Photo Credit: Stephanie Berger.
Scene from Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Lembit Beecher’s “I Have No Stories To Tell You,” Medieval Sculpture Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries after closing hours is akin to walking into a darkling dream. I’ve done so only once before, to hear The Crossing perform David Lang’s little match girl passion and other works before the Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche in the Medieval Sculpture Hall.
This time, I would hear the Gotham Chamber Opera perform two short operas: Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and the premiere of Lembit Beecher’s I Have No Stories to Tell You. While each opera tells a tale of war, Monteverdi’s work “is about the act of war and battle” set during the First Crusade, and Beecher’s, whose protagonist is a contemporary photojournalist home after assignment in the Middle East, “is about the after-effects of war, the difficulty of coming home.”
About two years ago, Limor Tomer, the Met’s General Manager of Concerts and Lectures, invited Gotham Chamber Opera to “[s]ee if there’s any space — other than the auditorium — that inspires you to do an opera.” Neal Goren, Gotham’s Artistic Director and Conductor, wrote that, upon visiting the Arms and Armor court, he “was struck by the idea that Monteverdi’s Combattimento—a 20-minute mini-opera about a battle between armored knights—would be right at home there.” Gotham commissioned Beecher to compose a companion work. For his one-act opera, Beecher chose the Medieval Sculpture Hall, “not so much because of the pieces in it but because of its mood . . . coming here, especially at night, it’s much more meditative.”
Arms and Armor Court
Photograph © Metropolitan Museum of Art (www.metmuseum.org)
Museum staff ushered the audience down the museum’s long corridors. On the way, we passed a man in modern soldier’s camouflage standing in a glass case, a harbinger of Beecher’s opera yet to come. We moved back in time to a period when the armor arrayed in the Arms and Armor Court held sway. We stood around a circle of fabricated dirt on which two soldiers would soon spar. We were now, somehow, not simply audience, but part of the action, living spectators to a battle that took place centuries before we were born. Two narrators, Abigail Fischer and Samuel Levine, circled the two singer-warriors as they fought. The exquisitely modest instrumentation included two Baroque violins, a Baroque viola, cello, and oboe, and a harpsichord and lute-like theorbo.
We watched as Clorinda died. In battle, she was Tancredi’s adversary, but also, though unrecognized in her armor, his lover. We saw her submit to him at death, converting from her Muslim faith to Christianity as an act of forgiveness and of love. Whether her choice was wise or not, it seemed best to let go of judgment. It was, after all, a fiction, and a long time ago.
From the last image of Tancredi holding the dying Clorinda, we walked toward the Medieval Sculpture Hall, the familiar corridor made strange by an undertow of apprehension revealed in sound. The sound, composed by Beecher, was electronic, “derived from recordings of the period instruments playing various extended techniques and effects.” I am a confessed skeptic when it comes to deployment of electronics to create musical effects, but my resistance was soon overcome. By sound alone, Beecher carried us from the distant past into the present, along an unrelieved, yet subtle, line of tension. While we might have left behind the dying Clorinda, there would be no respite.
We settled on benches on either side of a long, rust-colored ramp. Lighting threw off sharp-edged shadows from the Spanish choir screen, ordinarily an object of benign beauty in the Hall. Levine, now Noah and a modern soldier, appeared on the ramp. Beth Clayton, who had been Clorinda, was now Sorrel; Craig Verm, her Tancredi, was now Daniel. Accompanied by a chorus of three memories (Sarah Tucker, Rachel Calloway, and Fischer), Clayton and Verm depicted, with gripping eloquence, Sorrel’s unnamed distress and Daniel’s poignant probing of Sorrel’s nightly inability to sleep—an aftershock of war in which Noah was to play an essential part.
Photo Credit: Stephanie Berger.
Scene from Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Lembit Beecher’s “I Have No Stories To Tell You.”
Beth Clayton (Sorrel) & Samuel Levine (Noah) on ramp.
One of Beecher’s great gifts is his mastery of understatement, evinced here, among other things, in moments of unaccompanied chorus and the oboe’s winding line to achieve exactly the effect the narrative required and no more. Matched by Hannah Moscovitch’s libretto, Beecher’s music limned the rising tension between Sorrel and Daniel with a sure hand. It’s rare for a libretto and music to work this well together to infuse the dailiness of ordinary language with such power. In a production that was elegantly spare, this excellent ensemble of musicians and singers made palpable the half-submerged, indeterminate landscape of human hearts and minds.
Postscript: I wish to extend my thanks to Lembit Beecher for making it possible for me to attend a performance of this program. I don’t ordinarily accept “comp” tickets, but in this case I did jump at the chance. What I witnessed was the artistic alchemy of bringing a performance to a pre-existing “set” that I don’t think can be replicated by a set created for the traditional opera stage. I do hope that the production, and particularly Beecher’s opera, can be made available, by HD, DVD, or other means, to a wider audience at some point.
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An interview with Lembit Beecher about his opera may be found here. More information on the Gotham Chamber Opera production, cast, and creative team may be found here and here. Wonderfully atmospheric photographs by Damon Winter of the operas in rehearsal may be found here.
Photo Credit: Stephanie Berger.
