The tessitura of this tough monologue seemed to suit Mr. Hendrick; after a couple of acts in which his voice sounded a little strained and grainy on top, he settled here into smoother and clearer singing.
Opera is a marvelous conveyor of realistic human emotions, but it may not be the best vehicle for portraying realistic daily life. This hypothesis is certainly reinforced by Janacek’s fourth opera, ”Osud” (”Fate”).
Based on various real-life situations, ”Osud” has not digested reality enough to present it effectively onstage. The result is the story of a neurotic composer named Zivny, told in three acts that remain disparate and confusing, despite Janacek’s structuring ideas and requisite operatic elements, like a love duet and a couple of good mad scenes. Underlying all this, however, is a lot of stunning music. The man could write.
”Osud” was not performed during Janacek’s lifetime, and it had never been staged in the United States until now. The new Bard Summerscape festival chose it as the first opera production in Frank Gehry’s gorgeous new Fisher Center for the Performing Arts here. It was a blue-chip production: JoAnne Akalaitis directed, Jennifer Tipton did the lighting, and Mr. Gehry made his debut as a set designer.
Leon Botstein, leader of Bard College, the festival and the American Symphony Orchestra, rose to the occasion by conducting a sometimes heavy-handed but generally sound performance. He was helped out by the fine acoustics of the trim, elegant, 900-seat Sosnoff Theater and the overhang of Mr. Gehry’s protruding set floor, which seemed to mute the orchestra a touch, possibly sanding down some rough edges.
”Osud” takes the idea of an opera-within-an-opera to extremes. It had its origins in Janacek’s meeting with a woman named Kamila Urvalkova at a spa in 1903. Urvalkova’s former lover, Ludvik Celansky, had written an opera called ”Kamila” portraying her in an unflattering light; Janacek set out to redress the insult with an opera of his own. But as he worked, the original story blurred with autobiography; by Act III it’s clear that Zivny’s unfinished opera is Janacek’s own.
Janacek delighted in the unorthodox; he remains one of the only composers ever to make an opera out of a newspaper comic strip (”The Cunning Little Vixen”). His maverick nature is illustrated in the first act of ”Osud”: the big reconciliation between Zivny and Mila, former lovers who run into each other at a spa, takes place offstage.
He saves the big love duet for the discussion that follows the reconciliation: the explanations of who felt what when. Wedding his vocal lines to the patterns of speech — a cornerstone of his operatic philosophy — he keeps the singers (here, Michael Hendrick and Christine Abraham) hovering at the edge of melody, borne up by a swelling orchestra that ravishingly depicts the ebb and flow of deep feeling without explicitly crystallizing it into pat phrases.
In the second act the two have married, and the unperformed opera becomes the subject of one of those long marital wrangles that to an outsider are neither pleasant to watch nor particularly difficult to solve with a little common sense. But ”Osud” saves its strongest venom for the figure of the mother-in-law, a senile harridan who appears in her nightgown to harangue the two and then wrestles her daughter off a balcony, sending both to their deaths. Linda Roark-Strummer was quite effective, in part because of vocal qualities — a big, wobbly vibrato, a penetrating shrillness — that in another role might have been accounted liabilities but here added to the characterization.
”Act III will be strange,” Janacek wrote to the real Kamila (not to be confused with Kamila Stosslova, the muse of his late years, whom he didn’t meet for more than a decade). He was right. Set in a music conservatory 10 years later, it depicts students discussing the mysterious end of the opera and whether it could be autobiographical (hardly questions of much mystery to the audience, at this point). Zivny then enters, tells all and dies.
The tessitura of this tough monologue seemed to suit Mr. Hendrick; after a couple of acts in which his voice sounded a little strained and grainy on top, he settled here into smoother and clearer singing. In the smaller roles Andrew Nolen did respectable double duty as a painter in the first act and a student in the third. And in a tiny role September Bigelow impressed this listener as one of the finest voices onstage, the second time her singing of two or three lines has had this effect. It would be great to hear what she does with a whole aria.
Ms. Akalaitis offered a crisp, bright staging that presented but didn’t always elucidate the opaque plot. Mr. Gehry’s abstract set summed up the piece best: two huge fiberglass forms, one reddish, one glowing white, both at once indefinite and warmly sensual. In this, they perfectly reflected the overall impression left by this very odd opera. ”Osud” will be performed again Friday and Saturday.
by Anne Midgette
The New York Times