HGO has a holiday-season hit, but it’s no ‘Nutcracker’
‘House Without a Christmas Tree’ shines with melodic, compelling tale
This is the time of year when the opera industry experiences “Nutcracker” envy: a wistful longing for a perennial holiday favorite that audiences flock to see year after year, raking in enough revenue to underwrite the rest of the season.
Many companies, including Houston Grand Opera, have made bids for a share of the holiday audience with varying degrees of success, but to date, no operatic “Nutcracker” has yet materialized.
This holiday season, HGO is offering up the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon and Royce Vavrek’s “The House Without a Christmas Tree,” the third of three world-premiere Christmas operas in as many years. Not only does this opera have to find its place among the “Nutcrackers,” “Christmas Carols” and “Messiahs,” as a world premiere, it also has to bid for a permanent spot in the operatic canon.
Gordon’s melodic,
tonal score makes a strong bid for that spot, falling easily on the ears, often bringing to mind the late operas of Richard Strauss in its naturalistic setting of Vavrek’s dialogue to melodically compelling, if not ideally memorable, music.
A seasoned opera composer, Gordon here employs a small chamber orchestra set to the right side of the proscenium in the George R. Brown Convention Center’s Resilience Theater, skillfully balancing arias, duets and ensembles to keep the drama flowing smoothly. Gordon’s writing for his protagonist, Addie Mills, also brings Strauss to mind, with its soaring soprano flights of lyricism as the young girl begs her father for a Christmas tree.
Musical highlights include a trio for Addie, her father and her grandmother; the poignant duet “Promise Me” between Addie’s father and his memory of Addie’s late mother; and a gorgeous quartet late in the opera. It’s frustrating, though, that these moments are over all too quickly; with the opera clocking in at a brisk 80 minutes, why not let the audience luxuriate in these moments just a little bit?
Casting is especially critical to a world-premiere opera. Mellifluous vocals and vivid dramatic performances by soprano Heidi Stober, mezzosoprano Patricia Schuman and baritone Daniel Belcher all make strong cases for the viability of “The House Without a Christmas Tree.” The standout, though, is soprano Lauren Snouffer in the central role of Addie Mills. Reminiscent of the character Jo March in “Little Women,” Snouffer invests her spirited, appealing portrayal of the self-possessed young tomboy with crisp diction, soaring lyricism and a completely convincing preteen predilection for drama.
Members of HGO’s Bauer Family High School Studio all give authentic, vocally accomplished performances as Addie’s classmates, including key supporting performances from Maximillian Macias and Elizabeth Leone.
The production hits all the right notes for a holiday classic. The action is centered around the three-dimensional revolving set depicting the Mills’ small-town Nebraska home, lit with a warm, incandescent glow we’ve all but forgotten in our own neon-bulbed day, and framed by a blue proscenium festooned with white snowflake patterns. Homes, churches and evergreens on the horizon are lit with Christmas lights as the scenes fade from twilight to nighttime. Various scenes introduce a 7-foot-tall snowman, a snowball fight and a living Nativity staged by schoolchildren. Gordon even weaves “Silent Night” into the score.
The pleasing score, congenial vocal demands and modest scale of “The House Without a Christmas Tree” give it a good shot at achieving staying power, attractive to professional opera companies of all sizes and to conservatories and universities. It was warmly received by the opening-night audience, some granting it a standing ovation.
But is it something audiences will come back to see year after year? Perhaps that’s not the relevant question: Is any one opera going to bring audiences back every single year? Probably not. But the occasional revival of “The House Without a Christmas Tree” would be a welcome addition to Houston’s holiday arts calendar.