The first, a matinee, was The Civilians' documentary-theater musical "This Beautiful City," about Colorado Springs' transformation into the evangelical capital of America and the rise and fall of Ted Haggard. The work was cleverly constructed and well performed against a wonderful set. The best bits to me were those where they recreated the young adult worship and praise at Haggard's New Life church - itself already intensely and self-consciously theatrical (picture source) - and a rather creepy spiritual warfare group called RHOP. If it presented two sides of its issues - theocracy and liberalism, end times evangelism and sexual tolerance - and not the middle, this may have been because documentary theater can't invent characters. If any there are (I feel I have to believe there are), how would you find ordinary evangelicals who take it all with a grain of salt? The closest, ironically, was one of Ted Haggard's sons, who said that he wasn't that surprised to learn of his father's misconduct - theirs is an interesting family and "it sounds Haggardesque." Instead of invoking end times battles with spirits he said the crisis was helping his father be a better Christian, indeed he's "closer to being human now than ever before." The Haggard affair happened just as The Civilians were in "The Springs" doing research; it was a windfall for them but also somewhat overshadows the larger more nuanced picture they're trying to paint.The other was part of the opening festival for the new and lusciously warm sounding Alice Tully Hall, the U. S. premiere of Vladimir Martynov’s “anti-opera” based on Dante's “Vita Nuova," with the stage filled with the London Symphony Orchestra, the EuropaChorAkademie and soloists, including three choirboys from St. Thomas Choirschool. I'm not sure it's a great piece of music - many pieces of new music strike me as disjointed, this one switching from atonal to lushly neoromantic to minimalist repetitive to medieval Orthodox liturgical and a citation (I'm 90% sure) from the start of Richard Strauss' "Capriccio" - but it has its somewhat hypnotic moments. Most impressive was the spectacle of it, which led me to the conclusion that, at least in the context of this opening festival, it's a Bühnenweihspiel (Wagner's name for Parsifal) - thought perhaps the stage directions are part of the piece?
It began with an empty stage (empty but for music stands). As the house lights dimmed, the choir and full orchestra came in, talking quietly, dressed in black - no white shirts. Suddenly a voice, one of the boy sopranos, pealed out from the right aisle of the audience, incipit vita nova, echoed by another boy approaching the stage on the left and completed by a third who'd been sitting on the edge of the stage, his feet hanging over the side, looking a little terrified in his white shirt and striped schoolboy tie. As they came together, conductor Vladimir Jurovsky and soloist Mark Padmore (Dante) walked unobtrusively on, joined eventually by the stunningly beautiful Tatiana Monogarova (Beatrice). The voice of Amor was sung from the side balcony. As the piece progressed, the choir along the back wall churned and split into now two, now three choirs, now one again, before finally processing down the aisles singing a litany. But before this Beatrice disappeared from the stage. The lights even on the stage were dimmed for all of the second and much of the third act, until suddenly, in a vision of heaven, all the lights came back on and she reappeared at the side of Amor on the balcony, transfigured (by numerology: she died in the ninth month, nine is thrice three, three is the Trinity, and - this part was lost in translation - nova/nine is is also nova/new life), invoking the intercession of Christ. Eventually the lights dimmed again and the orchestra left the stage, in sections, carefully clicking off the lights on their music stands, percussion, then brass, then strings, until all that was left was a Glockenspiel and, after she left, a xylophone in the back. The audience wasn't sure what had just hit us, it seemed more and less than a concert performance of an opera. Bühnenweihspiel indeed!
