‘Seven Deadly Sins’ turns vices into virtue
Why must it feel so good to be bad? Poets and philosophers have been trying to reconcile this paradox for eons; even the most virtuous among them have pretty much admitted that sometimes it’s better to just give in.
he Houston Symphony let its collective hair down (after a fashion) this past weekend under guest conductor Bramwell Tovey by bundling three works that, if not quite first-rank in their own right, together present an appealing evening of orchestral glamour and sensuality, absent any true wickedness.
You know, the friendlier vices. The main course was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s satirical, cabaret-style “sung ballet,” which debuted barely three months after Weill fled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933. After he landed in Paris, fortune smiled on the nearly destitute composer in the form of a wealthy British businessman seeking a showcase for his ballet-dancer wife.
The dancer’s role has since been written out of “Seven Deadly Sins”; rather, it’s been absorbed into the personality of Anna, the narrator and leading lady portrayed here by multifaceted vocalist Storm Large. Anna is a good girl only partially corrupted by the task before her, which is to travel through seven U.S. cities and earn enough money as a dancer to help her family build a respectable home back in Louisiana. As she does, the artistic and practical sides of her brain maintain a steady debate over whether what she’s doing is right, though any reservations she may have ultimately don’t seem to slow her down.
As Anna’s family, the all-male vocal quartet Hudson Shad quickly makes it plain they’re actually less concerned with her virtue than how much money she can send back home.
Each sin corresponds to a city (pride, Memphis; anger, Los Angeles; lust, Boston, etc.) and musically to a popular dance (tango, foxtrot, or waltz). Weill’s music is expressive and bustling, much like Hollywood film scores at the time, but overall remains a backdrop to the tug of war between the two sides of Anna’s personality.
The 1930s had its own set of issues with gluttony and lust, for example, and at times, Brecht’s sense of irony seems a little muddled to a modern audience. (I thought so, anyway.) But other times, it’s perfectly in sync, like when Large spontaneously updates the nefarious deeds of one “Mr. Big” to Harvey Weinstein. Throughout the performance, the role of Anna fits her exaggerated facial expressions and droll delivery like her black floorlength gown and matching thighhigh boots; sometimes she says as much with her eyes as her lips.
The dynamic singer, who has parlayed a runner-up spot on the mid-2000s CBS reality show “Rock Star: Supernova” into a successful gig as an all-around latter-day chanteuse, refrained from unveiling her full vocal might until Anna’s climactic reconciliation with her family, fulfilling that old showbiz adage to always leave ’em wanting more. After the final curtain, her animated stage exits and reen-trances offered yet another hint that Large could well be keeping her talents on a rather short leash here.
Before intermission, Tovey — whose conducting style nearly belongs to one of the martial arts — led the orchestra through “Le poem de l’extase (The Poem of Ecstasy),” Alexander Scriabin’s 22-minute symphonic exploration of pure sensory pleasure. Dense and immersive, his extended search for a “mystic chord” teases listeners for some time through a series of swells and fades — at times the trumpets seemed to be scouting the way forward for the rest of the ensemble — before finally arriving at a resounding payoff of bells, percussion and orchestral unity.
The evening opened with the dance from Richard Strauss’ one-act 1905 opera “Salome,” which so scandalized J.P. Morgan’s daughter at its 1907 American premiere it was banned from The Met for the next 27 years. History has been much kinder to his evocative interpretation of the famous dance of the seven veils, performed by the New Testament princess who called for John the Baptist’s head on a platter and got it.
Interspersed with splashes of castanets and brass, Strauss’ lush recurring melodies reflect Salome’s conflicted feelings toward the prophet, whose severed head she kisses (out of spite but possibly also regret); and stepfather King Herod, generally regarded as the worst rulers to ever wield a royal scepter.
Even one of the Bible’s most notorious sinners, the waltz suggests, had her tender side.
Chris Gray is a writer in Houston.