Esoteric music staged by an operatic outsider paid off for the New York City Opera on Friday night with “Monodramas,” a program of three single-character operas.
Though the works weren’t intended to be performed together, director Michael Counts — best known for his large-scale art installations in DUMBO — found a common dramatic thread: each featured a soprano thrown into some sort of existential dilemma.
The evening began with a stageful of extras swathed in burquas amid dancers dressed as department store mannequins. It wasn’t immediately clear, though, what all this fuss had to do with the opener, John Zorn’s 2000 piece “La Machine d’etre” (literally, “The Existence Machine”).
This quirky miniature, suggested by sketches by visionary French artist Antonin Artaud, featured jittery, metallic music backing Finnish soprano Anu Komsi’s deft coloratura singing, whispers and screams. Meanwhile, an animation of the Artaud drawings danced in a cartoon thought bubble over her head.
After a long and pointless interlude featuring sound effects of chirping crickets came Arnold Schoenberg’s 1909 psychodrama “Erwartung.” This piece (the titlee means “waiting”) is a stream-of-consciousness peek into the mind of a woman who believes she has murdered her lover. As performed by soft-grained soprano Kara Shay Thompson, the jittery vocal line sounded subdued, almost bland.
Last was the jewel of the evening, Mor-
ton Feldman’s 1977 “Neither,” set to an enigmatic libretto by Samuel Beckett. A stalled emotional journey “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither” invoked creaking, groaning music suggesting a giant ship disturbed by waves.
Cynthia Sieden gently intoned the eerie text in a monotone so high in the soprano register as to make the words incomprehensible, then settled into a wordless wail that looped repeatedly. After a sudden crash from the full orchestra depicting the poem’s “unseen footfalls,” the piece turned ominous, its shrieking woodwinds flinching from some nameless horror, before shuddering to a disquieting finish.
Here Counts’ direction came into focus, isolating the elegantly gowned soprano in a cavernous nightclub with towering silvery walls and chandeliers of mirrored cubes dangling from infinite space. The mannequins returned to echo her movements, though she seemed numbly unaware of their presence.
With veteran NYCO conductor George Manahan at the helm, “Neither” was worth the wait, even for an audience that had clapped impatiently when the start of the show was delayed nearly half an hour with no explanation.
By spreading barely 90 minutes of music over more than 2½ hours in the theater, the company seems to have taken the Schoenberg title “Waiting” all too literally. But it didn’t seem to deter the near-capacity audience: Indie film director Jim Jarmusch led the ovation, joined by hundreds of skinny-jeaned Williamsburg types.