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Los Angeles Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Commentary: How exuberant, ambitious operas in L.A. score big despite small casts and modest budgets
Los Angeles is no opera oasis in the sense of Berlin or Paris, which have nightly choices. Our opera comes and goes, fickle as flood-drought weather. Right now it's pouring chamber opera. February has, in fact, been something of an ad-hoc L.A. chamber opera festival. Last week alone, four premieres around town created an atmospheric river of chamber opera and opera-like works, home-grown and imported. All were different in musical and theatrical style and, somewhat, in intent. Importantly, all proved relevant, speaking to the moment in ways unique to the medium. For opera on a reduced scale — small casts, small instrumental ensembles, small spaces — intimacy replaces grandeur. Smaller budgets allow for bigger ideas. There is room for experimentation, immediacy and risk. Such opera can be done pretty much anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and pretty much anything goes. Better known for reinvention than status quo, L.A. is, in fact, a chamber opera town of renown. The ad-hoc festival began with a celebration of the Industry, the most impressive opera lab in America, and a wave goodbye to its founder, Yuval Sharon, who has taken the revolution to Detroit Opera, where he is artistic director, and to the Metropolitan Opera, where he will face the greatest challenge of his career attempting to mend the company's old Wagnerian ways with radical new productions of 'Tristan und Isolde' and the 'Ring' cycle. Next up, the Wallis in Beverly Hills hosted the U.S. premiere of a marvelously multimedia opera of ideas and imagery on the subject of exile. 'The Great Yes, the Great No' got a great big yes. It was created by William Kentridge at his South African opera lab, the Centre for the Less Good Idea. African and European musical forms, exuberant visual design and a wide-ranging text explored, with universal implications, the lasting ways deportation affects identity. Early on in its history, Long Beach Opera, originally Long Beach Grand Opera, found the 'grand' too ceremonious and increasingly scaled back to experimental, in-your-face intimacy. Last week the company presented its most radical performance ever to begin an audacious season completely composed of Pauline Oliveros productions. To call 'El Relicario de Los Animales' — an exercise in singers and instrumentalists expressing their inner animal — an opera may seem a stretch. But it happened to include a performance by a noted traditional mezzo-soprano, Jamie Barton, that already sets a high standard for operatic performance of the young year. The production began with Oliveros' 'Thirteen Changes,' a series of activities or images — standing naked in the moonlight, a singing bowl of steaming soup — with the extravagantly dressed performers in the nooks and crannies of Heritage Square. The reliquary itself, held in the square's church, was a series of exceedingly odd musical interactions between vocalists and the instruments in a combination of rap session and organized mystical service. The sounds, those seductively embracing and those frightfully howling in the wind, became an acknowledged life in all its strangeness, the animal kingdom as counselor to our uncertainties, indulgences and differences. This was also the week that Los Angeles Opera took its annual break from its grand pedestal at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and presented the West Coast premiere of another opera from Beth Morrison Projects at REDCAT. Mary Kouyoumdjian's 'Adoration' is an adaptation of Atom Egoyan's 2008 film in which a Canadian high school student of mixed race comes to terms with prejudice. Looking at reality through various cultural lenses, the deceptively elegant film is a nuanced deliberation on Simon's fantasy, planted in his imagination by his racist grandfather, that his Lebanese father was a terrorist. The opera, with a workable Royce Vavrek libretto, is less concerned with the issues than the characters and what's inside them, something opera is designed to do. The instrumental ensemble is but a string quartet. This is Kouyoumdjian's first opera, but she has been writing string quartet music of theatrical power for the past decade and has been championed by the Kronos Quartet. A new Kronos recording devoted to those works will be released in early March, and it features pieces with narration about war and peace in the Middle East that are grippingly theatrical. 