Composer Dylan Mattingly blushed and started crying late Saturday night as he bowed to the world premiere of his opera Stranger Love.
It was understandably an emotional moment. “Stranger Love,” with Thomas Bertscheller, has been in development and piecemeal for over a decade, and is now, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, perhaps the only orchestra capable of it. All songs will be performed by the Los Angeles Orchestra. Philharmonic.
That’s why “Stranger Love” is a six-hour long opera, a serious exercise in deep emotion that captures a sensation and extends it from the personal to the cosmic, where contemporary music is small. Because it’s a big thing in an era that tends to be. It requires a dreamy plan that many educational institutions shy away from, but that’s what the Philharmonic Orchestra is all about.
This distinction is largely credited to Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime administrators, who announced last week that he will be leaving Los Angeles this fall to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The news follows another recent shock with the announcement that Philharmonic superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel will depart for New York in 2026.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic is currently at a tipping point. At stake is the ethos that made this orchestra the kind of orchestra that could invest its ambitions and money into projects like John Cage’s outrageous “Europera” at Sony Studios. Maintain. Symphony-length and all-night regular commissions. And while “Stranger Love” is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” (which is also programmed this season) in its first act alone, it’s marketability is not the only part.
So when Mattingly wept onstage, his triumph was bittersweet, accompanied by a hint of unease about the next phase of the Philharmonic Orchestra. “Omnia mutantur,” someone says in the opera, nodding to Ovid. “Everything changes.” But it’s only natural to want to enjoy more of the Smith and Dudamel era. “Stay in the moment” to “hold back” to pull another line from the show.
Whatever happens, Stranger Love deserves to live on beyond its one-night stand at Disney Hall, hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble Contemporary Us. The most natural fit for New York, where epic avant-garde opera has largely disappeared from early strongholds like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, is the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale productions, Per. Qu Avenue Armory.
If anything, the Armory would be a more appropriate space than Disney Hall.Its vastness can accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional breadth – his score is a no-nonsense way. but Stay immersed in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the questionable, and most of all, the ecstasy.
Like most films of extreme ambition and scale, Stranger Love isn’t perfect. Checking out the names of figures like Ann Carson and Octavio Paz behaves more like creative non-fiction than opera, pulling the audience away from the experience of pure emotion. Some parts of the score are more difficult than they carry, and the second act seems destined to torment any director.
The 80-minute performance, in which the singers are more instrumental than traditional characters, seems to have baffled imaginative and effective director Liliana Blaine-Cruise, but she’s not the only one here and elsewhere. I was not able to completely control the material of In her understated staging, there was a reference to the operatic and sustained art lineage of the work. In Matt Saunders’ scenic design, a tall background (made of threads forming a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projection) was illuminated at one point by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s lighting . Celestial bodies, forced perspective set For “The Magic Flute”. As if quoting “Einstein on the Beach” in the line “This are the days my friends,” Brain-Cruise has two chairs that would have been used in Robert Wilson’s original work “Einstein.” I carry it to someone and let them sit down.
This isn’t the only hint at “Stranger Love,” but it might be the most obvious. Mattingly internalized a wealth of musical styles, including the gamelan-influenced West Coast sound of Lou Harrison. The propulsive rhythms of John Adams. Meredith Monk’s vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy. The three female voices of Holly Zediros, Katherine Bruckman and Eliza Bagg often employ woodwind-like vocalises and may have been plucked from minimalist ensembles.
Mattingly, however, does not cite. Instead, his influence surfaces subtly, abstracted, for example, in rhythmic gestures. After all, the language is entirely his own. His scores often instruct singers to “sound as beautifully as possible”, but his compositions seek pop directness rather than operatic color. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and his three pianos. One in standard tuning, one about a semitone lower, and his one somewhere in between. The microtonal effect in Mattingly’s polyrhythms could be like a chorus of gently melodious wind chimes.
In each scene, Mattingly extends a musical idea with a mantra-like focal point, then subtly transforms it with enjoyment. Bart Scherer’s poetic, slim tale follows the couple of Tasha and André through the seasons. It’s an ambiguous timeline guided more by moods than timelines. Fresh and promising spring. A pleasantly lethargic summer. The sudden change of autumn. A breathtaking glacier winter. This overall narrative is narrated by Uriel, a charismatic Julana Soheristiyo whose otherworldlyness is emphasized in Kay Voice’s costume design, depicting threats from outside (temptation) and threats from within (doubt). Accompanied by two allegorical figures.
David Bloom steered Mattingly’s pitfall-filled score with a sure hand. Occasionally, his hips would feel the urge to groove, but he remained unfazed and precise. Tenor Isaiah Robinson as André had a bright purity that contributed to the score with an egoless instrumental tone similar to soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As a threat from Without Out, Jane Sheldon sang in a bird-like leap reminiscent of Monk’s “Atlas.” Luc Kleiner as a menace from within was more somber, dark and seductive.
Blaine-Cruise’s work features six dancers, and in the first act Tasha and André find each other, unpredictable speed and speed, only coming into focus when they maintain eye contact from across the stage. Made to work with slow, stylized movements. But in the second act, the dancers only tell the story of lovers through Chris Emile’s sickeningly obvious choreography.
Most impressive were the members of Contemporary Us, which Mattingly founded with Bloom while at Bard College. They are familiar with Mattingly’s idiom and are well suited to tackle such a huge and difficult score in one night. Accurate and detailed, yet lively and openly danced, it is as full of personality as any other singer.
They are the protagonists of a purely instrumental third act, repeating earworm phrases for about 20 minutes. As the score ritually unfolds a sort of communal love for the universe, one melody begins to unfold as well, slowly unfolding in the final seconds and finishing before reaching the final note.
And why?
stranger love
Performs at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on Saturday.