Scene from Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Lembit Beecher’s “I Have No Stories To Tell You.”
Beth Clayton (Sorrel) & Craig Verm (Daniel) (Foreground)
Listening List
Lembit Beecher talks with New Music Box about music, including excerpts of recent works
Lembit Beecher’s String Quartet, These Memories May Be True, First Movement
To hear the rest of Lembit Beecher’s string quartet, click here and scroll down. For more about Lembit Beecher, click here.
Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
Credits: The evocative photographs of the February 26, 2014, performance of Beecher’s I Have No Stories to Tell You are by Stephanie Berger, and displayed here by kind permission of Gotham Chamber Opera. Please respect copyright and do not use these photographs without obtaining express permission. The remaining photographs are as credited in the photograph captions and may also be found on the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as follows: Medieval Sculpture Hall, Arms and Armor Court, and Choir Screen. The quotations are from the sources linked in the text.
Prufrock's Dilemma 
Oh, how I would love to have been there.
Mark: It was quite an experience, as you’ve read. I do hope that, in the future, there will be a way make the performances available for streaming or HD or similar so a wider audience can participate.
O Susan, what an absolutely sublime experience. But if anyone deserved it, it’s you.
Like Mark, I wish I could have been present.
I can’t get over it, operas as they are meant to be performed, adding atmosphere and setting to the music and the voices. And you were there! Art of the highest form.
Friko: I wish you and Mark both could have been present! Everything about this production was extremely well done, and the interplay of art, artifact, and music was beyond price. A review I learned of after I’d posted this report caught the intimate power of the experience best of any I’ve read so far: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304360704579417052993903132 (scroll down to “New York” for the review of the Gotham performance). Here’s what the reviewer wrote about Beecher’s opera:
“Mr. Beecher’s opera, also about war, had a different kind of power. Sorrel (an intense Ms. Clayton), who has returned from an unspecified modern conflict, has posttraumatic stress disorder, and in the course of 40 minutes we find out why. Hannah Moscovitch’s libretto subtly builds suspense; it starts over several times, with the sleepless Sorrel asking her husband (Mr. Verm), “Did I wake you?” but refusing to tell him why she cannot sleep. A tight trio of women, led by the expressive Ms. Fischer, sing her nightmare memories as an ominous vocal haze, and the narrative gradually gathers momentum until the trauma is finally revealed—another soldier (the bright-voiced Mr. Levine, skillfully playing a boy trying to be a man) raped her and was later killed. Mr. Beecher’s music for the baroque ensemble made artful use of its skills in articulation, layering pizzicatos on tremolos to create an eerie, almost mechanical sound that added to the sense of late-night unease.
“Andromache Chalfant’s set, a runway with spectators on either side, made the disturbed, restless Sorrel seem forever trapped. The shadowy gallery, with its Virgin and Child statues and other devotional objects, turned the home front into a place where nightmares hide in corners and war is never in the past.”
That last is a particularly insightful point, which hadn’t occurred to me, but which describes exactly what the experience of this performance was like.
I’m so pleased that the exceptional setting has given LB the wider coverage he deserves. I’d normally baulk at the subject matter – there have been some terrible operas written around recent wars, Judith Weir’s much the worst. But I believe you that this composer’s understatement paid dividends.
Site-specific operas are big now, and they’re pulling in a whole new (younger) audience. I’m off to see Offenbach in a pub tomorrow night (fine for young singers, though I feel that I’m too old to hear Puccini and Verdi sung by less than world-class voices…) I rather imagine the Met crowd was one of wealthy patrons, Ladies Who Lunch.
David: The wider, and extremely positive, coverage for Beecher was indeed nice to see, and well-earned. You’re right about the perils in this subject matter. Without Beecher’s (and Moscovitch’s) light touch, this could easily have gone south.
Offenbach in a pub, eh? I’d put that in the “alternative venue” vs. “site-specific” category, and I know what you mean. Striking about this production, and from reviews I’ve read, typical for Gotham productions, is that everything was well done. The ensemble and singers were excellent (and among the singers, I’d agree with those who point to Abigail Fischer as a stand-out). Re audience, the small capacity and fixed overhead surely had to affect the pricing. Gotham does perform in other venues, but it’s clear from this that Met Museum galleries are imaginatively fertile ground, so I hope those issues can be addressed.
Dear Sue,
as you know: I’m always “eyes”, much more then ears (except…you know…concerning peas…), and instantly when I saw the impressing photos, and those wonderful rooms, and read your story they came alive, the First Crusade as well as the wars of now. The same drama now and then. Battle, war – nobody who has to fight there has a protective shield against the horrors of war.
I don’t discuss the maybe necessity – I just think of all those young people – some I spoke to as school children (!) before – coming back from Afghanistan, and being changed, and me, so much older, being spared. Not fair at all.
But now I will listen to the music – thank you, as always, for your wonderful presentation
PS: What is a “comp” ticket?
Britta: Ah, yes, those peas! And as you so often do, you’ve caught the essence in a few well-chosen words: “The same drama now and then. Battle, war – nobody who has to fight there has a protective shield against the horrors of war.” (A “comp” ticket is a complimentary ticket, so no charge.)