Snapshot 2020

West Edge Opera presented their fifth annual Snapshot program of four operatic works-in-progress last Saturday at the Taube Atrium Theater, and it was a fascinating evening. The highlight this year for me was the extraordinary musical accompaniment by Earplay, a San Francisco chamber orchestra dedicated to contemporary music.

Led by conductor Mary Chun, the players were Tod Brody, flute; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Loren Mach, percussion; Keisuke Nakagoshi, piano; Roy Malan, violin; Ellen Ruth Rose, viola; Leighton Fong, cello; and Richard Worn, bass.

It helped that the musical scores for all four operatic excerpts were consistently interesting in different ways, even when the vocal lines or the librettos didn't measure up. First up was a harrowing scene from El Canguro by composer Mike von der Nahmer and librettist Cynthia Lewis Ferrell dealing with a miscarriage by a Guatemalan peasant who has been surviving by selling her newborn babies to a gringo adoption mill. The orchestra was extraordinary, evoking a Central American jungle with impressionistic means.

The libretto verged on borderline cultural appropriation, but its heart seemed to be in the right place, and Maya Kherani, Tania Mandzy Inala, and Kevin Gino all sang well as poor Guatemalans stuck in a terrible situation.

Jonathan Khuner, West Edge Opera's musical director, took over the conducting duties for Moon, Bride, Dogs, by composer Ryan Suleiman and librettist Christina Fries, which was a surreal take on the French fairy tale Donkey Skin entwined with a nightmarish vision of being gnawed on by feral dogs in an Argentinian landscape.

J. Raymond Meyers played the Moon, Aléxa Anderson was the Idiot Girl (Bride), and Jason Sarten wearing a fur jacket played the Dogs, and they were all wonderful. So were the music and vocal lines, while the libretto was genuinely creepy.

Aléxa Anderson as Idiot Girl in particular did an amazing job, singing a procession of anguished melismas that were stunning.

This was followed by Eighteen Melodies for Hu-Jia, with a libretto and score by Joan Huang above. It's a monodrama that tells the story of a Chinese woman kidnapped by a warlord who is eventually rescued/ransomed but who has to abandon the son she conceived with her abductor. This unfolds in short snippets of poetry of haiku length that basically translated to "He is in the East and I am in the West."

The music was both spare and complex, and Vivian Yau gave a vocally superb performance except when she had to declaim some of the poetry in speech, which didn't work at all.

The final operatic excerpt was Gilberto with music by Nicolas Leif Benavides and a libretto by Marella Martin Koch based on stories Benavides told her about his grandfather teaching Latin dance in Oakland in the 1950s, only to be drafted into the Korean War. In Joshua Kosman's review at SFGate, he mentions that the musical score "kept making head fakes toward vivid Latin dance rhythms but then stopping as soon as anyone had something to say," which was my impression too. I have loved every piece of music I've heard from Benavides over the years, but this felt way too talky rather than lyrical.

It didn't help that everyone seemed to be slightly miscast in their roles (pictured above: Nicolas A. Garcia, Aléxa Anderson, Linda Baird, Chad Somers, and Jason Sarten) except for Chad Somers as a virginal recruit taking dance lessons on his last night before shipping out. With his lovely young tenor voice, he was sweetly convincing and poignant as a lamb being led to slaughter.