The Odyssey returns

Tuesday, 5/6/97 The Odyssey returns Director Pierre Audi brings
classical Greek style to L.A. Opera’s production of ‘The Return of
Ulysses.’

By John Mangum Daily Bruin Contributor The opera may be called
"The Return of Ulysses," but chances are many Los Angeles
operagoers have never seen anything like it. Avant-garde director
Pierre Audi and early music specialist Glen Wilson first joined
forces in 1990 to create this production of Claudio Monteverdi’s
opera, which premiered in Venice in 1640. L.A. Opera presents the
7-year-old production of the 357-year-old work for six performances
beginning Tuesday. "Ulysses" was Audi’s first production at the
Netherlands Opera after being appointed the company’s artistic
director in 1988. The work appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music with the Netherlands Opera cast and was lauded as one of the
hits of New York’s 1993 season. The director rethought his concept
for the production’s Los Angeles appearance. "It is like a rebirth
of the production because the cast is completely new, the orchestra
is completely new," Audi says. "I’ve had to adapt the production to
these new personalities, which means of course it would be
different." These new personalities include baritone Thomas Allen
as Ulysses and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade as the hero’s
wife, Penelope, who waits 20 years for her husband to return from
the Trojan War. The Los Angeles-based ensemble Musica Angelica
provides the requisite instrumental support under Wilson’s
direction. The 10 musician group (11 if you add Wilson on
harpsichord) plays a version of the opera prepared by the
keyboardist on instruments dating from Monteverdi’s time or
reconstructions. The version cuts an hour from the lengthy work,
removing all of the gods except for Minerva and placing the
dramatic emphasis on the human characters. "Glen Wilson is the only
common denominator in the whole thing," Audi says. "He’s kept the
narrative very tight, moving. The first part is more like an
introduction of the characters, setting up the context in which
Ulysses has gone and is coming back, and the second part is the
return of Ulysses. It is really the opera." The opera, based on the
second half of Homer’s "Odyssey," centers on Ulysses’ disguised
return to Ithaca and Penelope’s relationship with her suitors. The
drama leads up to a series of scenes during which Ulysses defeats
the suitors in a contest, kills them and reveals his identity to
his wife. "The text, of course, is a very, very good libretto,"
Audi says. "The poetry is very, very high quality, but the music is
trying to push the text forward. It’s first the word, then the
music, and the music is there to push the word forward. "In a sense
what the singers are doing is not so much singing. They are
speaking, or declaiming, the text. The music is a form of notated
declamation, just like in Greek drama." This declamatory style of
singing shifts the focus away from the melodic style of solos and
ensemble pieces more familiar to opera audiences. Instead, the
music matches the words of the libretto closely, forming a
continuous string of recitative, aria and arioso interrupted only
by orchestral interludes, or ritornelli. "Singers have a tendency
to want to sing, and in this opera they almost have to speak," Audi
says. "It’s a question of pulling back their resources into other
areas, the area of making colors with their voice, of not dropping
the rhythm, because there is no conductor. They have to keep the
rhythm of the thing right. And thirdly, they have to be hugely
concentrated theatrically in order to fill this music from inside
so that it functions as theater music." The attention the singers
have to pay to words and to each other gives "Ulysses" a stronger
resemblance to spoken theater than many other operas. Audi likens
the dramaturgy of the work to Shakespeare, with its many characters
and numerous scene changes, and his staging takes this into
account. "A Shakespeare play moves constantly from place to place,
and the question is not to set up a whole set to describe one room
and then change the set," Audi says. "You have to have a space in
which the actors are in a sense themselves primarily changing the
space and making the set and elements which help the audience to
maybe create an image, with lighting that suggests we’re outdoors
or suggests we’re indoors. The most important thing about the
performance is that it is coming into the auditorium." The stage
sports a set comprised of several large forms, including copper
plates, a rusty wall, a boat-like structure, a catwalk and a strip
of sand. These "sublimated images," as Audi calls them, evoke an
austere nobility appropriate to the work’s Hellenic subject and the
Greek theater origins of Monteverdi’s own conception of opera.
"Without him there would be no opera," Audi says. "He wrote the
first operas. It’s really the attempt to recreate the Greek
theater. That’s why it started. For anybody who is really
interested in opera, they should come and see this production and
hear this music because it’s where opera started." OPERA: Claudio
Monteverdi’s "Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria," directed by Pierre
Audi and conducted by Glen Wilson, will be at the Dorothy Chandler
Pavilion for six performances through May 18. $15 student rush
tickets are available one hour before each performance. For more
info, call (213) 365-3500. Monteverdi’s "The Return of Ulysses"
chronicles the mythical hero’s return to his homeland. L.A. Opera’s
production, directed by Pierre Audi and conducted by Glen Wilson,
opens tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Pierre Audi
External Links: Los Angeles Music Center Opera