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New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Moby-Dick,' the Opera, Cuts the Blubber
The opening line of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start. It's an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always had to make when turning a well-known novel — especially one as sprawling and shaggy as Melville's — into singing. Heggie, who also composed the well-traveled opera 'Dead Man Walking' (2000), and Scheer, an experienced librettist, have narrowed one of the canon's most overflowing works to its core plot. For readers who enjoyed 'Moby-Dick' but yawned through the rambling digressions about whaling, do I have an opera for you. The compressed adaptation is direct and clear, at least. Some contemporary operas, of which the Met has offered a burst over the last few seasons, lean heavily on confusing devices: complicated flashbacks; characters shadowed by doubles; singers playing metaphorical qualities like Destiny and Loneliness; split-screen-style scenes crossing place and time. 'Moby-Dick' wants none of that. It stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people. Yet the opera only rarely takes on flesh-and-blood urgency. While the story is streamlined and straightforward — a ship's crew struggles with the demanding whims of a vindictive captain — Heggie and Scheer also want to capture Melville's brooding grandeur, philosophical profundity and portentous language. So the prevailing mood is a dark, ponderous blue — a lot of stern, turgidly paced musings directed straight at the audience. The goal seems to have been to create a piece that's lucid and vibrant, but also dreamlike and meditative. A piece, in other words, much along the lines of 'Billy Budd,' Benjamin Britten's opera based on another seafaring Melville tragedy in which a ship becomes a petri dish for archetypal struggles. This is where the ambitions of Heggie's 'Moby-Dick' adaptation run up against his limitations as a composer. 'Billy Budd' fascinates because of the haunting complexities of Britten's music, but the meditations in this 'Moby-Dick' end up feeling dully one-note, as shallow as a tide pool. Even the circumscribed world of the opera includes a storm, a mast lit up by St. Elmo's fire, intimations of the South Seas, night and day, stillness and dance, vast expanses of sky — yet the music fails to meet the demand for these textures and colors. Heggie doesn't have many ideas beyond squarely undulating minor-key references to Philip Glass, John Adams and Britten himself. Every composer's work has influences, but these quotations are startlingly unadorned, even if played with spirit by the Met's orchestra under the conductor Karen Kamensek. Lovers of traditional operatic forms will find much to admire here, as Heggie and Scheer have embraced the kind of ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — that allow this art form to present multiple perspectives at once. But the variety in the text is not matched by variety in the score, and the conflicts that should energize the story don't always feel vital. The real tension is — or should be — between Captain Ahab, whose obsessive pursuit of the whale Moby Dick has drowned his humanity, and Starbuck, the sensible first mate who tries to steer the whole operation clear of disaster. But the opera gets distracted by a side plot about finding brotherhood amid racial and religious difference: Greenhorn — the name the opera gives the novel's narrator — first fears and then befriends Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner. It's not until nearly an hour and a half into the three-hour opera that it really holds your attention for the first time. In a ruminative aria, Starbuck mulls whether to murder the sleeping Ahab to save himself and his shipmates. In the end, he can't bring himself to do it, and he slinks out as Ahab softly moans and the curtain falls. The sequence is riveting — but we've waited until the end of the first act for it. For the other highlight, we have to wait again, until late in the opera, when Ahab finally lets down his guard with Starbuck and confronts the cost of his single-minded mania. It is the calm before the final, doomed hunt, and Heggie endows it with real tenderness. Ahab, though, primarily expresses himself through drearily similar monologues, grounded in Melvillean diction and given a similarly antiquated musical feel through robustly shaking Handel-style coloratura. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, conveys a sense of Ahab's weariness more than of his intensity. The cast is entirely male, with the exception of the soprano who plays the young cabin boy Pip; Janai Brugger captures the boy's otherworldly purity. The baritone Thomas Glass was a solid Starbuck and acted with remarkable confidence, given that he was announced as a replacement for an ill Peter Mattei just a few hours before the opening on Monday — a performance that began with the orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, the Met's latest gesture of solidarity with that country. While the tenor Stephen Costello was a plangent Greenhorn, the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green sounded underpowered as Queequeg, with little to do except intone native prayers. The sweet-toned tenor William Burden was piquant among the smaller roles. Leonard Foglia's handsome production, with sets by Robert Brill, costumes by Jane Greenwood and lighting by Gavan Swift, is dominated by masts and rigging. The deck cleverly curves up into a backdrop that cast members can climb up and tumble down, seeming — with the help of Elaine J. McCarthy's projections — to be lost at sea as their boats are broken in the whale hunts. It is a clear staging of a clear piece. But that piece lacks the ingenuity and depth to hold its own with its source material, let alone break free. And it turns out that Heggie and Scheer's opening salvo of independence was just a coy deferral until the opera's closing moment. As Greenhorn, the Pequod's only survivor, is rescued by a passing ship, the captain asks his name. Costello answers, singing low and mournful: 'Call me Ishmael.'
