BOSTON — Fed up with war, Lysistrata leads both Athenian and rival Spartan women in a sex strike. For Aristophanes, over two millennia ago, that was the premise for a bawdy punfest of a comedy.
For composer/librettist Mark Adamo, the weak-kneed standoff between lusty women and their agonizingly erect men not only tries comically to end a war but also attempts to engender a broader discussion of fate and identity.
Sometimes it succeeds.
Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose, semi-staged Adamo’s Lysistrata: The Nude Goddess on Feb. 15 in Boston’s Jordan Hall, the principal performance space of the New England Conservatory. Lysistrata is Adamo’s second opera of four operas: Little Women was first, and most recently Adamo wrote the libretto for husband John Corigliano’s The Lord of the Cries as well. Lysistrata premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 2005 and has had several stagings since.
Adamo has written a rich score — too dense at times — that was nimbly served by Rose, his orchestra, and the astutely assembled cast of singers. Soprano Anya Matanovič sang the title role, with tenor Dominic Armstrong as her love interest Nico. Mezzo-sopranos Katherine Beck (Myrrhine), Lucy Schaufer (Kleonike), Alexis Peart (Lampito, the tongue-twisted leader of the Spartan women), bass-baritone Kevin Deas (Leonidas), baritone John Moore (Kinesias), and a dozen ensemble singers in supporting roles sang with authority and blended beautifully.
Adamo’s ambitions are broad but not easily defined. The sexual shutdown makes for moments of humor: The hapless men spend Act II with perpetual erections, while the equally conflicted women bemoan their “unplucked flax.” (The sex wars are exclusively hetero here, although Sappho makes a cameo, garnering some lesbian shade.)
Adamo employs the humor but wants more. A central premise — “Things always have been like this, and always will” — encompasses not only the discomfiting slapstick of desire but also of war, identity, and duty. Those thoughts are sometimes too hazily articulated for the characters to bring them to life.
The intimacy of Jordan Hall loves singers, and the vocal score had heft and sat easily with these voices. Matanovič, whose character was central to most scenes, sang with lyric style and tenacity. Her intense concluding aria, “I Am Not My Own,” was shaped beautifully and sung with narrative drive. She paired especially well with Armstrong, with both lovers weighing duty and desire.
Other match-ups were equally compelling, like Armstrong and Deas, generals mulling surrender in “Too Late in the Day, Sir;” or Beck, Peart, and Schaufer in multiple scenes exploring the fractious alliance of women.
The libretto, mostly rhymed, strove for a kind of musical-theatre panache. Overall, Adamo’s score presented an amalgam of styles, sounding Sondheim- and Copland-esque at its best.
Gil Rose has decades of experience articulating scores for one-offs or short runs, and that translates into confident performances, like this one, of challenging works. Rose conducts firmly and never takes a measure off, and singers and instrumentalists benefit.
Adamo directed and used the stage periphery organically. Costumes were modern, although the women were classically toga-ed for some scenes.
The men were uniformly mocked, not only with bulges, but armor purchased from a party store. The plastic breast-plate that tenor Neal Ferreira wore, in a deus-ex-machina as Ares, undeniably invoked the tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ferreira had trouble suppressing a grin as he sang the ominous “Never Will It End.”
Although Adamo’s Lysistrata makes no attempt to update a classic, its own goals need to be intuited, since they are incompletely articulated. The music buttresses Lysistrata, which at times plays greater than just a comedy. When it doesn’t, the music rescues it.
