Home Bio Discography Catalog Reviews Publishers Performances Music Samples 'Summer and Smoke' breaks into flame at Central City OperaBy Wes Blomster, Camera Classical Music
Critic CENTRAL CITY — Alban Berg's "Wozzeck,"
premiered in 1925, is considered by many the outstanding operatic
achievement of the 20th century. In 1971, not quite half a century
later, in "Summer and Smoke" Lee Hoiby composed an American
companion piece to it.
Lanford Wilson fashioned Hoiby's libretto from Tennessee Williams'
1948 drama, and, as seen on stage at the Central City Opera on
Saturday, there is much in the finished product that recalls Vienna in
those sorrowful and sometimes sordid years surrounding the demise of
the Austrian empire.
At the core of "Summer and Smoke" lies that same seething
hothouse sexuality that informs the figures painted by Gustav Klimt and
Egon Schiele. And need one mention that theirs was also the Vienna of
Sigmund Freud?
Alma Weinmiller, central figure of "Summer and Smoke," is
the repressed daughter of a Southern minister, whose narrow-mindedness
has driven his wife to madness. Alma, as Williams describes her,
"suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her."
Hoiby leaves no doubt about what that fire is.
She is in love with John Buchanan, a young doctor, who defines the
human being as equal thirds of brain, belly and sex, each of which
demand nourishment.
In the drama, Alma compares their relationship to "two people
exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each one finding
the other one gone out, the door locked against him, and no one to
answer the bell."
There's a bit of hubris involved in composing Williams, which
perhaps explains why so few have tried. Indeed, one might ask whether
his plays — intensely musical in themselves — profit from
conversion into opera.
In 1998, for example, Andre Previn tried his hand at Williams'
"Streetcar Named Desire." The result was incidental movie
music.
Hoiby has taken a different approach. He does not merely set the
words of "Summer and Smoke" to music; he composes Williams
himself and the dark world, in which he lived. He puts a telling finger
on the underground forces that make the writer's figures tick.
The CCO has come up with a cast fully "in sync" with
Hoiby's intentions. Jennifer Casey Cabot and John Hancock are ideal
singers for Alma and John, on stage almost without interruption
throughout the opera. Both make their CCO debuts in the production.
It is hard to imagine a finer Alma than Cabot. Alma is in every way
the equal of Blanche, the tragic central figure of
"Streetcar," and both, of course, are deeply troubled
incarnations of Williams himself.
Cabot identifies totally with Alma and brings emotional force to her
every word and gesture.
Cabot's Alma is perfectly balanced by John Hancock's Buchanan. He is
both Southern gentleman and degenerate delinquent, and it is clear that
his marriage to airhead Nellie Ewell, wonderfully sung by Andrea Edith
Moore, will hardly be fulfilling.
As in the case of every significant drama made into opera, here too
a great deal of Williams' text remains on the cutting room floor.
Supporting roles are correspondingly reduced in size.
Whether the demented Mother Winemiller was intended to be as nutty
as Katherine Ciesinski plays her is open to question. Nonetheless
Ciesinski makes the caricature a comic delight. Tony Dillon is an
appropriately bigoted Reverend Winemiller. Christina Nassif is a
seductive Rosa Gonzales, and Raymond Diaz plays her unappetizing Papa.
John Moriarty is wonderfully at home in the score and extracts top
playing from the pit band in the many moments in the work that rival
Puccini in lyric warmth and richness.
As director, Ken Cazan, who twice played Tom in
"Streetcar," exercises a knowing and experienced hand. Set
and costumes by — respectively — Kevin Knight and Alice Marie
Kugler Bristow contribute much to the atmosphere of the staging.
Top honors, however, go to Hoiby, whose tightly woven score
unrelentingly underscores the demonic sexual currents in which this
work is rooted.
"Summer and Smoke" makes an audience squirm, for it tells
a story that takes place to some degree in everyone. One can't put the
opera at a comfortable arm's length as one does with "Carmen"
or "Tosca."
It's heavy stuff, and the Central City Opera has performed a great
service in returning the work to the stage. Although it has experienced
only a handful of stagings in its 33 years, it is a major American
masterpiece.
Perhaps the superb success of the CCO production will help
"Summer and Smoke" gain its proper place in the repertory of
American opera houses.
