From Seen and Heard International
By: Bernard Jacobson

Vancouver Opera, soloists, cond. John DeMain, dir. Michael Cavanagh, scenic designer Erhard Rom, costume designer Parvin Mirhady, lighting designer Harry Frehner, projections designer Sean Nieuwenhuis, choreographer Wen Wei Wang, sound designer Andrew Tugwell, chorus director Leslie Dala, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 13.3.2009 (BJ)

If Vancouver Opera’s desire was to make a point about the sheer range of the operatic medium, the company could hardly have chosen two more starkly contrasted works than the ones that began its 2009/2010 season. Bellini’s Norma, reviewed here in December, may be called a gem of bel canto art. John Adams’s Nixon in China is a much rougher kind of diamond. This performance constituted the Canadian premiere of the work, which has been seen around the world–and recorded twice–in the 23 years since it was first presented in Houston.

Whatever you or I may think of the work librettist Alice Goodman and composer Adams brought into being, I have no hesitation in calling the Vancouver production superb. With the help of Erhard Rom’s sets, Parvin Mirhady’s costumes, Harry Frehner’s lighting, Sean Nieuwenhuis’s projections, and Wen Wei Wang’s choreography, director Michael Cavanagh has crafted a continuously fascinating visual presentation. The effects range from film-like simulations of Nixon’s airplane landing to a suspended strip of images morphing gradually from Nixon at one end to Mao at the other–a telling comment on the sameness of politicians. The technology is ambitious yet simple, and it all works. (The only small complaint I would level at Cavanagh concerns his adherence to the apparently obligatory directorial disagreement with the normal uses of furniture: at one point in the action Mao wants to sit down–there are four chairs and a table on stage, but, this being opera, he naturally chooses to sit on the table. And the surtitles, though mostly excellent, perpetrate one howler when Kissinger addresses Chou En-lai as “Premiere,” surely an inappropriate questioning of the Chinese prime minister’s sexual identity.)

When I listened recently to the 2008 Colorado recording of Nixon in China conducted by Marin Alsop, long stretches of the vocal writing seemed to me so ungainly that there was not much the singers could do but shout it. Now, in Vancouver, the principals all managed to do some real singing–clearly, sound designer Andrew Tugwell has fulfilled his responsibilities in managing both vocal and instrumental amplification (mandated by the composer) to excellent effect, and conductor John DeMain deserves his share of commendation for keeping the large orchestral and vocal apparatus at once trim, powerful, and lucid.

All six of the principals achieved dramatic and musical results of the highest quality. The first entry of Robert Orth, as Nixon, emerging from Air Force One at the top of the steps, drew an appreciative chuckle from the audience: his exuberant wave to the welcoming committee awakened memories of the real Nixon’s arrogant gesture of supposed triumph when he left Washington in disgrace. Orth is a singing actor of rare subtlety, and he managed to capture both the irrepressible cockiness of the great presidential crook and a touch of the almost sympathetic human weakness that underlay it. Sally Dibblee as Pat, Alan Woodrow as Mao Tse-tung, and Tracy Dahl as the poisonous Madame Mao were no less convincing, and Thomas Hammons simply was Henry Kissinger “to a t” in appearance and demeanor.

But the outstanding portrayal was Chen-Ye Yuan’s Chou-En-Lai. His seductive baritone voice was the only one that managed to extract some personal character from the vocal line, and he made it irresistibly clear that, so far as the opera has a moral center, Chou is that center. When the other politicians were all indulging their egotistic preoccupations in a little dance, he held aloof. It was appropriate, then, that he should have the last word, in a final soliloquy–questioning “How much of what we did was good?”–that is one of the few truly ravishing passages in the work, the voice supported by an exquisite tissue of chamber-musical writing for the orchestra.

All in all, the evening was a triumph for Vancouver Opera. Whether it was a triumph for Nixon in China is a quite other question. I suppose the repetitiousness of the voice parts draws apt attention to the propensity of politicians to say everything several times over. But what they say in this work seems to have little cohesion–aside from what everyone remembers from the momentous event that Nixon’s move to detente undoubtedly was, there really is no story in this opera, or at any rate no operatic story. The vocal writing, again, is non-operatic, in the sense that the characters all sing the same kind of music, lacking the kind of vocal characterization achieved by the great opera composers from Monteverdi, Handel, and Mozart onwards.

Certainly, Adams can sweep his audience up with sheer animal exuberance, in such numbers–the showbiz term seems appropriate–as the eupeptic ensemble that closes Act 1. But for the most part his constant exploitation of progressive rhythmic foreshortening (a sort of simplified version of metrical modulation) has the paradoxical result of making variety sadly predictable. Such writing gives new currency to the oxymoronic phrase, “the same difference”: if everything is different all the time, then really nothing is. And though some of Adams’s rhythmic procedures have led commentators to draw comparisons with Stravinsky, there are many places in the score where the affinity is with a much lesser master–Carl Orff; several passages in Act 2 sound like an unholy amalgam of Carmina Burana with the signature first-movement rhythm of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

In my view, then, Nixon in China is no masterpiece. But if it can bring new audiences, previously indifferent to the art, into the opera house through the technologically savvy treatment of a near-contemporary subject, it has undeniable value, and Vancouver Opera’s production reinforces that potential in the most convincing way possible.