Golijov's fountain of melody and tears
The Spanish writer Federico García Lorca had not only a musical gift with words but also a verbal gift with music. He once described the roots of the Andalusian deep song tradition as "the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds."
Some eight decades later, Lorca's words capture the expressive aims of "Ainadamar," the opera by Osvaldo Golijov which was given a stirring and emotionally intense performance last night at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. Lorca and his idea of "deep song" are at the center of this work, exerting a magnetic pull on all of its characters, sometimes through his presence on stage but often through his painful absence after his murder in 1936 at the hands of Franco's forces during the Spanish civil war.
The plot centers on the aging Spanish actress Margarita Xirgu, who knew and loved Lorca and carried his plays and his vision of freedom into exile in Uruguay. She passes on her knowledge to her own student, Nuria, and over the course of three "Impressions," she journeys back into the past, often in sublimely lyrical flights of memory.
The work premiered at Tanglewood in 2003, and was musically and dramatically overhauled with input from Peter Sellars for his production at the Santa Fe Opera in 2005, now being revived by Opera Boston. Revisions to David Henry Hwang's libretto may not have gone far enough, but they are an improvement. The work now has the feel of a darkly sensual fable about recovering the seeds of hope and liberation buried in a past that could not bear their fruit.
Golijov was born in Argentina in 1960, and was a teenager during his country's own Dirty War. He remembers making daily trips with his brother to collect the shells in the streets from the previous night's shootings. In "Ainadamar" - or "Fountain of Tears" - he has written disarmingly sincere music, full of an unbridled lyricism that is not often heard in contemporary composition. This music simply ignores decades of polemics about artistic progress and instead sails across the footlights in search of the listener's solar plexus. It may not land there for everyone, but last night, it seemed to reach its target for many in the audience, which cheered the opera as a whole, and the vocally superb and deeply committed performances by the three principals.
In addition to the lush vocal writing, Golijov's score draws its distinctive color from a raft of Flamenco percussion as well as two guitars and an artfully deployed laptop, which adds sampled voices, horse hooves, piercing gunshots, and flowing water, sometimes assembled together into their own haunting forms of music. The piece is amplified, though last night, not altogether successfully. When the Flamenco vocalist Jesús Montoya unleashed the first of several primal muezzin-like cries, his voice overwhelmed the sound system altogether. And the music was frustratingly muffled during the score's most imaginatively conceived passage, just before Lorca's execution, when the strings move up and down in giant ghost-like glissandos while a marimba floats eerily above. But the broad strokes of the opera came through nonetheless, and the conductor Gil Rose led a sensitive reading of a score that has until now been the province of two other conductors.
Sellars's direction is especially effective in the powerful second Impression. The chorus underlines the music with broad hand gestures. The painted backdrops by Gronk, riffing on Picasso's "Guernica," are a riot of colors and contorted shapes, shifting in mood under lighting by James F. Ingalls.
Dawn Upshaw gave a deeply compelling and courageous performance as Margarita, Kelley O'Connor was brilliant in the trouser role of Lorca, and Jessica Rivera sang Nuria with a river of luminous tone.
