Detroit. (North America).(Anoush)

In a compliment to Detroit's large Armenian population, Michigan Opera Theatre presented a vibrant new production of the folk opera Anoush by Armen Tigranian. The work was composed in 1912, to a libretto based on a poem by Hovhaness Toumanian. It tells the story of Anoush, a village girl fated to an unhappy life. (She was cursed in childhood because her mother once failed to reward a Dervish beggar.) The lovely young Anoush and a handsome shepherd, Saro, are in love. Hoping to impress Anoush, Saro bests her brother, Mossy, in a festive wrestling match, but in so doing he breaks a vital societal taboo -- he has publicly belittled Mossy's manhood. Though Anoush and Saro flee together to the mountains, the anguished Mossy tracks them down and kills Saro. The curse of the Dervish has come true, and unable to face life without her beloved Saro, Anoush throws herself off a cliff.

The story is told in a series of colorful tableaux, revealing scenes of simple village life and an unsophisticated, loving society, with strong traditions and rigid social codes. Tigranian's flavorful musical style fits the story perfectly: it is marked by sinuous, exotic, modal melody. The "Middle-Eastern" augmented-second interval is featured (think Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherezade, blended with some good klezmer band tunes), and its effect is pungent and evocative. Conventional (Western) musical structure and form are rarely apparent, while the colorful orchestration, as revised here by ...