By Richard S. Ginell
LOS ANGELES – Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who became more famous (or notorious) in death than he was in life, was obsessed with beauty. “The texture of black skin excites me photographically, maybe as well as other ways,” he once wrote. “There is a reason that bronzes are bronze.”
It seems to me that Bryce Dessner’s new theatre piece inspired by Mapplethorpe, Triptych (Eyes of One on Another), is also more interested in beauty – gorgeous vocal sound for its own sake – than in reigniting old debates about what is indecent art and whether it should be funded. And it is a success on those grounds alone, even in the partial production that constituted the world premiere performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall on March 5. (A new biopic about Mapplethorpe starring Matt Smith just opened in U.S. cinemas. March 9 was the 30th anniversary of the photographer’s death from AIDS.)
They sure didn’t have a problem lining up sponsors for this baby; the program book lists 17 organizations as co-commissioners, with the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, ArKtype in Brooklyn, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic as co-producers. It was written for the remarkably versatile vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, joined on this occasion by tenor Isaiah Robinson, mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran, and ten instrumentalists from the LA Phil New Music Group led by Sara Jobin.
The 66-minute-plus piece is supposed to have a full staging with sets, costumes, and video images of Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white photographs. But the Los Angeles concert performance only featured the photographs; the next performances in Ann Arbor on March 15-16 and those subsequently in such prestigious houses and events as the Barbican in London, the Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Stanford Live, the Holland Festival, etc., will contain everything.
By the word “triptych,” Dessner apparently means that his work – like so many theater pieces of our time, more of a song cycle than anything else – has three sections, with each segment marked off as 1.0, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, and so forth. The first is an extrapolation of Monteverdi’s madrigal “Incenerite spoglie,” the second contains fragmented excerpts from the 1990 Cincinnati obscenity trial concerning a Mapplethorpe exhibition that attracted Dessner’s attention as a teenager, and the third meditates on the ways in which Mapplethorpe depicts black men.
Korde Arrington Tuttle’s libretto is a thing of plotless, disconnected poetic fragments printed in trendy lower case, supplemented by the text of the Monteverdi madrigal and the words of Patti Smith, Essex Hemphill, and Rhea F. Miller. Smith was an especially appropriate choice; she lived with Mapplethorpe for several years before she became a rock star at the peak of the punk-rock era in the late 1970s (a Mapplethorpe photo of Smith is on the cover of her first album, Horses). The final song in Dessner’s work, “American Wedding,” with words by Hemphill, hits the hardest, talking about those who are “too busy looting the land to watch us … They expect us to call in sick, watch television all night, die by our own hands. They don’t know we are becoming powerful.”
Little of this could be made out just by listening alone. While the full text was thoughtfully provided as a leaflet inside the program, the hall was darkened so that it couldn’t be followed – and except in one song, there were no supertitles to clarify the muddied words coming out of the P.A. system. We were warned of extreme sexual content, but I think that was oversold. I didn’t find anything particularly shocking (even the depiction of bondage) in this context where the words were only partially intelligible and the photo images far tamer than what should be considered pornographic.
What came through most clearly – often thrillingly – was the score. It opened promisingly, with the eight amplified voices of Roomful of Teeth expanding the madrigal into fifths and then blossoming outwards into even more alluringly complex harmonies. Syncopated rhythms and repeated riffs dominated a number of sections, one of which bounced along over a Steve Reich-tinged piano part. Another section was based on drones; gospel and a little bit of R&B crept into others, and there was one spoken section over marvelous vocal harmonies that sometimes sounded electronic.
Moran (whose husband is the renowned jazz pianist Jason Moran) was on the spot when a gospel feeling was called for; she delivered the goods with authority. Everything halted for a long pause before Robinson’s key solo spot, “American Wedding,” the spotlight pressing down on the diminutive singer who waited before cutting loose fervently.
My overall impression of this performance, whether intended by the creators or not, was one of the sheer joy of singing. The vocal writing was bright and beautiful, with the delicious sounds of the syllables and timbres of the voices, not the meanings of the words or agenda, being the main takeaway from Disney Hall. That impression may change or take a back seat once the full staging is seen, but I’m guessing that this score will have much popular appeal on its own.
Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, and is the Los Angeles correspondent for American Record Guide and the West Coast regional editor for Classical Voice North America. He also contributes to San Francisco Classical Voice and Musical America.
