Once on this island

Opera Parallèle introduced a beautiful new work that was nearly everything you want in a contemporary opera

Angela Yam and Craig Irvin (center) in The Pigeon Keeper at Opera Parallèle (Photo: Stefan Cohen)

The Pigeon Keeper, a lovely new opera by composer David Hanlon and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, announces its distinctive qualities right from the opening measures. A hazy, shimmery ripple runs through the chamber orchestra, as if a sea breeze were blowing across the strings and into the woodwinds, and instantly we know where we are: on a fairy-tale island, where a magic-realist fable is about to unfold. And sure, it helps to have looked at the program or the press materials ahead of time, but still — a composer who can conjure up an entire world within seconds is a composer you can trust to pull off the big swings as well.

The Pigeon Keeper, which had its world premiere on Friday at the Cowell Theater in a note-perfect production by Opera Parallèle, makes good on nearly every part of that promise. It’s full of sumptuous and often beautiful vocal writing, cast in a variety of forms — taut and shapely dialogue, urgently expressive arias, and choruses full of wit and sympathy. Hanlon uses his small instrumental ensemble with consummate skill, creating shades of emotion just by adding or dropping an instrument here or there. General and artistic director Nicole Paiement conducted superbly, bringing out every nuance of the score. The Pigeon Keeper, which is in one compact 80-minute act, is pretty much everything you want a new opera to be — an engrossing tale told through memorable music that is both accessible and substantive.

Bernard Holcomb in the title role of The Pigeon Keeper (Photo: Stefan Cohen)

That’s not to say that the piece is problem-free — on the contrary, there are dramaturgical stumbles littered throughout. At its center are a widowed fisherman and his young daughter, Orsia, who are still mourning and missing Mom and the stillborn son who died with her. Xenophobia is rife on the island they inhabit, which is either Mediterranean, per the libretto, or Polynesian, per the score. (I couldn’t help thinking of Maria Muldaur’s 1970s hit “Midnight at the Oasis,” set in a desert that somehow contains both camels and cacti.) So when they pull a mysteriously mute boy out of the sea on the very anniversary of their family trauma, father and daughter face the problem of finding someone willing to take the stranger in.

Why won’t Dad take him in? you may ask. It’s a good question, which the libretto doesn’t really answer. Nor does it persuasively address several other questions: Why are the residents of the village so nasty, including the schoolchildren? Why is the Pigeon Keeper who lives in the village such a pariah — aside from the fact that he doesn’t speak the language, hangs out with birds, and makes weird goo-goo eyes at everyone? (OK, that one’s actually pretty easy.) And most bewilderingly, why does the fisherman suddenly change his mind? For such a climactic plot point, this turnabout needed more justification.

Shayla Sauvie and Angela Lam with members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (Photo: Stefan Cohen)

But if the storyline tends to veer off in odd directions, Hanlon’s score continually brings it back online. The fisherman (baritone Craig Irvin, in a potent, tonally resplendent performance) gets a big aria that shines a spotlight deep into his soul in the way only opera can. 12-year-old Orsia, sung with silvery fleetness by soprano Angela Yam, sounds just like her character — a turbulent ball of adolescent impatience, empathy, sorrow, and moral insight. Tenor Bernard Holcomb contributed a virtuosic turn as all the adults of the village — the title character, the grocer, and the schoolteacher — giving each of them an idiosyncratic spin. Members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, including Shayla Sauvie as the mysterious orphan, never missed a beat.

The physical production, directed by Brian Staufenbiel and designed by Jacquelyn Scott (sets), Jessica Drayon (lighting and projections) and Y. Sharon Peng (costumes), was never less than enchanting. The village was depicted as a sort of Advent calendar, allowing characters to pop up in open windows and close them again, but with plenty of room for the principals to pursue their quest. And the lights and colors were marvelous throughout — the perfect corollary to the instrumental shades of the opening.

Elsewhere:

Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Hanlon, who has written several previous operas (including another with Fleischmann), has a keen ear for melody and orchestration. The Pigeon Keeper is marvelously singable, and from an orchestra of just eight musicians…he conjures a panoply of appealing colors and textures.”

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Under the sea

yMusic (Photo: Graham Tolbert)

It was a terrific weekend all around for water music; Handel would’ve been delighted. On Saturday night, under the auspices of Cal Performances, the new-music sextet yMusic gave the world premiere of Aquatic Ecology, a characteristically inventive and captivating work by the Berkeley-born composer Gabriella Smith. This magical, slightly overstuffed 38-minute travelogue is built on a suite of underwater recordings made by Smith and others that offer a glimpse of a biosphere with which many of us have no first-hand experience — parrotfish chomping on coral, ice melting, whales calling to each other across long distances, and perhaps most strikingly, raindrops hitting a river recorded from below the surface.