Chicago Tribune
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Concerts for Sir Andrew Davis: The longtime baton of Lyric Opera died last year, his son is safeguarding his memory
Ed Frazier Davis realized he wasn't like other kids pretty early on. How many kids lived in a high-rise on the Mag Mile? Had the Lyric Opera House as their personal playground? Performed onstage for thousands of people by the time they were in middle school? For Davis, all that and more was possible because his father was the smiling, bright-eyed man on the Lyric Opera podium: Sir Andrew Davis, the house's music director from 2000 to 2021. His mother, Gianna Rolandi, was an operatic soprano and director of Lyric's Ryan Opera Center for early-career singers. It wasn't long before little Ed became a chip off the old block. Early on in Sir Andrew's tenure, Ed was cast as a cabin boy in a 2001 Lyric production of 'Billy Budd.' 'My dad loved to tell the story about how, at one point in the dress rehearsal, one of the singers got off by a few beats. But I came in at the right time. Afterward, my dad said something to the effect of, 'That was great. You got back on track.' And I said, 'Well, Dad, I listened to the orchestra!'' Davis recalls. 'He was just so pleased by that. 'Chuffed,' as he would say.' Davis's next Lyric bow will be on Feb. 15, his father's memorial concert. The elder Davis died last April after battling leukemia. The concert — free with a suggested donation to Lyric, per his wishes — includes a piece by Ed, now a composer and conductor himself, and singers from across Sir Andrew's decades-long international career. Among those singers is soprano Christine Goerke, who last sang at Lyric as Brünnhilde in its pandemic-foiled 'Ring' cycle. She estimates she'd worked with Sir Andrew on at least a half-dozen productions. 'You always felt safe in his hands. Wagner can be so bombastic — you can get lost and drowned out,' Goerke says. 'I never felt that way with him … I felt like I could fly.' Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong — who started her career in Lyric's Ryan Opera Center and has since sung 14 roles with the company — agreed. 'It was the greatest feeling to sing for Andrew and see this smile spread across his face,' she reminisces. 'The twinkle in his eye, the knowing grin, the unspoken understanding that you were creating something beautiful for the world. It was pure and without ego.' A few weeks later, Ed Davis follows the concert with his own tribute on March 8, featuring his choir Vox Venti. To mark the occasion, the choir commissioned a new work by Roxana Panufnik, who became close to Sir Andrew while preparing her 'Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light' for the last night of the 2018 BBC Proms. The piece, 'Heroic Hearts,' sets 'Ulysses' by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, one of Sir Andrew's favorite poets. 'We have a very unique connection, because she also had a famous conductor dad,' Davis says of Panufnik. Indeed, even the general sketches of Davis's biography carry his parents' stamp. He was born in Spartanburg, his mother's hometown, 'sort of strategically' so he could have dual American and British citizenship. He grew up in the UK, in rural Rodmell — an easy commute for Sir Andrew to the Glyndebourne opera festival. An elderly neighbor had been one of the unfortunate youth to drag Virginia Woolf's lifeless body from the River Ouse. Other than that, Rodmell was quiet, uneventful. Just as Sir Andrew liked it. 'My dad was a very down-to-earth guy. He and my mom both came from very poor backgrounds. They raised me to never take our financial situation for granted,' Davis says. Ed Davis now considers himself an American, having spent twice as long in the States as Great Britain — though, at Knox College in Galesburg, he would revert back to a British accent whenever he 'reached a certain level of intoxication.' There, he planned to carve a path independent of his parents. 'My initial intent was to pursue a creative writing degree. My mindset at the time was, 'Well, I'll never be as successful as my parents. So why should I try to pursue music professionally?'' he says. That changed partway through college. During an American lit course, Davis read an Emily Dickinson poem and, for the first time, heard music. He penned his first choral setting and never lost the composing bug. Sir Andrew conducted Ed's pieces increasingly in recent years, even including one — 'A Seed of Joy,' a partner piece to Beethoven's Ninth — on his 2022 retirement concert at Lyric. After Rolandi died in 2021, Davis composed 'Mother and Child' in tribute to her — a piece which will be reprised at Lyric's memorial concert. His 'Set Me as a Seal' will be included on the Vox Venti program, alongside British choral music which was close to his father's heart. Unlike his son, Sir Andrew resisted calling himself a composer. Nonetheless, in recent years, he started arranging Bach organ pieces — organ was the first instrument he played professionally — and Handel's 'Messiah.' The last concert he conducted, with the Chicago Symphony, featured his own boisterous, exuberant reorchestration of the oratorio. After his wife's death, Sir Andrew traded the hustle and bustle of downtown Chicago for a house in Old Irving Park, close to Ed. It wasn't quite the English countryside, but they were able to get dinner together at least weekly in the last year of his life. 'He was thrilled to find a new home that was not surrounded by tall buildings,' Ed Davis says. At Lyric's memorial concert, Goerke will sing 'Es gibt ein Reich,' from Richard Strauss's 'Ariadne auf Naxos.' 'It's completely apropos. She's talking about yearning for death, because everything is awful here,' she says. 'It's funny, cheeky and beautiful at the same time, and I don't think I could think of any more adjectives that better describe Sir Andrew.' For all the hustle and bustle of Sir Andrew's life, Davis is struck, in his death, by how attentive of a family man he was. 'He always made time for my mom and me,' he says. One memory sticks out. Davis has grappled with severe depression his entire life. He first harbored suicidal thoughts at just 15. One night, during a particularly brutal episode, he was crying in bed. Sir Andrew heard him from the hall. 'He just laid with me until I felt better,' he says. 'It's just the kind of guy he was.' Ed spoke to the Tribune the day before what would have been his father's 81st birthday, on Feb. 2. To celebrate, he planned to go to evensong at a church in Evanston — like any good Brit, Sir Andrew loved Anglican choral music — and 'have a Negroni, his favorite.' 'I think maybe my dad's biggest mission in life was to make everybody, from the Yo-Yo Mas of of the world to the last-row violinists and stagehands, be excited to make music for a living,' he says. 'It's a unique place to be in, being the child of someone who is not only famous but also unusually and universally adored.' Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic. The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.
