BERKELEY, Cal. — Among many other innovations, Philip Glass basically invented a category of film/opera — wiping the soundtrack of an existing film and composing a new score to fit it. He started this practice in 1994 for a 1946 film by Jean Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête (“Beauty And The Beast”), with live singers replacing the actors’ voices. Thinking in threes again — as in his earlier celebrated Portrait trilogy of operas — Glass went on to compose scores for two more Cocteau films, Orphée and Les Enfants Terribles, to form a Cocteau trilogy.
Enter San Francisco’s plucky Opera Parallèle, which, encouraged by Glass himself, became the first opera company to stage all three installments of the Cocteau trilogy over a span of 11 years (2011-2022). La Belle came last in their sequence, and for that work, OP decided to go for broke — first on a small scale at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco in 2022 and then on a big stage, UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, on March 14 as part of the Cal Performances series.
On top of that, director Brian Staufenbiel introduced live stage action beginning roughly 12 minutes after the opera and film were underway. Suddenly, the cast members singing the parts of La Belle (soprano Chea Kang) and La Bête (baritone Hadleigh Adams) were before us in living color, as they used to say, made up to look almost exactly like their counterparts in the film, whose progress was halted during their duets. Meanwhile, there were two additional singers in the orchestra pit, mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis and bass-baritone Aurelien Mangwa, taking the parts of Félicie/Adélaide and Le Père/Ludovic/L’Usurier, respectively. Occasionally, Mangwa would take the stage, too.
In effect, OP was flipping the script on the Glass method and having it both ways at the same time. The original Cocteau film was shown almost continuously on a big screen in the center of the stage. A gallery of four smaller screens flanking the big one showed newly-made still and video images — also in black-and-white to match Cocteau’s film — sometimes with the faces of the live singing actors pasted within the original film by a process called green-screening. Whereas Glass was composing music to fit the film, OP was creating film to fit the music, as well as for what Cocteau delivered.
The shifting perspectives of old film, new film, stage singers, concert singers, dry ice fog on the stage floor, and a score that chugged ahead largely unimpeded by conventional opera changes of pace was designed to be surreal and disorienting — and so it often was. At times, it was difficult for me to hold onto the simple fairy-tale plot of the beast who, upon his death, transforms into the handsome Le Prince (also portrayed by Adams). But there were ample English supertitles to keep us on track and moments of humor to clash with Glass’ brooding, trademark minor-key duplets, arpeggios, and repeated statements of motifs. The on-target sync between all of this stagecraft, film craft, and amplified music was remarkable for such a complex undertaking.
In the pit under the unflagging, urgent baton of OP founder Nicole Paiement was a seven-member ensemble (flute/piccolo, soprano and alto saxophones, three keyboards, percussion) that fused together tirelessly for 95 minutes and change. Even the spookier elements of the score pushed relentlessly forward. All four singers, as heard through amplification (a fixture at Zellerbach and an integral component to Glass’ work anyway), sounded strong, with Adams, Delphis, and Mangwa easily adapting to the differing personas of their multiple characters.
Long before he wrote La Belle, Glass found a single, all-purpose manner that has an uncanny way of fitting into whatever situation he chooses to set. (One of the supertitles in this production innocently proclaimed, “Glass is just glass,” which has a double meaning for those who have sat through a lot of his music.) Here, though, the basic motifs that this ultra-prolific composer works with are sturdier and better suited to repetition than in a good deal of his output (Les Enfants Terribles, in particular, suffers from too much of the same old thing).
And there is another reason why La Belle is several cuts above routine Glass. The succession of scenes that trail off and don’t resolve, the continuously-running soundtrack, the brooding atmosphere, and, of course, the use of the French language seem directly descended from the lineage of Debussy’s opera Pelleas et Mélisande. You could even call it a tribute, which is never more clear than in this imaginative production from a little company that could and does.
Final note: As a coincidental followup to Opera Parallèle’s La Belle et la Bête, the duo pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque are coming to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on March 31 with two-keyboard transcriptions of suites from all three Glass Cocteau operas, complete with lighting effects and handout strips containing custom-designed fragrances. One innovation begets another.
