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This weekend and next, vocal adventures await in the Eastman Opera Studio. This year’s Winter Voice Festival offers a challenging version of a classic, a sparkling new work, and a beginning to a lively spring season.
“Impressions de Pelléas,” running through Sunday afternoon, offers an unusual rethinking of an unusual work. Claude Debussy’s 1902 opera “Pelléas et Melisande,” closely based on a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, is an enigmatic masterpiece: a musically alluring presentation of a mysterious and troubling story.
In 1992, theatre director Peter Brook and French composer Marius Constant shortened the opera’s five acts to 100 minutes with no intermissions, reduced Debussy’s luminous orchestration to two pianos, and retitled the work “Impressions de Pelléas.”
This chamber-sized “Pelléas et Mélisande” still packs a velvet-gloved punch. The story is tragic, but the characters’ relationships and behavior (which includes adultery involving the title characters, a fratricide, and the heroine’s death after childbirth) are never clearly explained. (“I want no discussion or arguments between the characters, whom I see at the mercy of life or destiny,” Debussy claimed.)
“Everything in the story is presented in a shadowy, ambiguous atmosphere,” says musical director Wilson Southerland. “The point is not to seek clarity, but to ask questions and supply your own answers.”
“You never really know what’s going on,” agrees Pat Diamond, associate professor of opera. “There’s a constant tension between the way the characters present themselves and the way they behave.”
But, like a good mystery writer, Debussy does provide musical clues for attentive listeners. In Diamond’s words, the music often “unlocks the imagination,” subtly revealing in notes what is really going on in that character’s head.
Constant, who died in 2004, was a skilled composer (one of his inspirations, appropriately, is the theme music for “The Twilight Zone”).
“He cut repetitive passages,” says Diamond, “but you still have the core of the piece and the essence of ‘Pelléas.’ It really puts you inside the music, and I think it makes the story even more relatable.
“And as opposed to a proscenium-style theater, the performers can interact more directly in dialogue, which serves the piece.”
Debussy’s vocal writing is as unique as its atmosphere. There are no arias to speak of in “Pelléas”; the music closely follows each word of the text.
“Debussy wanted to end what he called the tyranny of the aria in opera,” says Southerland. “Intimate, urgent, and conversational are the three words that come to mind in describing his setting of the text. ‘Pelléas’ is stripped down to the most efficient storytelling.”
The Eastman students’ preparations with that text began last June, through intensive lessons with Eastman professor Brock Tjosvold in French diction and pronunciation, and continued with a November visit and coaching with a leading interpreter of Pelléas, the baritone Francois Le Roux.
Reducing Debussy’s plush orchestration to two piano parts “heightens the fragility of the score,” says Southerland, who’ll perform it with graduate student Andrew Chen.
“I told the students that at certain points, their music is like a string quartet, chamber music—with voices. And that in this score, the silences may be even more important than the music.”
Next week’s Winter Voice Festival offering is a show that is nothing but arias—specifically,the contents of “Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias,” an anthology of 17th and 18th century music known to most classical singers.
Alison d’Amato, associate professor of vocal coaching and musical director of “Twenty-Four,” says it has been used to build voices for generations, instilling such basic vocal virtues as pure vowels, good Italian diction, and the sustaining of long musical lines. It’s safe to say that every cast member of “Twenty-Four” is familiar with it. “Several students told me in rehearsals, ‘I can’t believe I’m singing this song again!’”
But instead of singing in a practice room, they’re singing these songs onstage, in the service of a fanciful plot (by singer Tony Boutté, a 1984 Eastman alumnus) and lively arrangements that transform solo pieces into duets, trios, and even a sextet, accompanied by piano, violin, and cello.
D’Amato describes the story as based on Italian commedia dell’arte, full of such traditional operatic tropes as magic potions and dueling lovers.
Debussy might have been skeptical of all those arias, but d’Amato is enthusiastic: “It really is so much fun! The new setting of these familiar numbers refreshes the immediate power of the pieces, and Lindsay Baker’s staging often breaks the fourth wall. Our black-box studio theater gives the students freedom to use more intimate vocal colors than in a big space.”
During the run of “Twenty-Four,” more Eastman voice students will be heard on Feb. 7 in SongSLAM, singing first performances of songs by Eastman student and alumni composers, with the audience voting for its favorite.
“With our strong composition department, SongSLAM is perfect for Eastman,” says d’Amato, “and it fits perfectly with our mission.”
Whether the score is “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “Twenty-Four,” or anything else, Eastman’s voice, opera, and vocal coaching faculty members ((including Lindsay Baker, instructor of opera, as well as professors Octavio Cardenas and Tim Long, who will lead the spring production, a disco-era “Die Fledermaus”) are on the same page about their mission.
“We want people to see opera not as musty and dusty,” says Southerland, “but as vibrant and living—not a relic.”
Eastman Opera Theatre presents “Impressions de ‘Pelléas’” through Feb. 1, and “Twenty-Four” from Feb. 5-8, both in the Eastman School of Music Opera Studio. More information at esm.rochester.edu.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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