BOSTON — Solo voice and orchestra, usually with dramatic text: the challenging genre called monodrama. The setting feels under-explored after an intense evening of three American works with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, its leader Gil Rose, and a trio of compelling vocalists Feb. 21 in Jordan Hall.
Soprano Julia Mintzer sang William Bolcom’s Medusa; baritone Michael Chioldi realized Ahab from Ronald Perera’s The White Whale; and soprano Sarah Coburn sang Carlisle Floyd’s spiraling portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Flower and Hawk.
For decades, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project has been the firm champion of contemporary American music, with a Grammy and more than 100 recordings to prove it. Three works like these, exploring the American idiom in the small ways that filter into its depth, will likely get included in that recorded catalog.
Each of the soloists was singer, actor, and performance artist in equal measure. To believably conjure a character, develop gestures, and maintain tension in the spare front of stage, with no props is a tour de force of memory and execution. Three artists, and three different imaginings of three unhinged stories.
It took only a few scenes to be reminded that Bolcom is a magical musical chameleon. His Medusa (2003, libretto by frequent collaborator Arnold Weinstein) offers 12 such scenes as elusive musical snapshots, set for soprano and string orchestra.
The text tells Medusa’s story: youthful beauty, rape by Neptune, punishment (for being raped, she gets disfigured) by Athena. When Medusa’s gaze kills, her isolation drives her to revel in it. The mood veers, with lots of ugliness. Perseus comes, beheads the Gorgon. Medusa narrates it all, mostly in a spiteful third person (“The Medusa”).
Mintzer excelled as singer and actor. She examined every shade of bitterness. She played the artful chameleon herself, sounding at times like Edith Piaf or Lotte Lenya or Maria Callas.
Mintzer used a mike, as an instrument when the terror of her story dictated. A dark strain in her voice suited the character. The endlessly intriguing score drifted in and out of ideas, maintaining support but still sounding idiosyncratic. Of the dozen challenging scenes, a trio, with the first-desk violinists and the soloist, rang out in its simplicity.
Perera’s The White Whale (1981) follows no narrative, except for its backstory. Chioldi sang Ahab’s fulminations in sporadic patterns, befitting the madness of the captain. The orchestra includes piano, celeste, harp, horns, and percussion, and Chioldi unflinchingly strove with the larger ensemble, never relinquishing Ahab’s obsessions. It wasn’t a histrionic telling but an exact one, with a chilling tinge in its offhandedness. Chioldi sang with single-mindedness, following the straightforward reasoning of the obsessed.
Coburn found another way to bring presence to history, singing regally in Floyd’s 1972 monodrama Flower and Hawk but gradually, in one continuous, formidable movement, dissolving from her own memories. She sang to life the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen both of France and then of England.
The tale begins in Salisbury Tower, where Eleanor languishes, long imprisoned and ignored. She narrates the details of her husband’s betrayal, her son’s death, her own fall. The story unfolds gracefully at first, then collapses gradually, Eleanor revising her own life as a kind of monotonous fantasy.
Coburn lived the part. She sang effortlessly in varying styles, maintaining impressive tension as her story gathers downward momentum — first standing tall, she ends up collapsing onstage. Equally impressive was the collaboration: singer, conductor, orchestra, all focused on the plunging narrative.
