What impressed me here was the glistening web of sound behind the carnival-the interlocking modes, the multiple tonal layers, the silken ostinatos based on fragments of ditties you’ve already heard. Sloan awake on the last day of her life that he comes up with at least three indelible tunes. So let’s take it for granted that the composer creates precise pastiches of everything from Rossini to rockabilly that he throws in delightful allusions, like the Messiaenic birds that chirp Mrs. The trick in assessing Bolcom’s music is to make it seem something other than a stylistic casserole. A few stray plot strands and a quizzical ending aside, it’s a deft libretto that balances zany double-entendres with plainspoken poetry, mocking exaggeration with empathetic realism. There are also Italians on the loose-the groom’s father (Jerry Hadley) and his brother from the old country (David Cangelosi)-together with a Communistic aunt (Kathryn Harries), a hired wedding guest (Timothy Nolen), an obsessive-compulsive wedding planner (Maria Kanyova), and the best man, an alcoholic marine (Brian Leerhuber). Her parents are a reformed fornicator turned born-again millionaire (Mark Delavan) and a naïve belle who yearns for adventure (Lauren Flanigan). The bride (Anna Christy) is an ingénue from Louisville, Kentucky, who has no idea what she’s getting into. Her daughters and in-laws include a factory owner who employs illegal immigrants (Beth Clayton) a doctor turned dealer in Pollock, De Kooning, and Kline (Jake Gardner) a flaky interpretive dancer (Patricia Risley) who loves the family’s Caribbean butler (Mark Doss) an emotionally stunted morphine addict (Catherine Malfitano) and the groom, a military-academy graduate whose body is finer than his mind (Patrick Miller). Here goes: The old-money matriarch-Nettie Sloan, of Lake Forest, Illinois-dies in the second scene, but her haughty, melancholy spirit hovers over the messy party that follows. Arnold Weinstein, Bolcom’s longtime lyricist-librettist, worked with Altman to reduce the original cast of forty-eight characters to a still formidable assortment of nineteen.
“A Wedding” is Bolcom’s third work for the Lyric, the others being “McTeague” and “A View from the Bridge.” It takes off from Robert Altman’s 1978 film of the same title, about an all-American train wreck of a wedding where old money and nouveau riche collide.
This is the many-sided music theatre of Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, and Weill.
Bolcom aims for a higher complexity, a personal fusion of style and form. The fact that Bolcom can knock out a Gershwinish tune like nobody’s business has caused him to be underrated in the glum colloquia of contemporary music, where, for a long time, melodies had the status of radioactive rodents, and where seriousness is often measured by counting how many disparate pitches and rhythms pile up in any one bar. “Songs” has an awesome aura not only because it embraces every imaginable style but because it gathers momentum and mystery as it moves along. It had its première back in 1984 but was recorded for the first time this year, thanks to the Naxos label. His signature work is “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” a barbaric yawp of a piece that fuses William Blake’s poetry with a welter of musical traditions, from Shaker hymns to reggae. He has honed his craft in opera, musicals, concert song, and cabaret (he tours with his wife, Joan Morris). If, on the other hand, you hire composers who love the logic of theatre more than the sound of their own voices, you may end up with a joyous hit like William Bolcom’s “A Wedding,” which opened at the Lyric this month.īolcom, now sixty-six, is the rare living classical composer whom God made with the theatre in mind. True, if you hand out commissions to middle-of-the-road composers who prove maximally unobjectionable to the governing board, or to career academics who wouldn’t know a narrative arc if it hit them in the head, you will perpetrate expensive fizzles. Usually, the collective genius of administration acts to stifle new opera, on the theory that audiences want only the aged, imported European product. Louis also come to mind-where premières are routine, and that’s radical in itself. But the Lyric has a history of being one of very few American houses-the Houston Grand Opera and the Opera Theatre of St. Admittedly, you have to go elsewhere for radical ideas about production and repertory Matthew Epstein, the artistic director, recently left after encountering opposition to his more adventurous plans. Almost every performance is sold out, and the budget is in the black. Fifty years on, it is probably in better health than any other opera company in America.
The Lyric Opera of Chicago began life in the highest style, with Maria Callas making her American début.
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