Smith displays these sounds by themselves, letting the listener luxuriate in their weird, alien beauty. Then, with resolutely unflashy ingenuity, she transmutes them into music, drawing out the rhythms and harmonies lurking in the natural sounds and handing them off to the six instrumentalists to spin into beguiling sonic tapestries. This isn’t a new idea, exactly — composers have been doing something similar with both human speech and the sounds of nature for a generation and more. But Smith operates at a level of communicative eloquence that few composers can muster. You hear those marine animals living their lives, and Smith makes them sound like they’re talking directly to you.

Composer Gabriella Smith (Photo: Alex Welsh)

There’s a political as well as an esthetic imperative operating here, I think. Smith’s work as a composer is taken up almost exclusively with themes of nature, which in turn means sounding a loud alarm on the subject of climate crisis. Her magnificent organ concerto Breathing Forests, performed by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony in 2023, dove into the world of trees and fire, making listeners feel the urgency of that situation as well. Aquatic Ecology isn’t just an auditory picture book (though it has some aspects of that as well). It’s a warning, an exhortation, a call to action. This is what is at stake, the piece cries, and if that means turning fish sounds into musical fodder, that seems like an entirely effective resource.

Smith’s piece was the climactic high point of a thoroughly enjoyable evening with yMusic, whose trademark blend of smart post-minimalism and cheery pop accessibility is always a delight. As appetizers, the ensemble ran through Eleven, a quicksilvery etude by composer Ryan Lott (a/k/a Son Lux) and four of the group’s communal compositions, including the astoundingly catchy Cloud, which earwormed me for three or four days afterward. How often does that happen at a new-music concert?

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Quick hits

Conductor Peter Whelan (Photo: Marco Borggreve)

• Just one time, it seems, Handel was dragooned into composing incidental music for a play, rather than writing an opera or oratorio in which he could be the dramatist-in-chief. It did not go well. Alceste, written in 1749 by Tobias Smollett (best known, perhaps, as the author of The Adventures of Roderick Random and other early novels), was all ready to go, when the premiere was canceled for reasons that remain a mystery to this day.

That left us with a little over an hour’s worth of arias, choruses and instrumental music that Handel had composed for the play’s interstices, and this week’s program by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale offered a first-rate introduction to this little-known score. On Saturday afternoon in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, I heard the last of four performances. I was thrilled to hear Handel’s music delivered so expertly, and not to have to sit through Smollett’s play as the price. Guest conductor Peter Whelan, one of the candidates to succeed Richard Egarr as the organization’s music director, led a sprightly, fluid performance, with bright-toned contributions from soprano Lauren Snouffer and tenor Aaron Sheehan, and the Philharmonia Chorale, led by Valérie Sainte-Agathe, held up its end valiantly.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin with the Vienna Philharmonic at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall (Photo: Natalie Schrik/Drew Altizer Photography)

• The Vienna Philharmonic came to Berkeley last week for a three-night residency with Cal Performances. The programming could scarcely have been more soporific: symphonies by Mozart, Mahler, Schubert, and Dvořák, and not-symphonies by Beethoven and Strauss. When people say that classical music is irrelevant to the world we inhabit, this is exactly what they’re talking about. It’s not that the music in question isn’t fantastic; it is. But this orchestra’s exclusive, museum-like devotion to the recognized masterpieces of the past is the antithesis of living art. There’s always a strong whiff of formaldehyde in the concert hall.

I attended the opening program on March 5 expecting to do the traditional Vienna Phil two-step, which goes, What they do may not matter much artistically, but they do it better than anyone else in the world. But on this occasion, they didn’t even do that. Under the fussy and somewhat glib leadership of conductor Yannick Nézet-Seguin, the orchestra made Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony sound stiff and self-important, and sailed right past most of the looseness and humor in Mahler’s First. The turgid orchestral balances were almost certainly the fault of Zellerbach Hall’s lousy acoustics, but the rest was baked in.

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Cryptic clue of the week

From Out of Left Field #258 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:

Some funds provided by Tom and Johnny (5,4)

Last week’s clue:

Flaw in white painting, say (4)

Solution: WART
Flaw: definition
white: W
painting, say: ART

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Coming up

San Francisco Symphony: Not many guest appearances in recent years have inspired the kind of excitement brought on by the 2023 debut of guest conductor Elim Chan, unless it was her unexpected return later that year to lead the orchestra in Holst’s The Planets. Her repertoire this time is a bit disappointing — an all-Tchaikovsky program comprising the Sixth Symphony and music from Swan Lake — but I still expect sparks to fly. March 13-15, Davies Symphony Hall. www.sfsymphony.org.

Lavinia Meijer: I’m not familiar with this Dutch and South Korean harpist, but she sounds fascinating — a classical musician who has evidently topped the Dutch rock album charts repeatedly. Her upcoming solo recital features music by Philip Glass, Douglas J Cuomo, Olafur Arnalds, and more, as well as Meijer’s own compositions. March 15, The Studio, Stanford. live.stanford.edu.