Long Beach, Calif. — The 46-year-old Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles and Orange counties’ oldest producing opera company, many years ago earned bidding rights as the world’s most innovative opera company. In the U.S., only a handful — notably Beth Morrison Projects’ Prototype Festival in New York, Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O, Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival — plow the same terrain. Prototype is a comparative spring chicken, and festivals O and ONE are, alas, on hiatus.
Long Beach Opera’s innovation has involved far more than simply staging canonical operas in fresh ways. Since the early 1980s, it has programmed operas that rarely see the light of day (Frank Martin’s Love Potion; David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field) or that are outright firsts. Past American premieres include Szymanowski’s King Roger and Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter. World premieres include Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Hopper’s Wife (1997) and Anthony Davis’ Pulitzer-winning The Central Park Five (2019). Lacking the endowment to erect a dedicated theater, the company has made its continually changing venues — from the Queen Mary in Long Beach harbor to LA’s Heritage Square Museum — another innovation credential.
On Feb. 15-16, under the impetus of artistic director James Darrah, LBO staged the little-known, largely improvised El Relicario des Animales by Pauline Oliveros. As far perhaps from your grandfather’s grand opera as one can possibly go, El Relicario was a riveting, wholly original tour de force.
For a company as resolutely creative as Long Beach Opera, Oliveros’ improvisatory, sui generis works are heaven sent. In certain circles Oliveros, who died in 2016, is already a legend. A Tejana born and raised in Houston, Oliveros learned the accordion, violin, piano, tuba, and French horn in her teens (1940s), but she chafed at the passivity and structure imposed by traditional music education. Given a tape recorder, Oliveros discovered that the device “heard” more than her ears could. From this revelation of the sonosphere — which she described in her book Sounding the Margins as “all sounds that can be perceived by humans, animals, birds, plants, trees, and machines” — Oliveros built a career around creating her own sonic world.
Her more than six-decade career as composer, musician, teacher, and visionary took her from San Francisco State College to the San Francisco Tape Music Center as an electronic-music pioneer. She then migrated to teaching at Mills College (Oakland) and the University of California San Diego (1967-81) before living her last decades in Kingston, N.Y., as an untethered composer, performer, producer, and inventor.
Representative items from her catalog of about 150 works include Double Basses at Twenty Paces, Saxual Orientation, Bye Bye Butterfly (a deconstruction of Puccini’s opera), and Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato.
Oliveros occupies the same general family tree as pioneers John Cage, Terry Riley, and Morton Feldman. She tirelessly promoted women composers and artists, and she published notable books on practices such as Sonic Meditations and Deep Listening, in which improvisation, music, text-based sound recipes, and meditation converge to heal. It was Oliveros’ belief that co-created, often improvised, and untraditionally defined sound can produce healing: “How we listen creates our life.… I see and hear life as a grand improvisation.… The difference between composition and improvisation is … liberation.”
Long Beach Opera’s stagings of Oliveros’ 1986 piece Thirteen Changes brought her aesthetic to life. Droll, koan-like concepts such as “Elephants mating in a secret grove,” “Rollicking monkeys landing on Mars,” and “Solar winds scorching the returning comet’s tail” were cleverly used by LBO as springboards for 13 vividly improvised mini-performances performed across Heritage Square’s historic homes.
Strikingly outfitted by costume designer Chrisi Karvanides Dushenko in androgynous goth black, music director Christopher Rountree’s 20 musicians, arrayed in small groups around the park, incarnated Oliveros’ concepts, simultaneously squabbling at operatic volume, dueling in a double-bass showdown, or burying a clarinetist in a wooden coffin. The LBO nailed the humor that, Oliveros’ serious intent notwithstanding, is never far from the surface.
The afternoon’s second half, El Relicario des Animales (The Reliquary of the Animals, 1979), brought performers and audience inside the park’s 1897 Methodist church, which production designer Prairie Trivuth, lighting designer Kaitlin Trimble, and installation artist Juan Renteria had transformed into a kind of forest primeval. Filing into the church, the LBO musicians arranged themselves into a four-pointed (North, East, South, West) mandala, with audience members seated up close in the interstitial space. A photograph of Relicario’s first performance at the University of California San Diego in 1979 shows 20-odd musicians widely dispersed (as if social distancing) in a space the size of a gymnasium. With much less room to work with, LBO achieved in intensity and intimacy what it lost in sound reverberation.
A glance at Oliveros’ ten-page El Relicario score reveals both her genius in directing but not controlling interpreters and the LBO’s in bringing such non-traditional notation alive. Without bars or notes, let alone performance markings, Oliveros stipulates only the following:
• Instrumentation (6 woodwinds, 6 brass, 6 strings, 4 percussion, 1 vocalist)
• A very general sequence of player entrance, performance (conch shell players, then ‘rock players’, etc.), and exit
• The four animals the performers should evoke: tiger, owl, wolf, and parrot (author Bill Perrine notes that Oliveros researched these at the San Diego Zoo)
• The general kinds of sound each of the five instrument groups should use for each animal, e.g., “long tone, any vowel”; “air sounds”; “2-5 tone melody” etc.
• The eight general playing styles or modes each instrument group should adopt in relation to each other for each animal: “blend,” “echo,” “embellish,” “extend,” “follow,” “free,” “lead,” and “silence”
That’s it: structure enough to realize Oliveros’ intent – a “mystically weird” evocation of nature and ecological interdependence; but enough co-creative freedom and choice to fail spectacularly or transcend Oliveros’ vision. The LBO did the latter.
Ensemble was superb, the balance surprisingly harmonious given the tight space, and the dynamic range smoothly ran the gamut from the delicate rustling of dried palm branches to incipient ear-drum damage. The sheer variety and complexity of the conjured sound was staggering. The calls, coos, cries, yelps, purrs and other vocalizing by Brenda Rae, Kathryn Shuman, singer/violinist Eliza Bagg, and singer/oboist Theodosia Roussos (all sopranos) contributed mightily to the sonic jungle. But the heart and soul of the LBO’s performance was mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton (the designated Vocalist in Oliveros’ score). As Mother Earth, she stood at the mandala’s raised center, leading the call-and-response proceedings by voice, meditational cue, and charismatic expressiveness.
The company is devoting the entire 2024-25 season to staging other Oliveros works “as opera, not just in concert,” as Darrah put it: “We’ve engaged a design team for the whole season as an integral part of our productions, to give the designers a chance to have their own artistic experience — working with the singers and instrumentalists and exploring what it means to design for Pauline’s work.”
In this program, Darrah, only the LBO’s third artistic director, demonstrated that he’ll not only sustain the company’s intrepid mission, but also double down as needed to redefine what opera can be.
