philip glass: the sound of a voice

The first review I wrote for the Post-Gazette. This opera was reminiscent in scope to Glass' "The Juniper Tree," an opera I saw in Tulsa, OK in the '80s.

Fragility surrounded the small stage at The Andy Warhol museum Thursday night. Reflecting the fragile psyches of characters in a Philip Glass opera, visually compelling glass sets served as the backdrop.

Designed by Pittsburgh artists Kathleen Mulcahy and Ron Desmett, founders of the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the installations aided Opera Theater's intimate staging of Glass' "The Sound of a Voice." The opera opened the company's Fusion Festival, a celebration of American works with an Asian connection, presented in collaboration with the Warhol's "Off the Wall" series.

The cast for the Opera Theater's new production, just the second the opera has enjoyed, also appared in the world premiere by the American Repertory Theater in 2003. Glass' idiomatic vocal writing and the singers' familiarity with their roles kept the attention on librettist David Hwang's dramatic subtleties. Each act was inspired by a Japanese ghost story. Among other themes, Hwang's libretto emphasized the ownership of power in male-female relationships. Providing a symbolic common thread between the two stories, hundreds of clear glass drops "wept" from steel tree branches positioned above and around the stage.

These glass beads simultaneously furnished the static backdrop and interactive props for the singers. Sopranos Suzan Hanson and Janice Felty gracefully drew these glass pieces into the narrative flow of each story. In the title story, Hanson used a glass teardrop as a shakuhachi (a vertically blown Japanese flute). She also draped herself in a kimono that had similar glass beads embedded in it. In the second story, "House of Dreams," Felty used one of the glass drops as a key to unlock the rooms in her brothel of sleepers.

"The Sound of a Voice" gradually reveals that a secretive woman living alone in the forest is a suspected witch. A samurai dispatched to kill her becomes entranced by the woman's beauty and beguiling ways. During his stay with her, the petals of the long-stemmed glass flowers the woman cultivates are gradually revealed to hold the voices of past visitors. The sounds of their voices, drifting from beneath the flower petals, are the only remnant of these missing visitors. In this exquisitely staged scene, baritone Herbert Perry showed Glass' vocal writing to be emotionally moving and dramatically significant. The harmonic circularity of the music coalesced with the dramatic revelation that what had happened before, the trapping of a human voice, is in all likelihood happening again, this time to the samurai.

Glass incorporated the Chinese pipa, a lute-like instrument, and the shakuhachi to provide Asian timbre to his otherwise Western score. Combined with the cello and percussion, Glass' mixed quartet proved to be a musically effective ensemble. The variations in his scoring palette provided a breadth of colors for the singers to musically interact with. Conductor Alan Johnson, one of the leading Glass performers in the country, achieved an excellent ensemble balance: At times the quartet sounded like a much larger ensemble.

Glass' instrumentation also supported Hwang's character development. Pipa virtuoso Min Xiao-Fen became the musical shadow to Herbert Perry's "Samurai" in the first story and Felty's "Madame" in the second. Xiao-Fen's dissonant strumming at the end of the opera provided musical support to Felty's silent grief. A subtle lighting change also highlighted the hanging tears above her head, making the strumming even more poignant. Pittsburgh flutist Alberto Almarza supplied the aural realization of Hanson's symbolic, glass shakuhachi and became the instrumental doppelganger to Eugene Perry's "Writer" in the final story.

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