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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2011 > April > 14 > Entry
Review: Austin Lyric Opera’s ‘Flight’
Charming and thoroughly modern, Jonathan Dove’s opera “Flight” made a grace landing last weekend at the Long Center in its Austin Lyric Opera production.
And it was easy to grasp why Dove’s opera is a veritable hit on the contemporary opera landscape. (It’s been performed nearly 100 times.) With and appealing score, “Flight” tells the strange but engaging story of a group of travelers stuck in an airport for a night, an experience made all the more surreal by the presence of an undocumented refugee trapped in a kind of stateless suspension.
Dove’s atmospheric music — which must convey everything from a plane landing to the birth of a baby — smartly entwines a panoply of styles from a pleasantly pure brand of minimalism to stylish contemporary tonalities. And conductor Richard Buckley deftly handled it.
April de Angelis’s cleverly rhymed libretto is part modern poem, part snappily timed comedy patter.
But the real treat came from the solid singing throughout the chorus-less cast. Indeed some of the best musical moments were the ensemble singing.
As the the refugee, Nicholas Zammit’s sparking countertenot added and otherworldliness to the already ethereal role. And as the stiff and cool Controller who stays above (literally) the fray of the travelers’ farcical goings-on, soprano Nili Riemer elicited gasps of admiration from the audience Saturday when she effortlessly leapt to a high F in her first solo.
A comedic but thoughtful operatic portrait of life’s transitions, this “Flight” soars.
“Flight” contineus 7:30 p.m. Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday at the Long Center. www.austinlyricopera.org.
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