Use Your Indoor Voice.
Tobias Picker is a
very fine composer. His orchestral writing can be quite beautiful
and there is a great deal of it in his opera Therese Raquin
which was recently mounted by the Chicago Opera Theater. The
libretto is skillful; the sets and costumes effective. It should
have made for a wonderful evening in the theater
Unfortunately the
problem is Picker's vocal writing. He has beautiful stretches of
orchestral music with the voices pretty much screaming over
it. You wait for some moment where the text is not set to
jagged vocal lines at the top of the singers range. You are still waiting
after two hours. There is a section in the second act where
Mr. Picker starts out with an orchestra interlude and you think
there will be something lovely to follow but when the voices enter right
off the bat they start howling out intervals that illuminate neither the
text nor the mood. A lesser problem is the lack of truly transparent
music in the opera. It is beautiful but condensed in a limited range of
orchestral color and rhythmic vitality.
The singers were able
to scream through their parts pretty well, I guess. The
orchestra was adequate except for the under powered violins.
The most disappointing thing
about the piece is that it had a lot going for it. But what is
opera about if not communication with the voice. Perhaps
Mr. Picker thinks the more difficult the intervals the more serious the
composer. I would advise him to reconsider this notion
after a thorough study of Pelleas.
Ralph Boyd
