“Adriana Mater” is an opera of adverse questions and feelings however easy plot. Adriana (the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, a mighty presence in a small body) rebuffs Tsargo, a drunk younger man, with a mix of disgust and pity. But later, Tsargo — sung by the baritone Christopher Purves with Alberich-like chew — returns throughout wartime to rape her, empowered by circumstance and an assault rifle. Adriana turns into pregnant, and regardless of warnings from her sister, Refka (the alluringly lyrical soprano Axelle Fanyo), chooses to have the child. “It isn’t his little one,” Adriana says. “It’s mine.”
But she does fear: Will the kid be extra like Tsargo or like her? Cain or Abel? Act II, set 17 years later, places that uncertainty to the check when her son, Yonas (an agile, heldentenor-like Nicholas Phan) learns his father’s id and units out to kill him. But when he sees Tsargo, blind and damaged, he can’t deliver himself to do it. Yonas feels ashamed for not finishing up the homicide, however his mom is relieved. He is actually her son.
Saariaho’s music isn’t representational. Adriana’s offstage rape is punctuated with violent chords, and drilling percussion evokes the assault of warfare, however in any other case the writing favors ambiance and abstraction. In a method that prefigures the grand tapestry of “Innocence,” she attaches particular sounds to every character: turbulent concord for Adriana, lengthy melodic strains for Refka, darkly shadowed low strings for Tsargo, frantic lightness for Yonas. Too typically in up to date music, conductors appear merely to be protecting time; however all this was dealt with deftly by Salonen, who regarded as animated and guaranteed as if he had been conducting Beethoven.
Sellars’s concert-hall staging was minimal, as was his authentic manufacturing on the Paris Opera. Here, the motion unfolded on platforms of assorted heights that saved the singers, wanting up to date, if not particularly of anyone place, in Camille Assaf’s costumes, nearly at all times remoted. At the beginning, Adriana and Tsargo’s little levels, below James F. Ingalls’s lighting, had been coloured yellow and blue, as if to counsel that the story befell in Ukraine.
But any comparability to the present warfare didn’t linger. The colours modified always, mercurial and expressive, because the motion unfolded. Neither Sellars nor the opera, in any case, wanted an up to date story to make it extra recognizable. That’s already within the rating, in the way in which Saariaho’s delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: The solely method ahead is grace.
‘Adriana Mater’
Performed on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com