For its 76th world premiere – a feat that rivals if not betters Milan's legendary La Scala for world premiere operas – Houston Grand Opera unveils for Lunar New Year a kiddie opera, The Big Swim.
In association with Asia Society Texas, HGO brings on the animals to tell the fable of how each one became the signs in the Chinese zodiac. To be fair, the youngsters in front of me were having none of this, fidgeting or napping through the sixty-minute piece. I commiserated with them as best I could. I, too, fidgeted and briefly lost consciousness. But it wasn't my fault. It was the telling of the tale that did me in.
Let's see, we have a dragon, dog, tiger, rooster, monkey, rat, snake, sheep, ox, pig, rabbit, and horse, all involved in a royal race across a river to see who will become the first year in the zodiac. There are six singers, and each represents two of the beasts, wearing a beanie hat that rotates two colorful masks to delineate them.
It's clever and colorful in a Lion King-sort-of-way, and makes a quick change even quicker. Bass Zaikuan Song (dragon/dog), baritone Joseph Lim (tiger/rooster), tenor Seiyoung Kim (monkey/rat), mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce (snake/sheep), mezzo Alice Chung (ox/pig), and soprano Meigui Zhang (rabbit/horse) animate their characters with aplomb and fine vocal pipes as they navigate through composer Meilina Tsui's dense score and librettist Melisa Tien's rather thin script. The book's repeats are enough to send any kid to sleep. Move on, already.
Orchestrated beautifully for a sextet of musicians playing violin (Natalie Gaynor), cello (Barrett Sills), double bass (Eric Gronfor), flute and piccolo (Henry Williford), percussion (Craig Hauschildt), and piano (William Woodard), Tsui's music plumbs the pentatonic scale with stylish abandon but relies on jagged melodies that don't fall lightly on the ears. Phrases abruptly end or butt up against other jagged phrases, which sounds like a lot of unease going on in the animal kingdom. It's propulsive and sometimes poly-rhythmic, as if too adult for the intended audience. Maestro Eiki Isomura keeps all of this in constant sweeping motion, as if Stravinsky had visited Mao.
But the repeating libretto bogs this down, as does director Mo Zhou's sit-com staging which was tiresome even in the Ming dynasty. When the short scenes are finished, the singers walk or run off stage, to be replaced by the next ones entering from the opposite wing. It's all very rote. Nap, anyone?
The singers, troopers all, made the best of this, as they mugged like silent film clowns and ingratiated themselves to a willing audience eager to be entertained. Kim's monkey and rat made an impression with his high vocal line like a howler monkey's; Pierce's sheep drew laughs with her “baa”-like
inflections; Lim's tiger was commanding; Chung's pig snorted in fashion; Song's dragon was bass-deep; while Zhang's rabbit was all hip-hoppity in music and performance.
We applaud HGO in its unwavering stance to produce new work for, we hope, a new audience. Getting young ones into the theater is commendable in the extreme. Whether The Big Swim will keep them awake in their seats is debatable.
By the way, my Chinese zodiac sign is the Rat. Go figure.
The Big Swim continues at. 2 p.m. Sunday, February 18 at Asia Society Texas, 1370 Southmore Boulevard. For more information, call 713-496-9901 or visit asiasociety.org/texas or houstongrandopeera.org. $40.
