ART

Opera's subject: trio of artists from pre-WWI Eastern Europe

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Composer Jason Hoogerhyde will be the first to tell you it was intimidating to think about writing and producing an opera about three seminal artists - Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, German artist Gabriele Münter and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg - whose work and collaborative ideas had a seismic impact on culture in the early 20th century and still reverberates today.

"It's difficult for a composer to write an opera about a composer," Hoogerhyde says.

But Hoogerhyde did. He collaborated with his colleagues, theater artist Sergio Costola and art historian Kim Smith, and this weekend "The Color of Dissonance" will get its premiere at Southwestern University, where all three are on the faculty.

The opera follows the ideas of Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg during the brief period when their lives intersected. On the eve of World War I, the trio together developed new artistic theories, advocating an intuitive, spontaneous approach to art, not an intellectual one. They espoused abstraction and a break from realism. They published treatises and organized exhibits and concerts. And while World War I put an end to their collaboration, their avant-garde ideas of abstraction continued, shaping the course of the arts.

"These artists moved from a common artistic language to a pluralistic language," Hoogerhyde says. "They were interested at looking inward, rather than at the external world. And we're still feeling the ramifications of that today."

Perhaps it's serendipity then that it took such a contemporary collaboration to create a multimedia-laced opera about such pluralistic personalities as Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg. "The Color of Dissonance" involves a nearly 100-member cast of singers, dancers and actors and live continuously changing digital projections of about 7,000 images.

Perhaps it wasn't really serendipity. When the leaders at Southwestern University's Sarofim School of the Arts went looking for a production to celebrate the renovation of the school's Alma Thomas Theater, they wanted something that would incorporate all the artistic disciplines.

Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg seemed a natural focus to the trio of Southwestern faculty. "The were trying to create a new art and in turn change society," Costola says. "And they sought to involve the body, mind and spirit to create that conflict between the individual personality and society."

Hoogerhyde, Costola and Smith collaborated on the libretto of "The Color of Dissonance" using text culled from the correspondence and writings of Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg. The approximately 100-minute opera is divided into five scenes, each focusing on a single important moment when the lives of three artists intersected.

Each of the roles is triple cast with a singer, a dancer and an actor portraying Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg, usually with the three embodiments of each character on stage at the same time. Southwestern vocal faculty members sing the leads; baritones Bruce Cain and Oliver Worthington and mezzo-soprano Carol Kreuscher. Southwestern student round out the cast while the orchestra is a mix of students and faculty.

Costola and his crew mined Kandinsky's and Münter's paintings, Schoenberg's hand-written musical scores as well as historic film footage and photographs to assemble a vast collection of images that make for the bulk of the production's visual setting. Advanced software allows five images to be projected at once with some just alighting on a dancers body or on one portion of the large backdrop screen.

For his part, Hoogerhyde didn't want to borrow from Schönberg's very specific atonal style.

"The music is really my own neo-tonal language, but it involves a lot of quotations from and homage to Schoeberg," says Hoogerhyde. "It wouldn't have been right to imitate (someone else)."

Surely, the highly individualistic Kandinsky, Münter and Schoenberg would have no doubt agreed.

jvanryzin@statesman.com;445-3699

'The Color of Dissonance'

When: 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Alma Thomas Theater, Southwestern University, 1001 University Ave., Georgetown

Cost: $15 ($12 seniors, $10 students and youths)

Information: 512-863-1378, www.southwestern.edu/boxoffice