A VIEW FROM THE  BLOOD-RED FOUNTAIN  
                                              By Paul Hertelendy
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
                                                                 Week of Jan. 6-13, 2005
                                                                  Vol. 8, No. 6
          SANTA FE, NM---The Santa Fe  Opera season, always one of the summer highlights
in the western states, produced a touching drama on the life and death of the Spanish poet Federico
Garcia Lorca, ”Ainadamar” (2004.) The multiple overlays of scenes and personae provide a
dream-fantasy view of the poet, whose execution marked an overtly  political move that wiped out
one of the century’s important  literary giants at the age of 38.
       The work is unorthodox dramatically, with the chronological hopscotch common to
today’s theater. But it proved traditional enough in musical language to go down digestibly with the sell-out audience
here, which responded warmly at the July 30 opening night. It runs only 75 minutes (no intermission),
about 10 minutes longer than the original semi-staged concert version at Tanglewood last year,
thanks to substantial rewriting and editing, and a thoroughly redone finale.
        The Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, one of the notables in the genre active in America
these days, has muted some of his characteristic experimental  style,
reverting to more traditional Spanish norms with guitar solos, flamenco touches,
some gentle jazz sequences, and a vivacious Cuban segment as well. Golijov, who also  translated the libretto
by David Henry Hwang into Spanish, made extensive use  of cadential refrains and a vehement
group of women’s choristers.        
        Golijov’s great musical gift is to win our sympathies to the ill-fated poet, first through the passionate
laments recalling Greek choruses, and later through exquisite lyricism.    
        This is a piece that stays with you like a dark tattoo, lingering in memory long after you get back
home again. It must rank among the SFO’s most successful of its annual modern operas, It is appealing in its
story-telling, its eclectic music, its compact construction, and itgs real-world relevance. The
appearance of this opera precisely when real-life personal freedoms in America are being curtailed
is no surprise to any one remembering the historical play about Salem’s witch hysteria, “The
Crucible,” which appeared a half-century ago right after the Joe McCarthy political witch-hunts.
            The prologue is one of the most pulse-quickening in modern opera. It uses a prerecorded track of
jumpy trumpets and encoraching horses on cobblestones, transforming quite magically into live
castanets in the orchestra.
          Golijov writes very sympathetically for the voices, though exploiting the higher registers in the
more passionate outbreaks. 
	Garcia Lorca had been gay, left-leaning, and given to glorifying an anti-establishment  protest figure 
of a century earlier, Mariana Pineda, whom the Spanish king had quite cruelly ordered executed by 
garroting. This made him a marked man in the early part of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, resulting in 
his being taken out to Granada’s great fountain Ainadamar by some Falangist soldiers and summarily 
shot. Water naturally becomes a recurrent metaphor, both in theme and in sound.  
        Through flash-forwards and flashbacks, the story is told through three  figures: The poet’s 
actress-collaborator Margarita, her student Nuria (Jessica Rivera), and the poet.  
One of the brilliant touches was portraying Garcia Lorca through an entirely androgynous figure, 
played by a mezzo-soprano (Kelley O'Connor). The close interaction between the threesome in scenes 
both joyous and tragic played out exquisitely, a result of the unusually extended rehearsal time that Santa Fe 
can devote to movement. One only wished that the ill-cooredinated "Greek" chorus had half as much 
practice time as it needed.
	Soprano Upshaw (Margarita) was the lead, able to sing in every position and movement sequence 
(in an excellent Spanish) while conveying the reaction to the poet. Upshaw remains a marvel in this genre, one of the favorite collaborators 
of Stage Director Peter Sellars, who could make even the ludicrous replays and replays of the execution seem 
downright dramatic. 
				The Problem of Vocal Amplification 
	Unfortunately, the voices were miked and amplified, making any in-depth analysis rather worthless. 
The miking was done unbeknownst to the working critics at the opener, but confirmed subsequently by 
the SFO press department, which stated it to be the wish of the composer. 
	This semi-surreptitious practice---nowhere mentioned in the program book or the supertitles---
seriously undermines vocal efforts of fine singers in other operas who did not use mikes, Susan Graham, 
to give one example. With selective miking, opera is no longer a level playing field. And those with the mikes 
emerge with a large marketing advantage over those who do not.
	The orchestra under conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya made itself felt, part of a substantial personnel 
turnover since the arrival of the new Music Director, Alan Gilbert.
	 The set design---a single set of big enclosures---was wildly colorful in abstract designs, created 
by the one-name man called Gronk.
				Contemporary Opera Catching On 
	Asked about the remarkable growth of the modern-opera audience at the SFO,   requiring six performances now 
versus only three in the relatively recent past, Executive Director Richard Gaddes explained, "When the 
audiences find  themes they consider relevant, they turn out in numbers. But if we did a modern opera on, 
say, yet another ancient-mythology theme, well..." His voice trailing off said it all. 
         ”Ainadamar,” a new opera by Osvaldo Golijov, in Spanish, at the Santa Fe (NM) Opera. For
info: (800) 280-4654, or go online.         
	©Paul Hertelendy 2005
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        Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists, books (by authors of the region) and theater as well.
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