A scene from Akhnaten. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.
10:01am | Aside from aesthetic curiosity/interest/pleasure, my original purpose in attending the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’ Akhnaten was to write a review.
But considering I attended the second and final performance (these frigging operas often have short runs), I thought it might do them — and you — a greater service by simply helping to spread the word about Long Beach Opera.
Like, for example, that they exist.
This is not a dig at LBO’s PR department — I couldn’t tell you one way or the other how well they’re doing with the publicizing — but I’m aware that for many Long Beachers, particularly in the under-40 set, opera just isn’t a blip on the radar.
For starters, few of us grow up exposed to opera. And if you don’t get that early exposure, the vocal gymnastics that characterize opera solos — never mind the relative (i.e., to theater) stasis of the onstage dramatic action, the recitative (e.g., singing “Who is it?” after someone has knocked on the door), and the stately pace at which the story unfolds and with which information about the plot is doled out — can be quite an acquired taste.
Can be, I say, not is, because a lot of us simply don’t know what opera has to offer. If that’s you, you might think about going to one. After all, the L.A. area’s oldest professional opera company is right here in town, performing several times a year at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center.
One reason you might think about checking LBO out is that primarily they stage modern operas, ones featuring non-traditional touches like the a replica of Air Force One taxiing down the runway and letting off Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (as we saw last year in John Adams’ Nixon in China) or Akhnaten‘s front-screen electronic projections (at one point things were looking a bit Tron-y) and minimal, repetitive music forming itself into dark loops that remind you a bit of The Cure.
Then there’s just the pure spectacle of opera. Musically and conceptually, opera is often big, grand in scope and scale. See a full-scale opera, and you see an event. Casts routinely run into the dozens, with the music provided by small orchestras. What the staging may lack in frenetics it makes up for in meticulousness. The tableaux that opened Nixon in China (the People’s Army in silhouette) and Akhnaten (living hieroglyphics that moved as a single human glyph glided by) could easily have been something out of Pageant of the Masters. Except, you know, they did it while singing.
The stories, too, often break with the traditional. Take, for example, LBO’s next offering, the West Coast premiere (they do a lot of West Coast premieres) of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cherry Town, a “satiric romp through Khrushchev’s Moscow” which “[e]xploit[s] the failed idealism of the Soviet housing system” as it “follows a group of young people who have been evicted from their homes as they navigate through the bureaucratic labyrinth in pursuit of domestic happiness.”
I don’t know if you would like any opera. I do know that when you’ve got a first-class opera company right in your backyard, you might as well attend one to find out.
Long Beach Opera will stage Moscow, Cherry Town on May 15, 18, and 22. For more information, visit LongBeachOpera.org. You can even follow them on Twitter: @LongBeachOpera.
Jochen Kowalski as Akhnaten and Peabody Southwell as Nefertiti in Akhnaten. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff.
Keith Ian Polakoff