Aristocrats darkly irresistible
The two bored aristocrats who occupy Luca Francesconi’s 2011 opera “Quartett” are in an existential pickle. Alienated from the world around them, in thrall to their bodies and desires, oppressed by what one of them calls “the misery of being alive and not God,” they pass their days in a series of bloodless seductions and elaborate masquerades.
They’re not good company, in short — and yet, as brilliantly embodied by soprano Heather Buck and baritone Hadleigh Adams in the taut and tangy production that opened Saturday, Aug. 11, at West Edge Opera, they’re darkly irresistible. You may not care much about their plight, but you can’t look away either.
It helps, of course, that most of the audience already knows these two schemers well. Anyone familiar with “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” — either Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel of 1782 or the numerous stage, screen and operatic adaptations that it has spawned — will greet the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont as, if not old friends, then at least fascinating and slightly wearying acquaintances. (Anyone else will be pretty well lost at sea.)
Francesconi’s opera, though, is not so much a conventional adaptation (the late Conrad Susa covered that
angle with his 1994 commission from the San Francisco Opera) as a fragmentary, semiabstract treatment of his source material. “Quartett,” which runs about 90 minutes without intermission, plays like a sharp-edged theatrical mobile, a series of scenes from Laclos viewed through the prismatic surfaces of a cut-glass decanter.
Even the piece’s lineage is a bit scattered and elusive. The opera is based on a play by the German provocateur Heiner Müller, to which Francesconi added various theatrical layers of his own; hence the German title for an opera by an Italian composer, written in English about French nobles. The two-performer piece is dubbed “Quartett” because the main characters’ bedroom games involve impersonating one another and the two chief targets of their sexual gamesmanship.
Francesconi’s score — led here with fierce clarity by conductor John Kennedy — is no more smoothly integrated than anything else. It involves both a live chamber orchestra and the sounds of a prerecorded orchestra and chorus (a nod to the world of La Scala in Milan, where “Quartett” had its premiere). It ranges from the eerie atmospherics of the ethereal world these spirits inhabit, to the angular expressionism of their basic dialogue, to the cajoling lyricism they use for seductive purposes.
All of this could easily have devolved into mere pretension. But there’s a wide vein of theatrical bravura underlying the work, and the West Edge production — even in the cavernous expanses of the company’s new home at the Craneway Conference Center in Richmond — brings out every bit of the opera’s pitiless glint.
Director Elkhanah Pulitzer emphasizes the multiple levels of illusion on display, even as she imparts an air of haunting artificiality to the entire operation. On Chad Owens’ ingenious two-level set, the performers — coated in spectral white body paint and often stripped down to their skivvies — clamber up and down a large inclined surface like military recruits negotiating an obstacle course.
The lights come up and down abruptly, as if to underscore the shard-like structure of the work. Sexual elements are rendered with joyless directness. In one of the most alarmingly inventive strokes, the Marquise repeatedly takes out a cell phone to snap pictures of the action like some sort of robotic tourist in her own life.
In the end, though, much of the production’s success rests on the fearless, steely and musically alert performances of Buck and Adams. Both of them are well known locally as artists who never shy away from a challenge, but their contributions here — which combine imperious technical panache and a lingering air of vulnerability — are on a whole new level.
“I hope my performance did not bore you,” one of the characters sings — hopefully, archly, slightly menacingly — toward the end of the opera. Not in the least, my friend; not in the least.