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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > April > 05 > Entry
Review: “The Color of Dissonance”
Art about art is tricky territory. And while creative collaborations often result in a rich pluralist end product, sometime too many divergent artistic enthusiasms can clutter.
Clutter seemed to muddle “The Color of Dissonance,” an ambitious new opera with music by Jason Hoogerhyde which premiered Friday for a three-performance run at Southwestern University’s Alma Thomas Theatre.
With a libretto by Hoogerhyde, Sergio Costola and Kimberly Smith, “The Color of Dissonance” turned its lens on a seminal moment of cultural history: the birth of modernism. As this story used the pre-World War I friendship of painters Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Munter and Arnold Schoenberg as means to examine the radical break modernism made, from realism to abstraction, pretty tonal melodies to harsh dissonances.
Unfortunately, such a heady intellectual topic was never quite realized into compelling theater.
To be sure, Southwestern University deserves kudos for commissioning its faculty— of which Hoogerhyde, Costola and Smith belong — to create a such an ambitious production.
And what a production.
Kandinsky, Munter and Schoenberg were each played by a singer, an actor and a dancer, the cast clad in all-white fin-de-siecle period garb. Thousands of images — from Kandinsky’s paintings to Schoenberg’s scores to glorious early cinema and period newsreels — were projected onto the screen backdrop or sometimes cast onto individual canvases or other surface. A chorus sang from offstage after parading through the audience at the start.
More a singspiel, with arias interspersed by spoken monologue, “Dissonance” found the three characters hardly interacting so much as remaining isolated figures addressing the audience in monologues or arias. And that made for a very static, sometimes wooden progression.
iIn and around the singers and actors, the dancers wove. But their presence, and the overly-stylized choreography, distracted.
As Kandinsky, baritone Oliver Worthington was a standout, his tone expressive and colorful. Indeed he seemed poised to bring more dramatic depth to role, if only that had been part of the theatrical direction.
Unfortunately, it was not.
Really, one wanted ultimately much more of Hoogerhyde’s rich yet ethereal music. Hoogerghyde’s delicate, thoughtful tonal dramas was where this opera’s emotional force lay.
Only the media design, by Duncan Alexander, had as much impact and complexity as the score. Far beyond a typical kaleidoscopic montage, the churning story written by the images and footage offered the only true dramatic foil to Hoogerhyde’s music.
After all, just because some collaboration is good, doesn’t always mean more is better.
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By Ellen Davis
April 6, 2009 8:46 AM | Link to this
I attended this performance not expecting to like it since I don’t really care for either modern art or modern opera. However, I really enjoyed it. I particularly liked the social commentary that was woven to the piece about our materialistic society, the way women were treated in the early 1900s, etc. And the technical aspects of the performance were incredible - like nothing I had ever seen before. And they pulled it off flawlessly.