Music by Joby Talbot. Libretto by Gene Scheer. November 16-17, 2019.
Climbing Everest is easy. It’s coming down that’s the hard part. Or so we would be led to believe by Everest, a one-act operatic retelling of the May 1996 Mount Everest Disaster, in which eight climbers died after being hit with a freak storm during their descent from the peak. Composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer’s work provides the material for a deeply emotionally felt account of the tragedy, which Music Director Lidiya Yankovskaya and the Chicago Opera Theater (COT) did not fail to deliver.
Under the musical direction of Yankovskaya, the COT has made a name for itself as one of the foremost national champions of new opera, with last season’s critically acclaimed Moby Dick establishing the company as a major player in this role. The trend continues with Everest, in which a brilliant score, captivating performances from the soloists, and colorful and confident playing and singing from the orchestra and 140-member Apollo Chorus combined to produce a stunning artistic achievement.
The opera zeros in on the stories of three mountaineers as their attempt to climb Everest (minimalistically and effectively represented by a series of ladders and suspended platforms) becomes fatal as a result of the storm and the climbers’ poor decision to continue climbing a full two hours after the appointed descent time of 2:00 P.M. As the expedition spirals into chaos, members of the mountaineers’ families emerge on stage for conversations with the beleaguered climbers. These conversations are both real and imagined: Beck Weathers (Aleksey Bogdanov) hallucinates speaking with his young daughter (Anna Lorenzo) back home in Texas, and expedition leader Rob Hall (Andrew Bidlack) is patched through by the crew at base camp for a possibly final conversation with his pregnant wife (Zoie Reams) in New Zealand. By the end of the opera, Rob Hall and climber Doug Hansen (Zachary Nelson) are dead of hypothermia, while Beck Weathers manages to make it back to Base Camp, critically frostbitten but alive. Not one’s usual operatic fare in terms of plot, but nonetheless (or perhaps precisely because of its eschewing the melodrama and cartoonish villains more familiar to the genre), the narrative comes across as entirely compelling.
The brightest star of the production was Talbot’s music, which is deeply creative and often intensely moving. His score contains much that is thoroughly tonal and melodic, but Talbot also mines the orchestra for non-melodic “effects,” like the sliding violins, trilling piccolo, thrumming bass clarinet, and pulsating tom-toms evoking the howling winds and shifting ice of the Everest summit. Yankovskaya made the most of Talbot’s work, allowing the colors of the choral and orchestral writing to shine through, while ensuring that the soloists were never overpowered by the sometimes-copious forces arrayed against them. Perhaps there’s more going on here than simply successful conducting—in this opera especially it seems important that the individual human voice is not drowned out, even in the face of death on the impersonal slopes of the Himalayas.
Scheer has refreshing ideas about what a modern libretto can be: all of the characters speak in the language of everyday conversation (when the house lights came back up, my friend turned to me with a shocked expression and said “they used ‘fuck’ in an opera!”). The chorus was more of a mixed bag. They were at their most effective when Scheer allowed them to participate directly in the action of the plot, counting down the minutes until sunset, or speaking directly to the soloists in the fashion of Ancient Greek tragedy. In an opera essentially about the inner emotional worlds of three men in mortal danger, the chorus give the soloists opportunities to answer questions like “Were you scared?” providing an additional and meaningful look into the climbers’ psyches. The chorus was less well-used when they soliloquized in a more high-flown and philosophical lexicon which felt largely out of place amid the generally conversational tone of the libretto. Their pontifications were all the more unnecessary because the libretto demonstrated a real ability to deal with serious issues precisely without waxing overly philosophical. One of the best dramatic moments in the opera was when Beck Weathers sang, in common parlance, about the crushing depression he faced at home, and how only in climbing mountains could he find relief. Sheer deserves credit for recognizing that no grand verbiage is necessary for serious drama or depth. The extremity of the setting, and the mountaineers desperate will to live (captured by Sheer thanks in part, no doubt, to his forty hours of interviews with those associated with the tragedy) do all the work necessary to make Everest the stuff of intense theater.
Welcoming two of the three protagonists to the ranks of the Everest dead at the conclusion of the opera, the chorus sings, “Since 1922, our dreams have been woven from elegies,” a reference to the first abortive attempt by a British-led expedition to climb Everest. Talbot and Sheer’s work, by turns tragic, hopeful, and elegiac, is a deeply thought-out contribution to these dreams.
Aleko, written in two weeks by a nineteen-year-old Rachmaninoff as his final composition exam at the Moscow Conservatory, certainly had a tough act to follow. Despite able performances from the cast and the A&A Ballet, the traditional Romanticism of Rachmaninoff’s score felt more than a little anticlimactic after the exhilarating freshness of Everest. Nonetheless, there were some high points: the duet between Zemfira (Michelle Johnson) and her nameless lover (Andrew Bidlack) contained the most beautiful music of the opera, the hulking Aleko (Alexey Bogdanov) presented an easily loathable villain, and lush passages in the strings throughout the work revealed the man who would soon begin writing his great piano concertos and symphonies. And, if nothing else, COT and Lidiya Yankovskaya deserve credit for bringing a new work to the Chicago stage—though it was written more than a century ago, the work has never before been performed in this city.
COT returns to the stage at the Studebaker Theater in February with the world premiere of Dan Shore’s Freedom Ride, a COT commission.
November 2019