit develop into foolish. Marx Brothers, Wild West and SuperJew stagings are saved solely by the music.
Omar Ebrahim’s imposing and magnificently sung Schoenberg is well-suited for visionary gravitas, much less so for slapstick. Anna Davidson and Jon Lee Keenan, as Lady and Boy, activate a dime. They transfer with dancers’ ease, permitting Armitage to create a way of move within the episodic opera. They’ll do foolish, but in addition much more. Davidson was significantly gripping as Schoenberg’s first spouse, Mathilde.
In some methods, Armitage gave the impression to be compensating for the small, naked Nimoy stage. Schoenberg little question attended films in what’s now the Nimoy, which was a movie show till its recent renovation as a performing area for UCLA. It’s an intimate area, which meant that Armitage needed to do with out decor, and which can have led her to overemphasize theatrics.
Amplification added a complication. The sound stage was too loud for vocal subtleties and too flat for cautious instrumental and digital music stability.
Nonetheless, Schoenberg wouldn’t be Schoenberg with out obstacles to have triumphantly overcome. He modified music in Vienna and Berlin. He thrived in L.A. as composer, trainer and inspiration, becoming in as he wanted to. He remained true to his (12-tone) college but in addition, when it happy him, went rogue. Schoenberg even wrote a terrific MGM-style Hollywood Bowl fanfare that for no good motive by no means will get performed.
Might “Schoenberg in Hollywood” be a wake-up name? Shockingly, Schoenberg stays starless on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame.
