Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995 TAG: 9505190018
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Tonight's world premiere of her opera, "Travels," is mere days away, but the show is lacking one little item: sheet music for the orchestra. You don't need to remind Bond that the average opera orchestra needs more than hand signals to get the job done.
Trouble is, her regular music copyist was overwhelmed by 656 crammed pages of orchestra score and the job had to be farmed out to free-lancers. At this moment, dozens of copyists in New York City are getting serious writer's cramp as they transcribe page upon page of musical notes, dynamic markings, phrase lines and the scores of arcane symbols that a composer uses to communicate with the people who translate her ideas into actual music.
Every few minutes the phone rings with questions from frazzled copyists. Federal Express messengers stream to the door with parcels of copy, a few pages at a time, throughout the day.
This one is coming down to the wire.
\ Tonight's Opera Roanoke production of "Travels" in Olin Hall at Roanoke College will be former Roanoke Symphony Orchestra music director Victoria Bond's swan song in the Roanoke Valley. It's a project she's been involved in, one way or another, for nine years.
Based on - Bond's librettist strongly prefers the phrase "suggested by" - Jonathan Swift's scathing 1726 satire, "Gulliver's Travels," the two-act opera features a chamber-sized orchestra and a title role created especially for Opera Roanoke fave Nicholas Loren.
It's the second opera Bond has crafted from Swift's lacerating tale of Lemuel Gulliver's voyages to strange lands. A1988 Louisville, Ky. workshop production was "too literal," she says, and she was dissatisfied with it.
This time, though, she thinks she has it right.
"It really holds together," she said. "We had the first run-through last week (with rehearsal pianist James Bryant) and everybody is really pleased with the overall shape. The two acts are almost symmetrical, with three scenes in each act and each scene with its parallel in the other act."
The composer's collaborator is Blacksburg novelist Ann Goethe, who says she wasn't content merely to polish up an earlier libretto and suggested to Bond that they start from scratch.
"It's a completely contemporary setting, and I told her jokingly that it's because she had no idea how hard it is to get horses on stage," said Goethe. (Swift's Houyhnhnms were rational, virtuous horses.)
"I did it like this if only because I was too superficial to be able to relate to Swift's work, which I think is brilliant but which I think would play as well to today's audiences as running 'Laugh-In' would to audiences of 200 years ago," said the novelist.
After brainstorming with Bond on what kinds of places a modern-day Gulliver might visit, Goethe came up with four different "lands" that the protagonist Gull would explore in his attempt to discover his true identity.
After fleeing from his sweetheart, brother, mother and authoritarian father, Gull comes to Carnival Vita, which Goethe describes as "a very Latin culture where everybody's having a really good time, with a subtext going on where people are not."
In this land, as in all the others Gull visits, he encounters archetypal characters who are essentially incarnations of the family and girlfriend he left behind. Each archetype is represented by a characteristic melodic idea which recurs in every scene, a technique used by composers as different as Richard Wagner and Stephen Sondheim.
("I always have Sondheim in the back of my mind - and in the front of my mind. And a lot of Verdi and a lot of Mozart; those are my icons," said Bond.)
Gull next arrives in the crassly materialist Coming Soon Kingdom, where thinly disguised stand-ins for Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker rule over a tacky televangelist kingdom whose subjects take Gull to be the messiah.
"Loaves and fishes, cars and yachts, know God's love by what you've got," sings the chorus in this land.
In the second act Gull searches for fulfillment in the Gym of the Golden Calf, where the narcissistic inhabitants are obsessed by the quest for the perfect body. And in the Laboratory for the Re-Design of the Mind, the theme is "better living through chemistry," said Goethe, who was inspired by current controversies over mind- and disposition-altering drugs like Prozac.
Gull finally sees a vision of perfection in the Peaceable Kingdom, only to discover it is beyond his reach. When he finally returns home, Gull discovers both self-knowledge and a surprise ending to his quest.
Goethe compared her role as librettist to a biological parent who signs away her child at birth. At rehearsals, she said, "I can spy on the child and see what the adoptive parents are doing, but I don't have any real say...I can't say the child's bedtime is 8, it can't have dessert because it hasn't finished its vegetables, it has to read this set of books."
Baritone Nicholas Loren, who comes to "Travels" after receiving a standing ovation in Carnegie Hall recently, said he has six big arias in the opera, each one more "emotionally pungent" than the last.
"The last two are really hit tunes. The audience should leave humming," said Loren, who is the most popular singer Opera Roanoke has ever signed.
"I think I'm probably offstage all of 15 minutes all night. There's a high entertainment factor and lots of entertaining divertissement."
Loren is joined by soprano Diana Walker as Gull's sweetheart, bass-baritone Robert Osborne as his father, mezzo-soprano Margaret Lisi as his mother, and tenor Dean Anthony as his brother.
The director is Jonathan Arak, who did Opera Roanoke's 1992 production of "Sweeney Todd." Sets are by Frank Ludwig, with choreography by Carol Crawford Smith of Blacksburg's Ujima dance troupe.
'TRAVELS': A production of Opera Roanoke in Olin Hall at Roanoke College. Opens tonight at 8. Additional performances Saturday and Monday at 8 p.m. Seats are still available for all performances, though tonight's premiere is nearing a sellout. General admission $22 and $25; students $12 and $16; seniors $20 and $23. 982-2842.|
Memo: ***CORRECTION***