From around the world: Cambridge, MA.(North America ... The Sound of a Voice and Hotel of Dreams are premiered in a single production)(Opera Review)

The Sound of a Voice, Philip Glass's two interconnected one-act operas, based on plays by David Henry Hwang, had their premiere at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge in June. The title play, and the first of the evening's ghost operas, takes place in Japanese antiquity. A warrior, like Siegmund, comes across a dwelling in the forest. There lives a woman, who may or may not be a witch or a Lorelei of destruction. The second opera, Hotel of Dreams, takes place in the present. A distinguished novelist calls on the madam of a mysterious brothel that caters to old men; a series of uneasy dialogues between the two lies on the border between fantasy and reality. With minimalist precision, Glass has scored his operas for a small ensemble of four players: the astounding Wu Man on the pipa, or Chinese lute; Rebecca Patterson on cello; Susan Gall on flute, piccolo and bamboo flute; and Robert Schulz on percussion. There are short patches churned out by the familiar Glass perpetual-motion machine--arpeggios on Ecstasy--but that's something a group this small, and playing on these particular instruments, cannot keep up for long. So Glass comes up with a series of related rhythmic, melodic or harmonic patterns that are developed in a constantly shifting, translucent series of solos, duets and trios among the three melodic instruments, propelled by the percussion. The many solos for pipa, worked out in consultation with Wu Man, are remarkble. The pipa can shimmer like mist in moonlight; it can also twang like a banjo, as it does in the martial-arts sequences in the first opera. The bamboo flute plays a role in the story of the first opera, and Glass writes traditionally and evocatively, with many bent notes and soulful sighings.

In attempting to do something old, Philip Glass has achieved what many have given up expecting from him: something new. In writing about The Sound of a Voice, Glass placed himself in a great operatic tradition of text-setting that runs from Monteverdi through Mussorgsky, Janacek and Debussy. "The voice," he wrote, "has to bend itself to the dramatic needs of the story," and he requests that the singers dispense with "operatic" tone quality and diction in order to deliver Hwang's text with the immediacy of actors. But then Glass makes it very difficult for the ...