Guy Willoughby review OFTHEWEEK
It is cause for rejoicing that a serious new operatic work by a composer of global reputation receives its premiere in South Africa and even more cause for celebration that the work in question is powerful, dark, and challenging.
Thomas Rajna’s first opera presented by Cape Town Opera and the University of Cape Town’s opera school is a contemporary musical feast, rendered by a formidable bevy of local talents. Amarantha, based on an obscure short story by the equally obscure American writer WD Steele, tells a curious story of repressed desire and longing set in the Deep South of the Depression era. The eponymous heroine is an ill-educated farm girl known to everyone as Mary or “Mare” appropriately, as she isn’t much more than a comfortable unshod dobbin to her peers whose actual name contains poetic ardours and potentialities far beyond the ken of this poor rural community. Amarantha the name a “whim”, we are told, of her father’s is of Greek classical origin and comes down to us as the subject of Sir Richard Lovelace’s graceful cavalier lyric “to Amarantha, that she would dishevel her hair”. The homely Mare hides her oddly splendid handle in some embarrassment until one day she meets, explosively, a man who grasps its history and mythic meaning.
Humble Jewett is a crazed ex-schoolteacher, whose obsessive belief in the power of art and beauty in a prosaic world fixates on the girl with the poetic name. Pursued by the entire county, Jewett takes “Amarantha” on a wild night’s journey of discovery and shatters her mundane world-view for ever.
The story has rich dramatic possibilities, and Rajna tells it with a rare combination of deft economy and great emotional range. His score exposes at the beginning a number of musical themes, broadly suggestive of longing or desire in conflict with darker forces, which are augmented, developed and refined throughout in symphonic rather than classic operatic style.
Eshewing the classical formula of set aria and rectitative, with the orchestra chiefly present as accompaniment to the singers, Rajna makes the vocalists integral components of his musical structure each voice one instrument among many.
Stage action is thus more important than words and the aural balance at the Nico of singers and orchestra is exactly right: neither dominates, both are equally weighted elements of composition. Those who complain of a lack of “hummable tunes” (overheard on opening night) miss the satisfying symphonic richness and complexity of the whole.
The two principal singers grasp Rajna’s intention admirably: Brad Liebl is simply splendid as Humble Jewett, a raging, quavering presence who radiates both the character’s madness and his visionary ardour. Veramarie Meyer is a moving foil for Leibl’s well-judged intensity, bringing the right degree of pathos and vulnerability to the role. Most of the other singers, admittedly in rather thankless smaller parts, lack the experience to ground their parts sufficiently on stage.
The Cape Town Opera Orchestra, conducted with crisp precision by Christopher Dowdeswell, are in vigorous form and the entire performance played against Michael Mitchell’s brooding set is a marvellously layered and subtle musical experience.
Rajna’s haunting interweave of themes is so compelling, it’s a wonder to rise after less than two hours and realise one has travelled an imaginative journey of truly epic proportions. Amarantha deserves to enter the repertoire and not just the South African one either.
This is world-class opera, funded locally, exactly where it should be: right here. Go and see it.
Amarantha is at the Nico Opera House until December 8