Excerpts from review by Gabrielle Ferrari
Photo Credit: ROYCE VAVREK
Paola Prestini’s first full-length opera at National Sawdust begins and ends with a chorus of cicadas; the rhythms of the natural world and of daily life guide it and frame seas of emotion buried beneath an otherwise peaceful exterior. Based on Carlos Reygadas’ film of the same name, Silent Light is a portrait of a Mennonite marriage at a breaking point. Johan, middle-aged and otherwise dutiful, has been having an affair with another woman, Marianne. He wants to stop, but his connection with Marianne is only slightly stronger than his guilt. His wife Esther knows it all and watches in quiet desperation and suppressed anger. Johan’s pull toward both women and the inevitable choice he feels he must make between them brings all three characters to surprising places. The opera ends with a mysterious resurrection that, instead of resolving the tension, restores and enshrines it.
....Reygadas’ film presents a typical melodramatic situation but, by dint of his setting and characters, asks a fascinating question: what is a melodrama without expressiveness? Without explosive conflicts or, indeed, much speech, his Silent Light forces the passions of the characters underneath the surface, diffusing them into the actors’ bodies and then out into the landscape itself. The lack of hyperbole seems antithetical to opera’s typical rhythms, but Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek embrace the challenge offered by their source material. Furthermore, Prestini builds on Reygadas’ work to ask another intriguing question: what is opera when the voice is no longer the most important instrument but only one within a larger landscape of sounds?
....Prestini’s score moves seamlessly between environmental sound and music, combining some jazz and country influences with an otherwise highly contemporary musical language. NOVUS ensemble, here directed by an energetic Christopher Rountree. Some of it is very successful; a sexy, sinister number dominated by grooving drums and trombone was both surprising and memorable. Her chorus work is highly compelling; Silent Light was written in part with Trinity Church Choir, who sang with crisp, clear expression. Prestini’s writing is strongest with them; at various points, contemporary harmonies meet hymns in beautiful, surprising ways. These moments let the chorus take on the unsaid passions of the principal characters.
Read Observer review in full here
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