No controversy, however, about the theatrical electricity generated by Hungarian actor Örs Kisfaludy wending his way through the orchestra as he recited the often omitted riddling Prologue (the music starts filtering in near the end of his speech), teasing us into picturing the action behind “the fringed curtain” of our eyelids.
I found the opera so haunting I didn’t want to hear anything else afterward, least of all Brahms’s First Symphony. But the tight, vigorous, forward-moving and forward-looking performance — by turns pounding, uncertain, stealthy, singing, and soaring — won me over. I’d already heard how much Bartók owed to Richard Strauss (especially Salome, composed six years before); now I was discovering how much the Brahms “owed” to Bartók (though Bluebeard arrived 35 years later).
Kirshnit thought the Brahms “dreadful,” “ragged,” and “discordant” (the odd word he used for John Ferrillo’s oboe solo, which I’d found especially beautiful here). I don’t know what, if anything, went wrong in New York. At a live performance, of course, anything could.
The chamber-opera group Intermezzo is in its fourth season and has already commissioned five new operas. The only one I’ve caught, Verlaine & Rimbaud, was ambitious but disappointing. But last year’s Kurt Weill, Seven Deadly Sins, was a knockout. Intermezzo’s latest was the first Boston revival in more than three decades of Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River, the first of his three “parables for church performance.” William Plomer’s libretto is based on a Japanese noh play Britten had been struck by but changes the setting to mediæval Anglia. An Abbott (bass-baritone Paul Guttry, in one of his finest performances) presents the parable, in which the acolytes act out the tale of a Ferryman (superb baritone Sumner Thompson) who takes pilgrims across the river including a weary traveler (Intermezzo founder and artistic director — and baritone — John Whittlesey) and a woman driven mad looking for her lost child (heartbreaking tenor Jason McStoots). As the Ferryman tells of an abused boy who died the year before, the Madwoman realizes that this abducted child was her son. At the end, the spirit of the dead child (the extraordinary boy soprano Jake Wilder-Smith) sings from his grave to console his mother. It’s one of Britten’s most austere and moving works, and both the performance and the production lived up to it.
Music director James Busby led the excellent male chorus and seven-member ensemble (he himself played organ) with telling and magical detail. Veteran designer William Fregosi’s intricate but spartan platforms made a striking contrast to the Baroque splendor of the Jesuit Urban Center. And young stage director Andrew Ryker blocked the action with hieratic simplicity, even managing to suggest the opera’s Japanese origins.
The company had advice from a superior source: director Colin Graham (in town for Boston Lyric Opera’s Madama Butterfly), who staged the world premiere of Curlew River in 1964. Intermezzo wisely based this just-about-flawless production on Graham’s original. The company will soon be rising to another challenge, the Boston stage premiere of Janácek’s The Diary of One Who Vanished, January 12-12 at Berklee College of Music.
