(Photos by Maria Baranova)
By Anne E. Johnson
NEW YORK – A blood moon is a total lunar eclipse, when sunlight filtered through the Earth’s atmosphere gives the moon a red glow. That eerie phenomenon inspired composer Garrett Fisher and librettist Ellen McLaughlin’s new opera, Blood Moon, which had its world premiere Jan. 9 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center.
The piece and its production, co-presented by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE as part of the eighth annual Prototype Festival, also draw on Japanese Noh theater’s style of movement and storytelling. The scenic design by Susan Zeeman Rogers kept the stage bare except for a large white circle in the center of the black floor, a circle that sometimes glowed (lighting by Yuki Nakase Link). Huge, vine-like branches that crept along the back wall might also have been magnified blood vessels. This was, after all a play about life and death.
It’s a simple plot: Nephew (bass Wei Wu, producing a velvety tone, especially in very low passages), approaching old age, is driven by guilt to revisit the place where he abandoned his dying Aunt (mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen, with a multifaceted voice) 40 years before. He pleads with Moon (the mesmerizing countertenor Juecheng Chen) to let her spirit visit him; after warning Nephew how painful the experience will be, Moon agrees.
There are two manifestations of Aunt: a life-sized puppet (designed by Erik Sanko and given movement by dancer Takemi Kitamura), who seems to represent Nephew’s diminished memories of his childhood guardian, and the flesh-and-blood Nelsen, who deepens Nephew’s understanding of the real woman behind those memories.
Director Rachel Dickstein shared choreography duties with Kitamura. Choreography is integral to the concept on two levels. At one point, Kitamura lays down her puppet and illustrates in dance three stories Aunt tells from her life. But beyond literal dance is the Noh-inspired approach to movement for all three singers. Moon, in a glittery gown with wing-like sleeves (costumes by Maiko Matsushima), sways his hips and snakes his arms in not-quite-human patterns; Aunt hovers restlessly like a discontented spirit; Nephew forms angular shapes with his body, as if he’s fighting to walk through the relentless storm of life.
This is not Fisher’s first use of Japanese instruments and scales. You’ll find similar melodic ideas and instrumentation – taiko drums, bamboo flute – in his 2001 set of “visions,” Moon in the Bucket. In Blood Moon, as in that earlier piece, he combines Japanese sounds with those from a wide swath of Western history, including viola da gamba, harmonium, piano, flute, bass flute, piccolo, and electronic keyboard.
Those instruments were covered by a seven-person team under the direction of Stephen Osgood. Several pitches of taiko were positioned stage left (played with strength and great expression by Barbara Merjan and Fumi Tanakadate, who also played bamboo flute) and all the others sat stage right.
Fisher took full advantage of the array of colors and textures available to him. Sometimes instruments were paired with characters, such as gamba with Nephew and bamboo flute with Aunt. Overall, the orchestra was atmospheric, offering homorhythmic support to the vocal lines or simple contrapuntal ideas. An exceptional moment of voice-instrument interaction came when Aunt angrily accused Nephew of abandoning her, to the strident sound of piccolo (Isabel Lepanto Gleicher) and taiko.
The vocal writing focuses on simple, mostly syllabic text-setting that often packs an emotional punch. Especially memorable is a trio near the end, when Nephew, Moon, and Aunt bemoan the tenacity of grief and the regret of a life not lived fully. Fisher creates a sound rich with sorrow. The three stories told by Aunt to reveal her real self to Nephew are dramatically powerful enough to stand alone as a short song cycle.
Daniel Neumann’s sound design contributed some particularly affecting moments, such as the whispered voices from the spirit world that seemed to bubble up from throughout the audience. However, the displacement of instrumental sounds to the opposite side of the stage was at times distracting.
Playwright McLaughlin crafted a libretto filled with poetic and thoughtful abstractions. (Sings Moon: “Autumn kindly lets you think on how death makes life visible. Autumn clears the leaves from trees to give you more sky.”) The text is less successful when it needs to function conventionally, as in Nephew’s first aria, explaining – in the first person, but addressed to whom? – his own character at great length and in expository language too mundane to match the rest of the libretto.
Still, McLaughin courageously weaves a tapestry of some of humanity’s loftiest themes, which she listed in a video interview as no less than “life and death, and our relationship to birth, and what is worth living for, what is joy, what will we remember at the end of our life?” That’s a lot to expect from a 90-minute opera, but, to a large degree, Blood Moon delivers on its promise.
Blood Moon continues through Jan. 17. For tickets and information, go here.
Remaining productions in this year’s Prototype festival, which runs through Jan. 19, are Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West, a multi-composer “operatic poem” called Magdalene, and Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro.
Anne E. Johnson is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her arts journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Classical Voice North America, Chicago On the Aisle, and Copper: The Journal of Music and Audio. For many years she taught music history and theory in the Extension Division of Mannes School of Music.