'Adoration' feels like a natural next step. The string quartet conveys a mystical atmosphere. Her lyric vocal writing contends with harsh reality, but her style is never far from profound rapture. Unfortunately, the opera itself doesn't transcend other realities. Complex issues are simplified in Vavrek's libretto. An agile production directed by Laine Rettmer includes a stylish minimalist set by Afsoon Pajoufar and a fine cast headed by Omar Najmi as Simon. The string quartet and conductor Alan Pierson are hidden and amplification is overly loud, adding its own emotional emphasis. Egoyan, who wrote the appreciative liner notes for Kouyoumdjian's Kronos recording, is a talented opera director. May composer and director one day make an opera together. Coincidentally, the Kronos, with three new members, were in town last week at the Wallis for the Southern California premiere of Michael Abels' 'At War With Ourselves — 400 Years of You,' for string quartet, narrator and chorus. Abels is best known as a film composer ('Get Out,' 'Us,' 'Nope') but also has opera credentials, having shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rhiannon Giddens for 'Omar.' Here he elaborates, line by lyrical line, on an eloquent poem about social justice by Nikky Finney. Her expressive reading of it was as much song as speech. The L.A. chorus Tonality brought a sunlight that made the text flower. It would not be far-fetched to present this as exalted music theater. Lastly, the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo gave the world premiere last weekend (with a repeat this coming Saturday and Sunday) of Daniel Kessner's 'The Camp' at the Aratani Theatre. This was the most traditional of all the chamber operas. Its sentimental and rhyming libretto by Lionelle Hamanaka follows a Japanese American family during their World War II incarceration, leaving little room for meaningful music. But the story is moving in its treatment of how different generations dealt with tradition in a hostile environment. 'The Camp' has many advantages. Kessner, an L.A. composer and flutist, elevates the drama with pastoral beauty and serene tenderness. Set designer Yuri Okahana-Benson's skeleton structure in the modestly unfussy production evokes the kind of sets that Isamu Noguchi once designed for Martha Graham. These are well suited for Kessner's Copland-esque score (with subtle Japanese bits) for a superb mixed chamber ensemble conducted by Steve F. Hofer. Diana Wyenn's direction, suavely natural, never intrudes. The large cast is led by the compelling baritone Roberto Perlas Gómez as Mas Shimono, the father whose world crumbles around him as he tries to maintain traditional values. Kessner's opera, too, holds on to traditional opera values in a changing world and makes them and chamber opera matter.
Los Angeles Times
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
For the Record - Feb. 11, 2025
The Wallis: In the Feb. 10 Entertainment section, a review of 'The Great Yes, the Great No' at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts said the production was a U.S. premiere. It was a West Coast premiere. If you believe that we have made an error, or you have questions about The Times' journalistic standards and practices, you may contact the readers' representative by email at by phone at (877) 554-4000 or by mail at 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245. The readers' representative office is online at
Los Angeles Times
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: William Kentridge's ‘The Great Yes' at the Wallis: A dazzling meditation on a world out of kilter
'The Great Yes, the Great No' is a great title. And William Kentridge's latest chamber opera, which is having its U.S. premiere at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, lives up to that title as one of the celebrated South African artist's most astonishing works. Concept, direction, set and costume design, projections, video, text, music, choreography and performances by a vast company of singers, dancers, actors and equally vast creative team — all simply great. Great, to be sure, but this 'Great Yes' happens to be a project of Kentridge's Centre for the Less Good Idea, a Johannesburg workshop he's dubbed an 'interdisciplinary incubator.' For Kentridge, attachment to a great idea can lead to entrapment, closing your mind to other, unthought-of fertile ideas. He cites a South African proverb: 'If the good doctor can't cure you, find the less good doctor.' That doctor may have more imagination. Ideas, however you want to weigh them, always proliferate in Kentridge's varied and layered work, which can be a single charcoal sketch, an elaborate video, a complex installation or an eye-popping opera production. The extravagant Kentridge show 'In Praise of Shadows,' at the Broad museum two years ago, brought together history and the present, oppression and fantasy, colonialism and the power of the individual, humor and sadness, ecstasy and pain. The Broad palpitated with energy. A previous chamber opera, 'The Refusal of Time,' seen at UCLA's Royce Hall seven years ago, was a supercharged planetary exploration of 19th century South African colonialism. In 'The Great Yes,' Kentridge turns to a creaky old cargo ship smelling of rotted oranges that sailed from Marseille to Martinique in 1941 overcrowded with some 300 passengers escaping Vichy France. Among them were a bevy of noted artists, writers, intellectuals and revolutionaries. We know about the voyage of SS Capitaine Paul-Lemerle primarily from the opening chapters of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss classic 'Tristes Tropiques.' He describes the conditions as being horrific but the company as being exhilarating. On the voyage he became friends with one of the