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Music Review

Who Killed This Woman’s Lover? And Other Elusive Operatic Issues

"Monodramas," New York City Opera’s bill of three one-act works at the David H. Koch Theater, includes “Erwartung,” with the soprano Kara Shay Thomson as a woman searching for her lover.Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

There was encouraging evidence on Friday night that the struggling New York City Opera is making smart moves and continuing to rebound. It was the premiere of “Monodramas,” a triple bill of one-act works that are not operas in any traditional sense. Before the performance so many ticket buyers, including noticeable numbers of young people, were lined up in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater waiting to get inside that the curtain had to be delayed more than 20 minutes to accommodate them.

As presented here, in a surreal and visually beautiful production by Michael Counts, these strange and strikingly diverse monodramas, each a monologue for soprano and orchestra, made for an engrossing evening of musical drama. Under its general manager and artistic director, George Steel, City Opera has done a good job of building interest in this adventurous presentation.

In approaching “Monodramas” it is best to switch off the part of your brain that needs to know what an opera is about. The program begins with John Zorn’s volatile 10-minute “Machine de l’Être” (“Machine of Being,” 2000), textless as well as plotless. The longest work, at nearly 60 minutes, comes last: Morton Feldman’s gurgling, murky and haunting “Neither” (1976-77), his musical rendering of an elusive 87-word text by Beckett.

Compared with those two works, Schoenberg’s 30-minute “Erwartung” (“Waiting,” 1909), with a text by Marie Pappenheim, may at first seem a cogent story. A woman prowls a forest on a warm evening searching for her lover and finds him dead. But with its nightmarish music and harrowing text, is “Erwartung” a dream? Has anything the woman describes actually happened?

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From “Monodramas”: Cyndia Sieden in Morton Feldman's “Neither”Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

Mr. Zorn has long been a hero of the downtown contemporary-music scene, a rebel who willfully combines, tweaks and otherwise appropriates into his brash, audacious pieces whatever kind of music suits him. In a recent interview with The New York Times he expressed surprise at finding himself, at 57, courted by an uptown company at Lincoln Center. But “La Machine de l’Être” comes across here as an uptown score, pulsing with fits of astringent atonality, fidgety contrapuntal writing and boisterous percussion, over which the soprano must sing all manner of “ah” sounds, flitting from melodic fragments to orgasmic outbursts. The excellent Finnish soprano Anu Komsi threw herself into the music. The conductor George Manahan led a colorful and bruising performance.

But what is going on? Mr. Counts, a visual artist as well as a stage director, provides some guidance in the surreal production he has created with the choreographer Ken Roht and the costume designer Jessica Jahn — like Mr. Counts, making their City Opera debuts — and the lighting designer Robert Wierzel.

Before the curtain goes up a young man and young woman, both in tuxedos, stare with sometimes vacant, sometimes glowering looks at the audience. When the piece begins, the pair become like severe masters of ceremony, wandering between rows of silent people wearing full-body robes like the traditional garb of Muslim women. But as the hosts remove garments from some of the robed people, you learn of their secret lives, in a sense. There is a woman in a short slip, who could pass for Alban Berg’s Lulu; a man in a red suit, who is soon lifted off the ground on wires; and an assortment of other motley types. In a playful touch, huge flat set pieces pop up, looking like speech balloons in cartoons. Yet no words appear: just Miró-like images. Through the abstraction onstage comes the intense performance of Ms. Komsi, who was riveting on Friday.

To set its mood “Erwartung” begins with the recorded sound of crickets, birds and brooks. But when Schoenberg’s softly simmering orchestral music starts, the forest is quickly established as a mysterious and dangerous place. Leaves fall on the protagonist, who, wearing a creamy summer dress, says that she is searching for her lover. What has happened to him? From the first phrases sung by Kara Shay Thomson, a compelling American soprano with a plush, vibrant, powerful voice, you do not know whether to pity or fear her.

Silent sisterly characters follow the woman and tend to her as she tells of tripping on a dead body that turns out to be a fallen tree and confides details of her husband’s supposed infidelity. All through the piece the body of a man in a gray suit with a knife in his chest is sprawled onstage. When the horrified woman discovers this body and recognizes her lover, the man rises, as if to dance with her.

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Anu Komsi in John Zorn's “Machine de l'Être.”Credit...Richard Perry/The New York Times

So did he wander off and get killed? Did the crazed woman kill him in vengeance? Did any of this happen? You hear all possibilities in Schoenberg’s ambiguous, anguished and lyrically rapturous atonal music. Mr. Manahan conducted with visceral sweep; Ms. Thomson was marvelous.

The second line of the “Neither” libretto — “from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither” — conveys the mix of what seems to be acute observation and complete uncertainty in Beckett’s phrases. Yet Feldman savors every word of this text in his elemental and obsessively repetitive music. The soprano must deliver the words in syllabic utterances, often on high sustained notes that hover above the staff, making it almost impossible for the text to be clear. The soprano Cyndia Sieden was dazzling here, singing with uncanny focus, impressive stamina and ethereal beauty.

The orchestral music in the first part of the work gurgles at an almost timeless pace: a primordial pool of heaving chords and twisted strands of notes. At one point the soprano becomes fixated on a rhythmically steady nine-note melodic line, a phrase the orchestra picks up and churns out, over and over.

To stage this piece Mr. Counts and his team have created a room that looks like a cosmic disco hall with glittering walls and rotating mirrored cubes dangling on wires, illuminated with a riot of colored lights. Silent characters people the stage, including a man who flies up into the wings.

Mr. Manahan and the orchestra gave a mesmerizing account of this fiercely original music. Ms. Sieden was a wonder.

“Monodramas” runs through April 8 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500, nycopera.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Killed This Woman’s Lover? And Other Elusive Operatic Issues. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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