Long Beach Opera (LBO) has artfully navigated 2021’s ongoing pandemic with offerings ranging from the digitally supplemented parking lot performance “Les Enfants Terribles,” the fully digital streaming series “Desert In,” and its safely outdoor season finale on Aug. 14 and 15 at The Ford amphitheater in Los Angeles.
Its final performance last weekend was a double bill of two composers: Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”—a poetically mesmerizing vocal and dance experience—and Kate Soper’s visceral meditation on female characters written by men in “Voices from the Killing Jar.”
The two pieces showcased sopranos Kiera Duffy and Laurel Irene, whose powerful voices thrill the body and resonate in the mind long after their performances’ final notes.
Schoenberg composed “Pierrot Lunaire” in 1912, setting to music 21 verses by Albert Giraud. A collaboration with the LA Philharmonic, the performance featured classical musicians from the group Wild Up led by conductor Jenny Wong. The musicians performed while aligned on a narrow “boat” floating on the metaphoric moonlit river of Giraud’s poem, whose title means “Moonstruck Pierrot” or “Pierrot in the Moonlight.”
Though Giraud’s intricate and dreamy verses are originally French, Schoenberg’s version is in German. An English translation projected above The Ford’s stage revealed moody lines like, “The wine which through our eyes we drink / Pours from the moon in waves upon us,” which worked well with the open night sky of the amphitheater.
Schoenberg’s Pierrot is also female rather than Giraud’s original male, perhaps because of the sheer range of intonation required. Duffy’s incredibly controlled singing was inspired and fluid, despite consonant-heavy German lyrics. Every note had to be pitch-perfect, moving sharply higher or lower within each line in what LBO described as “exploring a threshold space between singing and speaking.”
Duffy’s control and vocal strength were even more impressive considering she had to move among a troupe of nine dancers while continually singing. Directed and choreographed by Danielle Agami, the dancers—members of the Ate9 Dance Company—were as precise and fluidly expressive as Duffy’s vocals as they traversed the stage and often each other, adding kinetic dimension to the surreal piece.
“Voices from the Killing Jar” continued that surreal feel and powerful vocal performance, though with a more introspective and pained inflection. Soper’s more contemporary 2014 composition features eight women from literature voicing hurts that—all as performed by singer Irene—emerge from very deep within their bodies.
Directed by Zoe Aja Moore, that pain sometimes visually emerged from the characters’ mouths as thin pieces of paper fluttering out or a string of them pulled from the singer’s mouth (seen in shadow from the light of a chandelier). Irene, dressed in bright green satin, also physically enacted the plight of these characters, sometimes with the help of a silent aid played by Sierra Priest, who in one vignette is choked to death by a character played by baritone Abdiel Gonzalez.
Among the most recognizable of Soper’s characters may be Lady MacDuff from William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”; Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” with a voice “full of money”; and Clytemnestra from Greek myth and Euripides’s play, who pines over the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia in one of the most vocally haunting pieces.
With music by Wild Up and some electronic vocal distortions, Irene conveyed through her voice the visceral emotions of the dismissed characters she portrayed, all written by men. Hearing their powerful wails, pleas, and just plain sounds surging from Irene’s slight frame was both moving and electrifying. She even managed to out-sing a helicopter hovering over the amphitheater in the last few minutes of the performance.
LBO’s 2022 season begins in March with four operas, including a new production of its 2019 world premiere of Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five”—about five Black and Latino youth unjustly accused of rape—which LBO describes as having “increasing societal relevance.” LBO also plans to release new operatic short films, beginning this fall with “Entry,” an “operatic cinematic dance short” that explores integration out of isolation.
With such artful works that resonate with the pandemic and the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, LBO seems to be thriving at the cusp of what’s now and what’s to come, including the digital future COVID-19 may have helped usher in all the more urgently.
