Opera’s road to the future just might start in Philadelphia The city’s O17 festival gave audiences an immersive and experiential new way to see the art form Provided by Opera Philadelphia By RAY MARK RINALDI October 2, 2017 Opera practices what might be described in the current age as reverse radicalism. When every other engine of 21st century life is telling us to embrace change or die, opera advocates for tradition — preserving the primacy of a certain kind of voice and instrument, of a way of recording notes on a page. The code it writes in was developed centuries ago. Still, it wants to exist with the times, to be relevant and draw young listeners to replace the old ones who will inevitably depart. That means finding ways to position its music in the living, breathing culture of now. The field has tried a lot of things to stay fresh, and many have been successful. There are terrific new works being written to complement the ones everyone has heard a hundred times. Companies broadcast their fare across the world. Sets and lights have gone high-tech; there is an artful boom in the use of projected scenery over the past decade that’s been exciting to watch. Still, the most notable advances, at least with audiences, have been its dips into pop culture. If you want to sell out the theater, to get kids in the door and the mainstream media to even care, you’ve got do what the Minnesota Opera did by translating a grisly Stephen King novel into the language of baritones and sopranos. Or what the Santa Fe Opera did, setting the life of the Apple founder and millennial hero Steve Jobs to music. Provided by Opera Philadelphia This month, Opera Philadelphia did its own steal, mimicking the biggest thing going in the contemporary concert scene today — the music festival. Pop is all about its Coachella and Bonnaroo and Firefly and scores of other multi-day fests where the entertainment goes on nonstop, day and night. The lineups are stacked so high, fans convene from all over the world to hear them. More than that: to experience it all together, to be thrilled and filled to the brim with music. They love it, so much so that they often have to take drugs to cope with all of the excitement. I didn’t see any drugs going around at Opera Philadelphia’s O17 last weekend, but I did see a lot of euphoria among the thousands of people who attended the seven operatic “happenings” staged over 12 days across the city. The event wasn’t as compact as a Lollapalooza or a Burning Man fest, but it brought the same joys of indulgence and immersion. The festival, highlighted by three major premieres, was a success, top to bottom. It took risks — on both art and audiences — and it did make opera feel like it was with the times. Philadelphia, too. The fest took place at the same time as the city’s daring Fringe Festival, a showcase of experimental theater, music and dance, and it combined with O17 to position the metropolis as a world-class cultural leader. If these two festivals continue to program simultaneously, it’s easy to see Philly becoming a high-brow destination every September. The real power of O17 came from its art — and the way it was framed. Operas took place at a variety of locations: the grand and beloved Philadelphia Museum of Art; in Independence Park, a few feet from the Liberty Bell; at the Wilma Theater, a hangout for the stage-play crowd; and at the Barnes Foundation, the new high- architecture museum full of works by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse. The productions weren’t just at these places, they were authentically integrated into them. A production of one of Monteverdi’s short works, a Christian-Muslim love story set in the First Crusade, took place inside the 13th century cloister installed on the museum’s second floor. The acoustics were a miracle, and so was the singing, in Italian with no supertitles. The audience was shuttled around the ornate building, into the armor room, with its swords and shields, to hear a string duo play a musical interlude of Telemann and then, finally, toward the main entrance, where composer Lembit Beecher’s contemporary chamber work about PTSD, titled “I Have No Stories to Tell You,” used the museum’s famous grand staircase as a multi-level set. Programmatically, it was the perfect counterpoint to Monteverdi’s ancient war work, and the two meshed memorably; both operas opted out of expensive sets in favor of the museum’s existing ambiance. The audience totally got it, and in a music fest kind of way: They slammed red wine between the one-acts, they wore comfortable shoes, they chatted about what they liked and didn’t. Things were even looser — wilder, I’d say — down the beautiful Benjamin Franklin Parkway promenade at the premiere of composer/librettist David Hertzberg’s “The Wake World” in the Barnes Foundation’s massive, rectangular atrium hall. The performance took place on a long, long shoulder-high runway and, as the singers bounded up and down it, the audience was invited to walk around and follow along. At the same time, the chorus, dressed in body tights and face paint, walked through the audience as it sang. Provided by Opera Philadelphia The room was in constant motion; sonically, this was as trippy an experience as any drug might induce. You could hear the singers individually as they passed by you and then collectively as part of an ensemble. Audiences do not get that experience, ever. Director R.B. Schlather’s staging fit well with Hertzberg’s fantastical fairy tale, based on Aleister Crowley’s novel. The story was convoluted, not so easy to follow (or, really, possible to recap other than to classify it as a very twisted love story set in some mysterious time) but it didn’t matter. It was a dream, and dreams are always hard to follow and always fully engaging. Hertzberg’s music captured the drama through a combination of new and old classical sounds. He is compared by critics to Ravel, and that was evident here, darkness and romance cobbled together into something quite beautiful and startlingly dangerous. If “Wake Word” was a mythic journey into some mystic past (or future; sorry, I’m still not sure), “We Shall Not Be Moved” at the Wilma Theater brought audiences into the shocking reality of today. The piece examined the lasting effects of what Philly calls “the MOVE tragedy” of 1985, when police ended a standoff with a black liberation group by dropping a firebomb on their West Philadelphia house. Eleven people were killed and 65 neighboring homes were destroyed. No public officials were indicted. Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph create an opera here that connects the story to 2013, when many of Philadelphia’s schools were simply shut down because the city ran out of money. They draw a portrait: a “family” of teens caught up in a street crime who camp out on the site of the MOVE house waiting for their own inevitable and violent confrontation with police. The score is fully compelling, a contemporary classical work infused with hip-hop, jazz and gospel elements, and the libretto, which allows some spoken dialogue, is anguished without being clean and conclusive. These kids are full-blown characters, doomed angels but also troublemakers, and they are haunted, literally, by a troupe of dancers in ghostly white clothing, who shadow them on stage. O17 turned opera on its head, so much so that its most conservative move was actually to premiere a work by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, who teamed up most recently to make the Pulitzer-prize winning “Silent Night.” Not that the new “Elizabeth Cree” was routine — it’s a bloody gothic horror story — it’s just that it took place at the Kimmel Center, in a real classical venue with an orchestra in the pit and spectators in seats. It was so 2016. And it was thrilling, a tight 90 minutes of music that showed why this duo is in high demand. Campbell is skilled at turning characters created to be read into living, breathing beings that demand to be heard, and he made the most of author Peter Ackroyd’s popular murder-mystery about a Victorian anti-heroine who kills it in show business, and then some. There was a real balance of darkness and light in them, a depth developed through a combination of cutting lines delivered in free- wheeling rhymes. Puts was right there with him, producing a score that was rousing for moments set in a music hall and deadly dark during the story’s grisly massacres. Murder scenes are nothing new to this art form, and here the gut-rendering was depicted through a shadowy sort of animation. Still, I’ve never felt violence as viscerally in an opera house; interesting what these two collaborators, working with director David Schweizer, are capable of. If I have any useful criticism of O17, it’s that all of it felt a little too highbrow. The music fests it was emulating are down-and-dirty affairs held in muddy fields. O17 never quite got real like that; it was set in art museums and theaters, not warehouses and street corners, and it still retained the preciousness that turns off perspective new opera fans. Even O17’s free outdoor performance of “The Magic Flute” — and it was packed — took place in Independence Park, which is groomed to an unnatural perfection by the National Park Service.