NEW YORK — Reasons abound why Osvaldo Golijov’s entrancing Ainadamar may not have seemed to belong amid the Metropolitan Opera’s grandeur. It’s really a chamber opera. Maybe not an opera at all. The 1930s Spanish Civil War setting — the backdrop for this tale of the assassination of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) — requires flamenco dancers, non-traditional voice types, an Arab-style guitarist, and other resources the Met isn’t likely to have at arm’s reach. Yet Ainadamar, which opened Oct. 15 for a nine-performance run through Nov. 9, mostly defies reason. It belongs in any American opera house, and this one especially, even in circumstances that were sympathetic but not ideal.
The 2003 Golijov score seizes the ear from moment one. Tight, nagging dissonance — almost like a low-grade drone — instills a sense of danger that rarely lets up. The David Henry Hwang libretto highlights the artistic and sexual repression faced by poet-playwright Lorca, his unwillingness to save himself through exile, and his zeal to give voice to a culture that would ultimately kill him.
It’s also a memory play, recalled with love and outrage by the actress Margarita Xirgu, a soulmate and theater colleague of Lorca, unfolding with a dream-like narrative fluidity amid adversaries who periodically arrive like angels of death, vocalizing in malevolent microtones. Epic emotions rule — the title, after all, is translated “fountain of tears” — which makes the piece at home in the opera house, where non-naturalistic sung dialogue is customary. Less operatic is how the Ainadamar dramaturgy forgoes the typical scene shaping. There are no arias; expansive set pieces — often with a moment-frozen-in-time quality — act almost like one big (and rhythmically eventful) aria. Choral writing inhabits a netherworld between singing, chanting, and lamentation in a culture that appears to romanticize death.
Deborah Colker’s Ainadamar production, the most successful the Met has had among recent hybrid pieces, was effectively choreographed, as much as it was directed, with a constant sense of visual symmetry and in the emphatic spirit of flamenco. Jon Bausor’s set design didn’t ask the piece to be what it is not. Instead, it focused the action into a central-stage circle whose height alternately suggested a cave or a cathedral accommodating impressionistic, black-and-white projections — some with relevant faces, some in abstract shapes. It’s a testament to the production’s integrity that the only visual input during a spare acoustic guitar duet (the score’s most demure moment) comprised projections of beautifully choreographed hands. My favorite image: After Lorca’s death, he re-appeared in a version of Michelangelo’s Pietà, though he was the consoling mother while Margarita suffered in his arms.
The main drawback at the Met was the kind of vibrato that’s encouraged by the auditorium’s size. But what works in Verdi becomes a smoke screen that obscures the fierce, sharp focus of Golijov’s vocal lines, which can lull and charm but also need to cut like a knife. Angel Blue’s charisma as a vocal and stage presence is never taken for granted, but as Margarita Xirgu she was the primary instance of vocal miscasting. The vibrato problem was less pronounced with Daniela Mack in the trouser role of Lorca. Her distinctively dark tone quality suggested that Lorca was the rarest of birds and a gender unto himself. As Margarita’s student Nuria, Elena Villalón hit a particularly happy medium between operatic manner and the language of Ainadamar.
Chorus and orchestra were well in hand. Miguel Harth-Bedoya was the right conductor to make the Latin rhythms irresistible, and, one hopes, he will raise the overall heat even more in future performances. Most important, the music emerges as an essential work in the too-limited canon of Latin composers in classical music. Numerous greats had curtailed creative lives: Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) died of kidney disease, Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was on a torpedoed passenger ship, and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) got stuck writing an unfinished magnum opus. Golijov is their equal. Both Ainadamar and a recent performance of Tenebrae by NOVUS ensemble (at a Death of Classical-produced concert) are reminders of how great he can be. Sadly, he has been sidetracked by Hollywood. His latest film score to Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis sounds like something out of Ben-Hur.
For tickets and information, go here.