Contact Wes Blomster at (303) 473-1611 or blomsterw@thedailycamera.com.
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A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY
"The wholly unexpected happened at City
Center last night--the world premiere of a truly fine American opera." " . . . a wonderful new opera, a
loveliness steeped in sadness and, at once, lightness.
Hoiby's music adds a rich dimension to Turgenev, both
compatible and enlarging. His melodies are strong and
long-lined, his ensemble work tightly-harmonized and
conversational. His new score is one of the finest for an
American opera in many years, technically complete and
dramatically correct. Thematic music runs from character to character with deep understanding. Underlying orchestral
support is not simply structural but comments, underlines
and explains. He has kept his music very airy, tinged here
with irony, there with despair . . . it creates that rarity,
an intimate opera." "The closing scene is an octet of
overwhelming beauty, written above a small chorus. Its mood
of resigned farewell is akin to that of the Rosenkavalier
trio, or, differently, to the Meistersinger quintet. This is
a supreme moment in opera, and Hoiby's genius has done
nothing finer." "The best moment in the opera came in the
five minute octet just before the final curtain. This
probably was patterned after the closing quintet in Barber's
'Vanessa', except that it is better--more natural, ringing
truer." "Almost with surprise you grow aware of
the beautiful eloquence of the vocal lines, their clean
simplicity, and you forget that Hoiby is Menotti's pupil. He
is a compose standing on his own. There is no question about
this lyric gift; his melodies are more compelling by far
than those of his teacher."
In his setting of Martin Luther King
Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech yesterday afternoon . . . the
peculiar transparency of Lee Hoiby's genius came to the
fore. With baritone Michael Dash, composer-pianist Hoiby gave
the Washington premiere of the piece, which animates the
stately and severe rhythms of King's oratory with a
flexible, rangy, Italianate vocal line and positions it in a
harmonic landscape full of tolling piano figures and
churning rhythms. In Hoiby's vocal settings--the King speech
and five Whitman poems that preceded it--prosody and vocal
color and harmonic diction and instrumental gesture are all
so closely aligned that the formal devices of the music seem
to vanish and only its emotional content remains.
SUMMER AND SMOKE An opera in Two Acts. Libretto by Lanford Wilson after Tennessee Williams. (1971) "It is a lovely work, poetic and lyrical,
often haunting and very moving. . . . The composer sets the
English language to music as well as anyone today." "Hoiby has written a beautiful work,
exquisitely set for the voice, with an instrumental fabric
which is vividly evocative of the drama. As a wedding of
words, mood and music SUMMER AND SMOKE is our most
successful American opera to date." "Hoiby is that rarity among American
composers: a technician of the highest order, unashamed
before his more acerbic peers, to weave melody into his
musical fabric. . . . This is, in sum, a passionate,
reflective score." "Hoiby's opera proved to be a vehicle of
immense emotional power, flooded with music of great
beauty." "The world premiere of Lee Hoiby's opera
SUMMER AND SMOKE has registered a significant contribution
to American opera. A sold-out house for the final night left
an enthusiastic audience quite moved and obviously
impressed." "SUMMER AND SMOKE sounded good to me in
1972--a haunting score that seems even better on
reacquaintance in this version. . . . Hoiby's music,
conservatively neo-romantic though it may be, never settles
for obvious solutions as the voices float over a seamlessly
woven orchestral fabric of bittersweet lyricism that probes
and illuminates every unexpected twist in the plot. The
singers are given many gorgeous arias, duets, and individual
phrases, expressively shaped and often stamped with an
ecstatic intensity. Perhaps ten years ago, music of this
sort, unabashedly drenched in ardent melody, was considered
something of an embarrassment. Today, such an attitude seems childish and irrelevant, especially when confronted
with a refined, confident score, that makes its expressive points so honestly and sensitively." "Lee Hoiby has scored a triumph with this
opera."
libretto after Shakespeare by Mark Shulgasser published by G. Schirmer, Inc. Dallas Opera, November 1996 OPERA NEWS Further information about Lee Hoiby and The Tempest
can be found at: Des Moines Metro Opera World Premiere
July 1986 DES MOINES REGISTER OPERA CANADA OPERA (LONDON) NEW YORK TIMES Kansas City Lyric Opera, May 1988 KANSAS CITY STAR
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