Adams, A Flowering Tree: libretto by Peter Sellars and John Adams, San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, John Adams, conductor; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, 2.03.2007 (HS)

 

Cast
 

Kumudha: Jessica Rivera

The Prince: Russell Thomas

Storyteller: Eric Owens

 

After the tension and fraught scenario of Doctor Atomic, which San Francisco Opera premiered last fall, John Adams' newest opera seems almost soothing. In his least dissonant score in years, Adams revels in the lush sonorities possible with gentle treatment of the orchestra and silky voices to sing the lines. After the complex polyrhythms and harsh sounds of Atomic, the overwhelming effect of A Flowering Tree is tenderness.

 

Whether that makes for great opera is another question. But with a composer of Adams' inventiveness and ear, it is seldom boring.

 

The opera premiered last year in Vienna at the New Crowned Hope Festival, conceived by director Peter Sellars as a 21st-century response to the music of Mozart's final year. Adams and Sellars take their inspiration from Mozart's Magic Flute, not so much in the details but in the broad strokes, Like Flute, the story and music move from darkness to light in two acts. Young lovers come together in stressful circumstances, are separated, and are reunited. Magical happenings intervene.

 

San Francisco Symphony, Lincoln Center in New York, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Barbican Center in London co-commissioned the work, which was fully staged in Vienna and semi-staged for the performances in Berlin and now in San Francisco,

 

That may be part of the reason for my less than rousing response. Another might be the superfluous dancers as doppelgangers for the three principals. Perhaps the narrow confines of the three multi-hued disks that served as a stage didn't give the dancers enough scope. They seemed to be moving in place an awful lot, and added little to the storytelling.

 

Layering on extra stuff, like the dancers, translations from Tamil poetry and bhakti verses, and bits of Asian symbolism, only complicates a basically simple fairy tale. Blame Sellars. His participation in all of Adams' operas' seems responsible for much of the pretentiousness. Maybe that's why I like Adams' concert music so much better than his operas. He is much better when he calls all the shots.

 

Based on an ancient folk tale from southern India, the story centers on Kumudha, a poor but beautiful young woman who discovers that she can transform herself into a tree. She and her sister sell the flowers from the tree so the family can eat. A prince spies her one day and has her brought to the palace. He marries her and she does her transformations for their mutual pleasure. Some weeks or months later, the prince's sister cajoles Kumudha into doing her transformation, but the princess and her friends break the branches and Kumudha ends up armless, legless and deformed. She can't come home and the prince, in despair,  becomes a wandering ascetic. When he finally finds her, wiser from the loss of her, they reunite and she transforms one final time in a blaze of musical glory.

 

Among the musical highlights, these four transformation scenes feel distinct and differ in musical content. The first centers on an A minor chord. The others become increasingly complex. There is also a gorgeous prayer for Kumudha before her first transformation, and a heart-tugging aria for her after she becomes a cripple, Soprano Jessica Rivera, a recent graduate of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, lavishes a creamy, radiant voice and potent stage presence on these scenes. She is the vocal star of the cast, and Adams gives her the most gratifying vocal lines.

 

As the Storyteller, a figure rather like the Evangelist in Baroque oratorios, Eric Owens rolls out a sonorous bass and enunciates the text so that the projected titles are superfluous, But Adams gives him mostly parlando to sing. Just when his melodic line starts to go somewhere, the music moves on to something else. Owens, who played a general in Doctor Atomic, deserves better, something akin to the dramatic recitatives Mozart wrote for the Speaker in Magic Flute.

 

As the Prince, Russell Thomas wields a sometimes squally tenor, but in his love scenes with Rivera he rises to the occasion vocally.

 

The original chorus for the Vienna performances was a Venezuelan group, and Adams wrote all the choruses in Spanish. A strange choice. I'm not sure it works to have Spanish intrude on an English-language version of a south Indian folk tale. But it does give Adams a chance to interject some lively Latin rhythms. They are fun to hear, even if some of them go on a bit too long for dramatic pacing.

 

The star of this opera, as in all of Adams' vocal pieces, ultimately is the orchestra. This composer has an extraordinary command of sonorities, of balance, of ratcheting up tension and releasing it purely with instrumentation and dynamics. He uses some of his signature devices, such as rumbling chords in the low winds to support soaring unison lines in the high range, to great effect, Some of the special moments find a pair of recorders adding a quiet obbligato to plush chords. Percussion adds delicate touches, as with rainmaker and maracas to underly a sweet lullaby,

 

The blazing finish is a masterpiece of delayed gratification. This transformation includes the chorus, but instead of getting more complex as it nears a climax, it pares down harmonically to a final two-note dissonance, played by the entire orchestra, that resolves (upward, of course) not to a chord but to a fortissimo unison.

 

In that moment, all the glosses in the text and the piled-on directorial flourishes don't matter at all. It's hard to miss the message, that, in the end, what we should strive for is simply to become one. Mozart might well approve.

 

Harvey Steiman