Alzheimer’s opera ‘Sky on Swings’ opens in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA » Frederica von Stade sat on a table singing, her face filled with fear and wonder, her character unsure where she was going and where she had been.

Nearly a half-century after her professional debut, the 73-year-old teamed with fellow mezzo Marietta Simpson for a mesmerizing performance Thursday night in the world premiere of “Sky on Swings,” Lembit Beecher’s joyful and disturbing chamber opera about two women deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease.

Commissioned by Opera Philadelphia for the first night of its seasonopening O18 festival, the 78-minute work debuted on the eve of World Alzheimer’s Day. It explores the cognitive decline of Danny (von Stade) and Martha (the 59-year-old Simpson), whose disease is more progressed.

In the third chamber opera by the 37-year-old Beecher and librettist Hannah Moscovitch after “I Have No Stories to Tell You” and “Sophia’s Forest,” jarring keyboard notes and pizzicato in the 11-piece orchestra punctuate melodic singing to create a disorienting intensity.

“There was a feeling that the orchestral music in the piece needed to be about disintegration or degeneration in some way,” Beecher said Friday.

Moscovitch’s libretto explores the place of the elderly in a society with longer life spans, much like Alan Bennett’s “Allelujah!” which opened at London’s Bridge Theatre in July. But while Bennett sets his play in the specific locale of a Yorkshire hospital and has sharp political commentary about cuts to Britain’s National Health Service, Moscovitch focuses “Sky” on the collapsing minds of the two principal characters in their individual homes and a nonspecific facility.

Danny’s son Ira (tenor Daniel Taylor) and Martha’s daughter Winnie (soprano Sharleen Joynt) depict the frustrations of caregivers, and a chorus of four elders adds pathos by