<>         'WOZZECK'---THE PLIGHT OF THE PERENNIAL OUTSIDER
                        With New Venues, via a Reduced Orchestration 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Jan. 31-Feb. 7, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 58
           Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” is far more than an anti-military drama rising out of the ashes of World War One. It is a psychodrama of a soldier worn down by all the oppressive forces around him until, almost in a stupor, he is driven to disillusionment, violence and self-destruction. “Wozzeck” remains one of the most depressing operas ever. But the passion and anguish sinks in profoundly, even though  somewhat understated both musically and dramatically, with Wozzeck’s abruptly orphaned child obliviously hip-hopping about the stage at the final curtain.
          The too-long-absent masterwork has come back via an elite local new-music group that has too often been below the Bay Area radar: The  Ensemble Parallèle, the brainchild of conductor Nicole Paiement. It brought down the full house at the Yerba Buena Novellus Theater Jan. 30.
          This imaginative professional production opens up varied venue possibilities for the opera thanks to John Rea’s new chamber-orchestra reduction. We get a thinner, leaner, less dissonant accompaniment of the tightly organized twelve-tone music, with more streamlined chordal and contrapuntal lines that do not pull the punches.
          An outstanding production team carried it off. Large close-up movie projections from media artist Austin Forbord, with exaggerated mouth movements and finger-stabbing by the artists, echoed the silent films in vogue when the opera debuted in 1925. Matthew Antaky’s German-expressionistic/cubistic sets suggested the poverty of Wozzeck’s home, when the child even has to use a mop in lieu of a make-believe hobby-horse. The stage direction of Brian Staufenbiel was especially effective in the crowd scenes, with Wozzeck as the inevitable beat-a-mole victim.
          Staufenbiel drew brilliant acting out of the three male principals, all familiar to Bay Area audiences: the resonant bass-baritone Bojan Knezevic in the near catatonic title role; tenor John Duykers as the Captain; and Bass Philip Skinner as the Doctor. When was the last time you saw an opera where you raved about the acting?
          If some hands strained at the jagged vocal lines, that's not a first for Berg and his 12-tone wonderworld.
          To hear “Wozzeck” in an intimate theater setting at last provides an even tighter focus on the tragedy, foisted on a not-very-bright dogface who is unaware of all the intimidating and even sadistic forces taunting and knocking him down. He is even the guinea pig of the doctor, paid a pittance for following the latter’s nutty brainstorms (“Eat beans---beans!!”).
          Some of the night’s singers struggled with the German libretto, but supertitle projections in English alleviated the pain.
          Of note in the cast was the fine lyric mezzo-soprano of Patricia Green as Wozzeck’s common-law wife Marie, though Green is clearly more at home in concert than in opera.
          The challenge of any “Wozzeck” is to identify with modern audiences, to make real the soldier’s long-ago milieu, and to draw one’s sympathies to the doomed hero. (It is based on a real-life news story of nearly two centuries ago.) In this endeavor the current reprise is largely successful. And perhaps the Ensemble will some day  tackle Berg’s “Lulu,” an even bigger and more challenging enterprise, with an opening scene set in a circus ring (!).
          The Ensemble Parallèle is resident at the S.F. Conservatory of Music, where Paiement conducts.
            Berg’s opera “Wozzeck,” with a new chamber-orchestra reduction, 110 minutes without intermission, through Jan. 31. Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Gardens, S.F. For info: (415) 978-2787  or go online.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2010
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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 books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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