Leonard Bernstein - Trouble in Tahiti
Opera North, Leeds - 2017
Tobias Ringborg, Matthew Eberhardt, Quirijn de Lang, Wallis Giunta, Fflur Wyn, Joseph Shovelton, Nicolas Butterfield, Charlie Southby
OperaVision - August 2018
The Americans are coming, we've been told. While Europe has tended to go in one direction as far as 20th century contemporary music goes, breaking away from conventional diatonic scale, America has largely worked within the more familiar tonal hierarchies, telling us that traditional classical music is not dead yet. There have been a few tentative attempts to bring Europe back into the fold so to speak or at least recognise that there are still areas to explore and rediscover. Barber's Vanessa at this year's Glyndebourne, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking at the Barbican and Kevin Puts' Silent Night at Wexford and forthcoming at Opera North, have all made minor inroads but few have been as successful as Philip Glass or, in the music theatre world (where I think most edge closer towards), Stephen Sondheim.
Where Leonard Bernstein fits into the landscape of modern American music and opera is rather more complicated and varied, scoring Hollywood and Broadway musicals, a conductor, writer who composed in a number of styles, working in popular song, jazz and classical idioms. I'm not familiar with his opera work at all - it's taken until his centenary this year for any real opportunity to experience any productions this side of the Atlantic - but they keep telling us that the Americans are coming, so the opportunity to see Bernstein's first short opera Trouble in Tahiti is one that perhaps shouldn't be missed.
Whether Trouble in Tahiti is typical of Bernstein I couldn't say, but it certainly conforms to my impression of lying closer to the Broadway musical composer than opera. On the other hand, there's clearly a certain amount of knowingness and satire in the short opera's all-American subject and treatment and certainly a more complex side to the music behind its breezy swinging jazz-influenced score and melodic song arrangements. The problem with satirising American domestic life and attitudes however is that it ends up portraying banality and there's a danger that the music could also be equally banal.
Opera North's heightened all-American production however ensures that the audience is in awe of the superficial attraction while being aware of the observation and commentary on the attitudes promoted by consumerist society that lie beneath it, forcing distinctions between winners and losers, between male and female roles. The opera opens with an all-American couple sitting at the dining table over breakfast. Involved in a petty argument over going to see Junior in a school play, it's obvious that after ten years of marriage the spark has gone from Sam and Dinah's relationship and it might not be so easy to rekindle.
Neither seem particularly interested in making the effort and, to be honest, the consumerist lifestyle and social model doesn't encourage any deeper engagement with each other. Sam sees himself as a little god in the office, making deals and being praised for his sporting prowess, while a three-piece close harmony radio-jazz chorus pay glowing tribute to his own sense of greatness. Dinah meanwhile goes to see a 'South Pacific' style musical called 'Trouble in Tahiti', "a terrible, awful movie" but despite herself, she enjoys the escapism of its songs that take her out of herself for a while, until she has to go back and make Sam's dinner for him coming home.
It's no Von Heute auf Morgen (although it could certainly form a contrasting view of domestic life if the two short works are ever paired), but the swinging, upbeat jazzy arrangements are deceptive, and there is some measure of dissonance between the music and the situation, as well as within the music itself that doesn't offer any optimistic outcome. At the end, Sam and Dinah don't so much make-up or even just put their differences aside as brush them under the carpet, going to see 'Trouble in Tahiti', where they can live the American dream on the screen at least.
Directed by Matthew Eberhardt, Opera North's production is itself a Hollywood musical come to life, a stylised all-American dream whose artificial glamour is cardboard thin, the ideal of the less than ideal sustained by the seductive croon emanating from the voices on the radio, from the poster on the wall, from the image on the screen. The singing is just outstanding, from those jazz harmonies of the trio chorus (Fflur Wyn, Joseph Shovelton and Nicolas Butterfield), to the conflicted self-assurance needed by Sam and Dinah that is brought out in the fine lead performances of Quirijn de Lang and Wallis Giunta. Tobias Ringborg brings a wonderful flow to those smooth arrangements with a hint of trouble (in Tahiti) beneath the surface.
Links: Opera North, OperaVision
