Checked passions are at heart of world premiere
Intermezzo, the resourceful chamber opera company, presented another world premiere over the weekend, their seventh in six years. Charles Shadle's "A Last Goodbye" is a one-act companion to his earlier Intermezzo commission, "A Question of Love." Michael Ouellette's libretto efficiently outlines the situation: Robert, a Cambridge poet living with Stephen, a young composer, attempts to rekindle a romance with his former lover Carrie, now married to Ned. But this is an opera of checked passions, the sort of restraint that Stephen refers to derisively as "Brattle Street civility."
Shadle's music, scored for piano, violin, and cello, reflects the subterranean churn. All three instruments are a ubiquitous presence, intricately weaving counterpoint and motives into a shifting, chromatically rich tonality, softly dissonant lines alighting on triadic cadences. The accompaniment is the potent mixture of memory and emotion out of which words coalesce. Only toward the end - a trio among Stephen, Carrie, and Robert, and then Carrie's final aria, a post-mortem on her long-gone romance - does the music adopt a full-bore lyricism, inner lives made manifest.
Tenor Jason McStoots sang with calmly ringing ease as Stephen, avoiding overplaying the character's fey prickliness, deftly modulating to deeper ardency. Ray Bauwens, with a bright, steadfast tenor, effectively hinted at the worry beneath Ned's agreeing stoicism. Baritone and Intermezzo founder John Whittlesey played Robert as a man of effortless charisma but a jealously guarded soul, even as he pours out his heart.
As Carrie, Gale Fuller wasn't always successful negotiating Shadle's trickier intervals, but her warm mezzo-soprano was generous and unflagging. She played Carrie sadder than the other characters' descriptions of her - she began at the place the drama meant to transport her to - nonetheless, her duet with Whittlesey was absorbing, a colloquy of shifting emotions. Andrew Ryker's direction, naturalistic and efficient, made the judicious most of dramatic shifts in Bill Fregosi's lighting. James Busby, conducting from the piano, kept the momentum with a graceful pace. "A Last Goodbye" is modest in the best sense: a lovely, intimate short story in which words and music are ideally scaled to each other.
The first half was "Socrate," Erik Satie's cantata-like 1918 portrait of the Greek philosopher (in Virgil Thomson's English translation). Mezzo-soprano Hilary Nicholson was perhaps miscast, with an opulent voice that she seemed to be holding back. But tenor Aaron Sheehan was ideal, clear and polished, elegantly declaiming the wide-ranging but dramatically restrained recitatives with quiet intensity.
The performance was, amazingly, the work's Boston stage premiere, though Brian Price's staging was certainly minimal: flanked by podiums for the singers, a sheet across the stage became a screen, filled alternately with images and the projected silhouettes of Daniel Benavent and Domenico Mastrototaro, acting out events in a kind of stylized mime. At times it seemed like an elaborate PowerPoint presentation, but the concept wasn't a bad fit for Satie's self-effacing, dispassionately simple reportage.
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