founders of surrealism, novelist and theorist André Breton. Others on board included modernist Russian poet and a Trotskyite anarchist Victor Serge, Martinican poet and a founder of the anticolonialism Négritude movement Aimé Césaire, Cuban painter Wifredo Lam; influential Marxist psychiatrist and Pan-Africanist Frantz Fanon, along with fascinating others. Kentridge, though, doesn't stop there. He merrily throws onto the passenger manifest the likes of Josephine Bonaparte, Josephine Baker, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin. What the voyage now represents is the unmaking of ideas from some of the great thinkers and creators of the age. Their yeses and great noes no longer mean anything. They are leaving, we are told, a place where they will not be missed and going to a place where they will not be welcomed. Theirs is the plight of the eternal exile. Kentridge likens the captain to the ferryman, Charon, in Greek mythology transporting the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. These remarkable characters parade, dance, argue and make love. Newly unmoored, they are, while in limbo, living. Freedom fighters, they are free to be themselves. That great yes comes at the price of a great no. Having lost everything, they suffer filth, hunger and disease during a months-long voyage to uncertainty. Still, for 90 nonstop minutes, Kentridge's characters dazzle. They sport large painted masks of themselves and costumes that mirror their artwork. The video backdrop continually changes, one minute a drawing, another an abstract animation, another black-and-white documentary film. Documentary and fabrication conjoin. Kentridge's libretto is an assemblage of the characters' words and a range of other historical sources. The 'Embarkation,' for instance, begins with a jubilant seven-member South African women's chorus singing in Zulu lines from Aeschylus, Brecht and many others. Why, the chorus asks, quoting Anna Akhmatova, is this age worse than others? 'The world is leaking!' the Captain — a spoken role enacted with brilliant aplomb by Tony Miyambo — explains. He will become our congenial, riotous, seductive, wise guide throughout. What follows is a succession of scenes, each a different kind of theater, a different kind of music, different movement, different visuals, with mostly different characters. Yet all are, so to speak, in the same boat. One thing flows into another. On screen, Nazi tanks are seen on the Champs-Élysées; soon after we're in the world of dancing espresso pots. Text is visually presented on the screen in a host of ways — via roulette-wheel graphics, as post-it notes, as banners. An arrestingly versatile quartet of musicians led by percussionist Tlale Makhene (joined by Nathan Koci on accordion and banjo, Marika Hughes on cello and Thandi Ntuli on piano) seems to hold the whole world of music in their hands. One minute, it's Schubert; another it's Satie-esque, and many more South African splendor. Enough cannot be said about the singing, the dancing, the music-making. How can such a miserable voyage hold so much life? Glamorous as the exiles are, Kentridge does not glamorize them. Revolutionary art, revolutionary poetry won't patch the leak in the world. 'I shout my laughter to the stars,' Fanon says in despair. 'Get used to me.' Exile is emptiness. The passengers survive a terrible storm before landing where they will be mistreated. 'Love no country, countries soon disappear,' a member of the chorus sings in Zulu (a translation of a line by the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz) with thunder in her voice. 'The world is out of kilter,' she later tells us. 'We will reset it.' 'The Great Yes,' which had its premiere last summer in Arles, France, was commissioned by the Luma Foundation, the exhibition center designed by Frank Gehry. Kentridge brings it to America thirsting for even less good yeses and noes. (The Wallis is a co-commissioner as is Cal Performances in Berkeley, where the opera will be presented next, in March. If I read Kentridge correctly, he warns us of the fiction that we protect ourselves by deporting immigrants. Not only do countries soon disappear, but in a rapidly evolving post-truth-or-consequences era, it may be reality that soon disappears, leaving us all unmoored. In the end, 'The Great Yes, the Great No' reveals the collective might of exile. The proof theatrically is that the production is a rapt and riotous collective with a long list credits all seemingly on the same wildly unpredictable page. Nhlanhla Mahlangu is both choral conductor and associate director. Greta Goiris' costumes and Sabine Theunissen's set design bring Kentridge's visions to life. Sound, lighting and projection are individually exquisite. Kentridge's collective spirit, moreover, translates beyond the Wallis. The previous weekend, Kentridge returned to UCLA to present boisterous Centre for the Less Good Idea works in progress at the Nimoy. That was followed by performance artists at the Broad museum offering their own less-good-idea-inspired efforts. The American Cinematheque has just announced that it will screen Kentridge's complete 'Drawings for Projection' Feb. 21 at the Aero Theatre.
