From around the world: Lenox, MA.(North America--two tempestuous one-act operas commissioned by Boston Symphony Orchestra )(Opera Review)

It was an appropriately dark and stormy August night in the Berkshires for the second performance of two tempestuous one-act operas commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Tanglewood Music Center. Not since Serge Koussevitzky arranged for the composition of Britten's Peter Grimes has the BSO made an opera commission. (World War II made it impossible for the Tanglewood production of August 1946 to be other than the American debut, Sadler's Wells having offered the work the preceding year). The two sixty-minute chamber operas, Robert Zuidam's Rage d'Amours, and Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar, are based on incidents from Spanish history, and both concern a woman's commitment (erotic or vocational) to a man. Otherwise they could not have been more dissimilar, especially musically.

Zuidam's piece is dramatically more static and musically more demanding than Golijov's. Arranged as a series of tableaux, Rage d'Amours treats the story of Juana la Loca (daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella), who went insane after the death of her husband, the Hapsburg Philip the Handsome. Betrothed long distance and for political reasons, the couple reportedly fell in love at first sight in 1496; he died mysteriously, ten years later, possibly the victim of poisoning. Pregnant with their sixth child, Juana exhumed her husband's body to take on a journey of 370 miles from Burgos to Granada for re-interment. Insisting on opening the coffin to inspect the corpse for signs of possible resurrection, Juana never made it to Granada. Instead, her Father retired his demented daughter to a monastery in Tordesillas, where her husband's tomb was built, and where she spent the next forty-six years in poverty, squalor and madness. (The story was also the basis of Menotti's Juana la Loca.)

Zuidam's own libretto, in Spanish, medieval French and Church Latin, reflects the languages of bride, groom and the Catholic Church. In addition to three languages, the stage has three retreating proscenium arches. Most important of its several trinities is the decision to cast three women as Juana, singing sometimes together, sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes individually, and offering a visible and audible image of the queen's multiple personalities. As Juana I, Lucy Shelton set the pace for two Tanglewood vocal fellows, Rochelle Bard and Amy Synatzske, who followed her vocal and dramatic lead with pathos and power. Eric Shaw as Philip, Laura Lendman and Matthew Singer as choral figures, along with a male quartet who performed as monks and nobles, rounded out the splendid, youthful cast.

Dramatically, Rage d'Amours charts a descent into obsession, perversion and psychosis, an appropriate theme for Baroque or Counter-Reformation art. The students in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra (and there were separate ensembles for the two operas) scrupulously followed Stefan's Asbury's conducting. But the music often seemed oppressive in its jarring atonality, its sometimes heavy-handed reliance on percussion, and especially in its occasional pastiche. Zuidam wove Spanish motifs and Gregorian chant into his score. The strings came to the fore to represent Philip's romantic yearnings; otherwise, for Juana's obsession, brass and timpani prevailed. Contrabass clarinet and flute obbligato in the washer-woman's narrative were both effective, and ...