A review of the 1997 Newband performance of Harry Partch's King Oedipus. Originally appeared on the Corporeal Meadows website.
We'll likely have to wait at least another 43 years to see Partch at the opera house; in the meantime we have Partch's Oedipus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or had, since the performance was for one night only. It wasn't quite a sellout crowd, but I saw few empty seats in the museum's Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium. Publicity was minimal, but people have a way of coming out of the woodwork for Partch events.
This was the premiere of Partch's final (1967) version of the work. The first (1951) used the Yeats translation of Sophocles' text; a recording was made but the Yeats estate withheld permission to release it; Partch then rewrote the work, using his own text and changing a lot of the music. A recording of this second version was released in 1954 on the Gate 5 label. The final revision was much less extensive, consisting of minor changes in orchestration, as well as some editing.
Since the work hasn't been performed since, comparison with the 1954 recording is inevitable. Partch himself played the roles of Tiresias and the Herdsman in that performance. A treat we couldn't hope for here; on the other hand, to see the work as well as hear it was worth a lot. The performance was billed as a concert version, which had made me somewhat apprehensive: I half-expected the cast to be standing in a row behind music stands. As a matter of fact, the actors did all carry scores or scripts, but the work was nevertheless staged as a play, with props, masks, blocking and even some choreography. The staging was by Tom O'Horgan, who directed the 1991 production of The Wayward, and was simple but effective.
The instrumental ensemble and chorus were admirable; there was a fullness and detail that no recording, let alone a forty-three-year-old one, could match; the orchestration, mixing a dozen Partch instruments with a half-dozen conventional ones, filled the good-sized hall apparently without amplification, and the beat from the Marimba Eroica, an instrument originally designed for this work, had its intended pit-of-the-stomach effect at climaxes.
Dramatically the production could be described as strong but half-finished. The bulk of rehearsal obviously went into getting the music right. The purely spoken parts of the play were a bit rough, with a certain lack of vocal nuance and some mis-spoken lines, as would be expected from actors who are still reading from scripts. None of this seriously compromised the overall effect. The only really serious weaknesses were in those parts where speech and music were supposed to merge as one, as described by Partch in his notes for the work:
"...in critical dialogue, music enters almost insidiously, as tensions enter. The words of the players continue as before, spoken, not sung, but are a harmonic part of the music."
One of the most impressive things about the 1954 recording, and particularly Allan Louw's performance in the role of Oedipus, was how strictly this prescription was followed: I could never tell, until I was finally able to see the score, exactly which parts of Oedipus' speeches were set to precise pitches and which were not, so perfect was the continuity between them. The Oedipus in this production, Joe Garcia, had a powerful delivery and acted his role well, but it was always abundantly clear when a passage was being "intoned" rather than spoken: he would switch into his "singing" mode and intelligibility would go right out the window. And the same went, to varying degrees, for the other actors who were required to both speak and intone. This gave the intoned parts of the play that operatic quality that was pretty much everything Partch wanted to avoid, though it was not always completely avoided even in productions in which he himself had a part. The problem here was not that the "singing" roles (Oedipus, Jocasta, Tiresias) were filled by performers whose training was in opera - Partch often had to contend with that too, and opera-trained singers do have vocal qualities that are hard to find anywhere else - the problem, most likely, was that there was simply no Harry Partch around to badger them into a vocal style different from the one they had been trained in. And it may have been, too, that Dean Drummond, the conductor, made the performers follow the written vocal lines more literally than Partch himself would have done. If so, then this is a case where faithfulness in one respect leads to distortion in another.
Not that it wouldn't have been possible, I think, to follow the score precisely and still deliver the "intoned" lines intelligibly. That's after all the crucial thing, not the exact flavor of vocal style one chooses to use. Only it would have taken more rehearsal time than was evidently available. And a vocal coach who, like Partch, would jump all over those opera-trained performers whenever they even thought about blurring a vowel or swallowing a consonant.
Given limitations of time and resources, though, this production was quite
an achievement, and while it may have fallen short of the 1954 performance
in many respects, the decision to actually stage the work, in what was
ostensibly a concert setting, was a bold one, a risk justified, to my mind,
by the results. Oedipus is strong enough to survive a lot of makeshift and
under-rehearsal; on the other hand, to play every note perfectly, while
ignoring the fact that it is after all a play - and a great one at that
- would almost, though maybe not quite, kill it. A lot of the music would
be impressive even out of context, and Sophocles' drama, of course, is hardy
enough to have endured many a cold reading. No musical setting of the play
matches the heat of Partch's, and though there was a lot that could have
been improved in this performance, there was nothing cold about it either.
© 1997 Alan Shaw | alanshaw@prosoidia.com | home | links