Word: susa
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Music: San Francisco has a really grand opera in Conrad Susa...
...comes the composer-librettist team of Conrad Susa and Philip Littell, who have seized upon Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a fitting subject for an opera. It is an inspired choice: in the machinating Marquise de Merteuil and the voluptuary Vicomte de Valmont the composer has two soulless soul mates whose knowledge of the ways of love make The Art of War look like a kindergarten training manual. What Susa and Littell have created in The Dangerous Liaisons, now getting its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is nothing short...
...Susa, 59, a painstaking composer probably best known for his delightful 1973 opera Transformations, was delivering orchestrations right up to the dress rehearsal, but the seams don't show. From first note to last, Liaisons is a finely polished work that achieves a French transparency, sparingly invoking Debussy (not Pelleas but Images pour Orchestre). Unabashedly tonal, although hardly reactionary, the score glows with a luminescence too long absent from modern opera, and especially opera in English; for an equal, one must go back to Britten's Death in Venice (1973), which Liaisons resembles musically in many small ways...
...biggest deficiency, and it is a serious one, is that Susa never quite delivers the musical climax that the material demands. It is quite canny to stage simultaneously the death of Valmont and his inamorata, Madame de Tourvel, aptly illustrating their bond beyond the grave. But here, and in the final scene, when Merteuil is snubbed, shunned and ruined by the pox, the music needs to be bolder, richer; the composer must make clear exactly how he feels about what has happened to his characters as, say, Berg does at the end of Wozzeck...
...Librettist Tage Danielsson is no Brecht, and Werle shares with Weill only three letters of their surnames. In an opera as dependent as this on sure- handed pastiche, Werle's parodies of American lounge acts and soulful Russian folk songs consistently fall flat. Surely, the company that premiered Conrad Susa's magical chamber opera Transformations in 1973 and has championed resident Composer Dominick Argento could have chosen a better piece for this occasion. Perhaps Argento's Casanova's Homecoming, scheduled for April, will prove to be such a work. A performing space like the Ordway deserves...