The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial season, which recently ended with incandescent performances of Meredith Monk’s opera “atlas,” has no peer in modern orchestral history. More than fifty new scores shared space with classics of the repertory. Fully staged opera productions alternated with feats of avant-garde spectacle. The L.A. Phil, colossal in ambition and experimental in spirit, has redefined what an orchestra can be.
It was a season in which Andrew Norman added a new work to the canon, in the form of his shimmering soundscape “Sustain”; in which Benjamin Millepied devised exhilarating, cinematic choreography for Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”; in which the brilliant young director Yuval Sharon staged John Cage’s “Europeras 1 and 2” at a Hollywood movie studio; in which an array of artists paid tribute to Yoko Ono; in which a tribute to the Fluxus movement entailed the making of a huge salad on the stage of Disney Hall; in which Esa-Pekka Salonen led one of the finest, most ferocious performances of “The Rite of Spring” I have heard; in which Thomas Wilkins conducted a no less electrifying account of Duke Ellington’s “Harlem”; and in which an indomitable band of opera singers and musicians repeated the “Contessa, perdono” ensemble, from “The Marriage of Figaro,” for twelve unbroken hours, in a rendition of Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance-art piece “Bliss.”
Not everything was a triumph. One commission, Philip Glass’s Twelfth Symphony, meandered interminably through material derived from David Bowie’s album “Lodger.” Bryce Dessner’s “Triptych,” another première, attempted to make an oratorio out of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, with murky and often uncomfortable results. Tan Dun’s “Buddha Passion” wavered between visceral sensation and saccharine kitsch. Even when the L.A. Phil fails, though, it fails memorably. What the season resolutely lacked was the sort of cautious complacency that smothers so much of the classical world.
“Atlas” came to Disney Hall under the aegis of Sharon, who just finished a three-year term as an “artist-collaborator” with the orchestra. Monk’s piece was first seen at the Houston Grand Opera, in 1991, and travelled to bam a year later. Then it disappeared, because Monk turned to other projects and never produced a formal score. This artist, who is now seventy-six, is so unstintingly original in vision and in technique that the idea of presenting her work without her can seem unthinkable. The L.A. Phil performances were more than a revival; they set a precedent for the preservation of Monk’s legacy as part of a renovated repertory.
The wonder of “atlas,” as of so many other Monk creations, is the emergence of an intricately varied musical language from simple-seeming materials: ditty-like melodies, austere modal harmonies, gradually shifting minimalist rhythms. The opera is based, very loosely, on the life of Alexandra David-Néel, a Belgian-French explorer, Buddhist author, and opera singer, who lived from 1868 to 1969. Monk transports the figure of Alexandra into a symbolic milieu, one that hovers between the mid-twentieth century and the timeless landscape of Buddhist fable. At the outset, we see the teen-age Alexandra in her parents’ home, yearning for adventure. In the next stage of her life, she assembles a team of explorers and moves through a series of far-flung realms, each with a distinct musical texture: a kind of abstract hoedown for a pre-modern agricultural community; a desiccated tango for a desert expedition.
Monk’s more recent theatrical offerings—“Songs of Ascension,” “On Behalf of Nature,” and “Cellular Songs”—have tended toward transcendent contemplation. Earlier on, she was more confrontational in her approach: her 1976 filmed opera, “Quarry,” which recently returned to circulation, is a brutal parable of a totalitarian society in formation. “atlas” gives a briefer glimpse of a similar horror. Toward the end of the middle section, Erik Magnussen, one of Alexandra’s companions, is swept up in visions of a technocratic order, and the pulsing violence of his music, at once hyper-organized and chaotic, is all the more shocking given the gentleness of what has come before. This dystopian episode gives way to a hypnotic texture of close-knit, near-static vocal harmony, which in Monk’s scheme represents a healing realm of “Invisible Light.”
Before the L.A. Phil undertook “atlas,” Monk had never let another director assume control of her work. Although she gave Sharon free rein to impose his ideas, she did involve herself in the casting and the rehearsing of the singers. It is a challenge for trained singers to abandon ingrained habits and absorb Monk’s raw, pure vocal style, which has been described as a kind of folk song for which no historical folk exists. For the most part, the L.A. Phil cast made the transition successfully. Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, one of three performers embodying Alexandra, proved strikingly Monk-like in her timbre and phrasing. John Brancy infused Magnussen with a frothing intensity. Yi Li, as Alexandra’s comrade Cheng Quing, sometimes seemed too polished, but he brought out the crystalline beauty of Monk’s lyric writing. Paolo Bortolameolli led an idiomatic, agile ensemble of L.A. Phil players.
Sharon shaped the show with his usual combination of intellectual rigor and emotional focus. The set, designed by Es Devlin, was dominated by a huge sphere, thirty-six feet in diameter—half Earth, half Death Star. In one scene, panels in the sphere slid open to reveal Alexandra and her companions seated in an airplane; in another, a character called the Lonely Spirit appeared in splendid, eerie isolation. The apparatus was visually stunning, but the limitations of the Disney stage left little room for the exuberant movement that is integral to Monk’s aesthetic. I’d like to see the production again, in a bigger space. “atlas” is one of the great operas of the late twentieth century, and it deserves to travel as widely as its heroine.
The Long Beach Opera, another progressive musical force in Southern California, inverts the usual opera-company formula, concentrating mainly on works by living composers. While the L.A. Phil was mounting “atlas,” Long Beach was preparing for the première of Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five,” a dramatization of the Central Park jogger case of 1989, which led to the unjust imprisonment of five black and Latino teen-agers. Davis has a history of taking on charged subjects; his previous operas include “X, the Life and Times of Malcolm X,” “Amistad,” and “Tania,” the last based on the Patty Hearst case. With “The Central Park Five,” which has a libretto by Richard Wesley, Davis again enters the thick of the national conversation: Ava DuVernay’s television series “When They See Us” has been stirring fresh outrage over the fate of the five boys.
Davis first won notice in the jazz world, and “The Central Park Five” is to a great extent a symphonic jazz score, in the tradition of Ellington’s long-form pieces and, in its more seething stretches, of Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor. At the same time, Davis writes angular, incisive vocal lines in the mid-century modernist tradition. The score is dark, propulsive, and, at times, wrenchingly lyrical. Nathan Granner memorably voices Korey Wise, who, of the five boys, spent the longest time in prison. The opera takes a turn into savage satire with periodic appearances by Donald Trump, who notoriously called for the boys to be put to death. Sung with tenor bombast by Thomas Segen, Trump vents his racist fury while sitting on a gold Trump Tower toilet. Subtle it’s not, but we do not live in subtle times.
Long Beach Opera has an annual budget of less than two million dollars, and this constraint showed in “The Central Park Five,” which played at the Warner Grand Theatre, in San Pedro. It was the kind of show where the leads doubled as stagehands, carrying chairs and moving screens. I wondered how Davis’s hard-hitting score might have played on a grander stage—perhaps one within walking distance of Central Park. ♦
