Music and Mayhem in The Big Apple: Grendel Lives!

Jul 17, 2006 08:58 PM Filed in: Things Medieval
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Opera Review
From a huge cast, one stands out
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By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic
 ▪ How the opera came to be

New operas don't often come in packages the size of Aida, but Grendel did on Tuesday at its Lincoln Center Festival opening. Huge numbers of choristers and dancers, plus a monumental revolving set and some of the best opera singers alive, told the Beowulf legend in images and music - from the viewpoint of the enemy, Grendel.

In comparison to so many well-made, well-mannered operas that have crossed the stage of late, Grendel is a fearlessly R-rated pageant with so much to say and so many imaginative ways of saying it that you're willing to wait until the two-act piece finds its footing somewhere near the end of Act I, particularly with the presence of Eric Owens. In the title role, he is consistently charismatic, theatrically and vocally.
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In some ways, the evening is his. The Philadelphia-born and -trained bass-baritone repeated the breakthrough success he had in the role last month at the Los Angeles Opera, which commissioned the piece with Lincoln Center. The opening-night audience in New York, which drew luminaries from Stephen Sondheim to Isabella Rossellini, didn't add standing to the cheering until Owens took his bow.

The world of this eighth-century Nordic epic isn't easy to envision: It's about the dawn of civilization, in which warriors tame the Earth with roads and buildings and seek to eradicate the one foe that seems to resist defeat - the semi-human Grendel, descended from Cain. In the world of the opera (based on John Gardner's novel of the same title), human vanity makes Grendel a bigger, lonelier enemy than he'd like to be - and a smarter one, thanks to the existential counsel of a glamorous, world-weary dragon, played by Denyce Graves at her best.

Though the libretto goes down a few blind alleys in telling Grendel's back story (you see him getting beat up on the playground, which detracts from his strangeness), everything about the story is great fodder for the opera's eclectic, high-minded team - composer Elliot Goldenthal, librettist J.D. McClatchy, designer George Tsypin, and especially stage director Julie Taymor.
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If there's one moment you'll hear most about, it involves the dragon: Graves lounges on the tongue inside the maw of the beast, singing in the disquieting, baritonal depths of her register, framed by a huge, undulating tail topped with three singing dragonettes. Grendel's transformation from an accidental killer (something like Lenny in Of Mice and Men) to a bloodthirsty nihilist is portrayed in a visual montage of slides, with a grinning Grendel covered with blood and carnage.

The recurring riff from Taymor and Goldenthal and the fierce desperation of Angelin Preljocaj's choreography is that of a pre-standardized world where hierarchy exists in place of laws. Thus, you have the bizarre inhabitants of Grendel's lair built from familiar human and animal parts but joined in unfamiliar ways. Some tower on stilts. Others drag hind legs behind them.
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Similarly, Goldenthal's music is a not-so-tonal mixture of agonized harmonies, jazzy syncopation, odd instrumentation heavily featuring saxophone, and Philip Glass-style rhythms. The fusion doesn't happen convincingly in much of Act I, but in this piece written over more than a decade, Act II stakes a claim for Goldenthal as a major composer with a powerful gift for dramatic specificity. At best, the music is a great catalyst for sight, sound and story becoming indivisibly fused. It creates its own universe.

I just wish the universe had been in a more acoustically sympathetic place than the New York State Theater. Lower voices, in particular, don't carry all that well, so you're grateful that so many details of Owens' characterization come through.

Still, not much extrapolating was necessary to see that this was an absolutely remarkable performance, one for the books, with Owens coloring the wide-ranging vocal lines as deftly as he does in art songs.

Having heard Owens in a variety of settings, I never guessed that he was such a resourceful actor, whether cowering before the dragon like a scared boy or projecting joyful rapture during his character's death. In this role, he seems to have everything. How rare is that?