Brooklyn, NY. (North America).(Next Wave Festival)(Opera Review)

The history of Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival is already rich in important performances of Philip Glass's music, operatic and otherwise. Thus the premiere New York run of Galileo Galilei that opened this year's festival (seen Oct. 3) was anticipated particularly for the contributions of librettist and stage director Mary Zimmerman. The libretto, for which Zimmerman shares credit with Glass and Arnold Weinstein, presents important events from the life of Galileo in reverse chronological order: in the course of ten scenes, he first looks back on his life, wondering if he was struck blind because he lied, then he recants his beliefs in Copernican theory, appears before the Inquisition, writes his Dialogue and invents the telescope that enabled him to do so. But within the scenes, flashbacks are embedded, so there is no urgent dramatic need for the device (as there is in Harold Pinter's play Betrayal), nor does there turn out to be a musical need (as in Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along). The idea seems merely to ensure that the opera not end bitterly. Zimmerman won a Tony Award in 2002 for her direction of the play Metamorphoses, so it was surprising how much of her work was conventional: characters knelt in the snow, the Cardinal appeared on a balcony simply because someone mentioned him, nuns and priests endlessly prostrated themselves during the recantation. She did her best work in the scherzo-like scene in which Galileo's assistants demonstrated their theories of motion by manipulating strings, pitchers of liquid, balls rolling down planes studded with bells, and jump ropes. Two nice touches, delightful at first but held far too long, were the correspondence of the swinging of censers to the swinging of a hanging lamp and the image of the boy Galileo rolling a piece of paper into a telescope.

The opera was performed without titles, and no printed libretto was offered, but set designer Daniel Ostling provided surfaces in each scene for the ...