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Karla Cornejo (Music TRaC, Spring 06) Karla Reviews Cassandre at Carnegie Hall  So, which came first -- the music or the misery? For die-hard music fans and lyric enthusiasts, the question is a perennial favorite. For audience members of Cassandre, the concert performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Zankel Hall on Friday, March 31, the question was an outright dilemma. Cassandre is the story of the Trojan princess by the same name, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, who lived through the Trojan War. Cassandre was a woman of such ravishing beauty that the Olympus-dwelling god Apollo fell madly in love with her (unrequited) and granted her the gift of prophesy. She refused him, and was cursed with the ability to see into the future. She would be able to foretell it, but would never be believed. True to Apollo's words, she foresaw the fall of Troy, the murder of her family, and ultimately, her own rape and murder. Prior to the performance, you could see all the instruments sitting on the stage, quietly but menacingly. If you flicked through the program notes, however, you would see the reciter (in this case, Barbara Sukowa, as Cassandre) listed under "scoring," right next to flute, oboe, clarinet, base, bassoon, contrabassoon, horns, trumpet, trombone, percussion, piano, electronic synthesizers and strings. Try to find the odd one out. Sukowa, with her towering voice and shock of abundant yellow hair, was also listed below David Robertson, musical director and conductor. It was inevitable, therefore, for conflict to ensue. Sukowa, both an actor and a singer, was sandwiched between participating in what seemed like a theater production and a concert, and had to decide whether to be a musical instrument or a star. But maybe this was intentional. The New Yorker's Alex Ross dubbed David Robertson "the Evangelist" and said that a "part of Robertson's St. Louis strategy is to place music side by side with visual works." A large screen behind the stage seemed to be more like a prop than anything else, and with so much going on onstage, you could easily feel the state of confusion Cassandre must have experienced before coming to terms with her curse (if ever). But if Cassandre was a spoken opera, her words were the lyrics. All 65 minutes of 'lyrics' sounded like little more than Cassandre having a nervous breakdown and asking us to pity her. Hmm. That's sure one hell of a song. Cassandre, her eyes glistening and he voice roaring, related her woes, and in the beginning, the audience cared. We felt sympathy for her and horror for the first, say, 25 minutes, but when every word details something explosive, the ability to evoke emotion becomes watered down. The words turn stale and came crashing down. So Cassandre was sad. The orchestra's music seemed more like background music, but unlike anything you'd listen to on your quest to find a pair of jeans that actually fit (definitely not that sort of ambient music), it was memorable. When recreating her conversation with her father, Cassandre seems to be in an alternate state of consciousness, but that's a pretty difficult thing to convey when you have musicians behind you, taking in deep breaths, smiling quietly, stealing glances at you, turning pages of their music notes not loudly but definitely audibly (essentially breaking character), having two performances occurring at the same time can only be distracting. If both are competing for the audience's attention, it's a non-zero sum situation. One performance will win. And one will lose. I shan't be the one to choose, though. while both performances were synchronized nicely, it still seemed forced. I did have a clear favorite though. Cassandre is bathedÑ- or rather inundated in -- a white light that doesn't quite manage to look ethereal. The lighting only emphasized her pallor. Cassandra looked less and less like the cursed beauty Greek mythology intended her to be, and more and more like Glenn Close circa Fatal Attraction. The musicians behind her looked yellow. It didn't matter if the musicians looked the part, though. The French horn bellowed when Cassandra was outraged, announcing her troubles to the world. The contrabassoon's vibrating moans paralleled Cassandra's own, and the high-pitched shrills of the oboe rivaled those of Sukowa. Trigger words like the "nape of her neck" would give way to an influx of smooth violin sounds, thick and milky. And -- my cup runneth over -- any mention of Achilles prompted an almost musical epithet, led by music that was salty, poppy and heroic. Perhaps it would have been different if the audience had been allowed to feel the desired range of emotions for themselves, and not had every conceivable adjective for "horror" shoved down their throats. Even spoken lines like "anyone who doesn't side with us now is against us" seemed to be politically charged. Of course they had a right to be, but in a time where parallels to the Bush administration have become common in popular culture, claiming that you "can't win a war against a phantom" seem frail and fuzzy. So, which came first? The orchestra's music or Cassandre's misery? The true question, is not which came first, but whether the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra's decision to allow both to coexist in one stage, with one audience whose members had only one pair of ears and one pair of eyes each, was a wise one. Perhaps the performance was full of too many conflicting edges to allow me to come up with just one clear answer. |