Composer Dylan Mattingly’s cheeks turned red and he put a hand over his eyes as he began to cry late Saturday night during the bows for the world premiere of his opera ‘Stranger Love’.
It was an understandably emotional moment. Created with Thomas Bartscherer, “Stranger Love”, which had been in development for over a decade and was performed piecemeal, was now presented in its entirety at the Walt Disney Concert Hall by perhaps the only orchestra that could do it: the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
That’s because “Stranger Love” is a six-hour opera, a serious exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, growing big at a time when contemporary music tends to get small. It requires the kind of dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been a hallmark of the Philharmonic.
Thanks in large part to the work of Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime trustees, who said last week he would be leaving Los Angeles for the Boston Symphony Orchestra this fall. That news followed another recent blow: the announcement that the Philharmonic’s superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would be leaving for New York in 2026.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now at a turning point. At stake is the preservation of an ethos that has made this orchestra the kind that can put its ambition and deep pockets into projects like John Cage’s outrageous ‘Europeras’ at Sony Studios; regular commissions to the length of symphonies and full evenings; and “Stranger Love,” whose first act alone is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (also programmed this season), but which has not a fraction of its marketability.
So, as Mattingly wept onstage, his triumph felt bittersweet, with a tinge of dread for the Philharmonic’s next phase. “Omnia mutantur”, says someone in the opera, nodding to Ovid: Everything changes. But it’s also natural to want more from the Smith-Dudamel era — to “stay awhile” and “linger in this moment,” to pull another line from the show.
Whatever happens, “Stranger Love” deserves a life after its one-off run at Disney Hall, which was hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble, Contemporaneous. The most natural fit in New York, where epic avant-garde opera has all but disappeared from earlier bastions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, would be the Park Avenue Armory, the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale work .
If anything, the Armory would be a more suitable space than Disney Hall, as its vastness is able to accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional sprawl – as his score does nothing But linger, luxuriating in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the questionable, and especially the ecstatic.
Like most works of extreme ambition and scope, “Stranger Love” isn’t perfect. When it checks out names like Anne Carson and Octavio Paz, it behaves more like creative non-fiction than opera, drawing its audience away from an experience of pure feeling. Some parts of the score are more challenging than transporting, and the second act seems destined to haunt any director.
That 80-minute act — in which singers exist more as instrumentalists than traditional characters — seems to have dumbfounded Lileana Blain-Cruz, a resourceful, effective director who didn’t have complete control over the material here, or much elsewhere. . There were references, in its modest staging, to the work’s line of opera and enduring art. In Matt Saunders’ scenic design, a high backdrop (made of wires that formed a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projections) was at one point illuminated with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s celestial, forced perspective set for “The Magic Flute.” As if playing off an “Einstein on the Beach” reference in the line “These are the days my friends,” Blain-Cruz has two people carry and sit in chairs that could have been used in Robert’s original “Einstein” production. Wilson.
That’s far from the only tip of the hat in “Stranger Love,” but it’s arguably the most explicit. Mattingly has mastered a wealth of musical styles: the gamelan-influenced West Coast sounds of Lou Harrison; the propulsive cadences of John Adams; the vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy of Meredith Monk. Three female voices – Holly Sedillos, Catherine Brookman and Eliza Bagg, who often use woodwind-like vocalise – could have been extracted from a minimalist ensemble.
But Mattingly does not quote. Instead, his influences surface subtly, abstracted in, for example, a rhythmic gesture. Ultimately, the language is all his own. While his score often instructs singers to “sound as beautiful as possible,” his writing calls for the immediacy of pop rather than an operatic hue. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and three pianos: one standard tuning, one about a semitone lower, the other in between. The microtonal effect, in Mattingly’s polyrhythm, may be that of a gently melodious chorus of wind chimes.
In each scene, Mattingly extends a musical idea with mantra-like focus, enjoying and subtly transforming. Bartscherer’s poetic and sleek story follows a couple, Tasha and Andre, through the seasons, a vague timeline guided more by mood than chronology: fresh, auspicious spring; pleasantly lethargic summer; suddenly shifting autumn; stifling frosty winter. This general arc is narrated by Uriel – a charismatic Julyana Soelistyo, whose alien character is emphasized in Kaye Voyce’s costume design – and accompanied by two allegorical figures, Threat from Outside (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt).
David Bloom conducted Mattingly’s pitfall-ridden score with a sure hand. Occasionally his hips betrayed an urge to groove, but even then he remained imperturbably precise. As Andre, the tenor Isaiah Robinson had a clear purity that served the score with an egoless instrumental timbre similar to soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As the outside threat, Jane Sheldon sang with birdlike leaps reminiscent of Monk’s ‘Atlas’; Luc Kleiner, as the threat from within, was more somber and darkly seductive.
The Blain-Cruz production featured six dancers, who are forced to behave in act one with unpredictably fast and slow stylized movements that only come into focus when Tasha and Andre see each other and maintain eye contact from across the stage. stage. But in act two, the dancers merely tell the lovers’ story through Chris Emile’s exhaustingly obvious choreography.
Most impressive were the members of Contemporaneous, which Mattingly co-founded with Bloom when they were students at Bard College. These are players well versed in Mattingly’s idiom, and well suited to take on such an immense, difficult score for one evening: precise and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing, as full of personality as any singer.
They are the stars of the purely instrumental third act, in which versions of earwig phrases are repeated for about 20 minutes. While the score ritually extends a kind of mutual love to the cosmos, a melody also begins to spread, until it slowly unfolds in the last seconds and ends before the last note is reached.
And why would it? When something is so special, you just want to linger in the moment.
Stranger love
Performed Saturdays at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.
