The Comet / Poppea

Grant Chu Covell

[November 2024.]

George LEWIS: The Comet (2024) with Claudio MONTEVERDI: L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643). Curtis Opera Theatre, 23rd Street Armory, Philadelphia, November 1, 2024, 7pm.

Music is everywhere these days, leaking from elevators, passing cars, and all our devices. Music may require immense effort to create but is now effortless to consume (ease of access should not equate with low cost, but I digress). Listen to an orchestra on your commute, bop to the band’s beat as you water the garden, singalong while selecting your groceries from the aisle. Even creating music can be done while listening to other music. I’ve copied and proofread parts with other music playing in the background, and I know musicians who practice their scales while watching TV.

And so, it is not unfathomable to think of attending two operas at once. The idea for this combination came out of director Yuval Sharon’s work on Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2 for Los Angeles. The choice of W.E.B. DuBois’ The Comet was specific: Could a natural disaster to wipe away racism and reshape society? The contrasts and similarities between 20th-century America and 1st-century Rome are dramatic and extensive. How might individuals strive to make impossible changes, and how might those around them react? Why, you could write an opera about it.

Let me just say that this was among the most astonishing and wonderful musical experiences I have had in recent memory. To factually state that two operas were occurring simultaneously does not reflect the audience’s challenge to sort through various stimuli real-time, and how rewarding it was to experience music and action coalescing. Singers and instrumentalists were extraordinary, agile and focused, committed to the moment. Seek this out.

The operas’ stage was a continuously revolving turntable, with the audience separated into two groups seated at opposite ends of the large space. Each side had a different but valid experience. I overheard audience members expressing the desire to return the next night and see it again from the other side. Supertitles translated Giovanni Francesco Busenello’s Italian. Douglas Kearney’s libretto for The Comet was in English. Loudspeakers subtly amplified singers as they pivoted into view.

The circular stage was perhaps one-third Monteverdi and two-thirds Lewis, and a passageway or backstage was formed by each set’s back wall. Singers could step onto the turntable for their respective scenes, or use the in-between corridor to prepare and enter their sets through entrances (a door, an elevator, a grotto) at the back wall. It was rather ingenious, and the mechanics were only slightly audible. As there was no curtain, similarly dressed stagehands appeared frequently to reset furniture or introduce props. Monitors for the singers were mounted around the stage so the singers could get their cues.

The Philadelphia cast included: Cedric Berry (Jim), Kylie Kreucher (Julia), Samuel Higgins (Nero and Julia’s father), Jeysla Rosario Santos (Poppea), Amanda Lynn Bottoms (Ottone and Virtue), Nikan Ingabire Kanate (Ottavia and Fortune), Joelle Lamarre (Love and Nellie), Evan Gray (Seneca). The cast of Comet was primarily Jim and Julia with Julia’s father and Nellie appearing towards the end. Even though the double-casting was evident from the program, it was still surprising when a singer from Poppea surfaced in The Comet.

The Comet / Poppea premiered in June of this year in Los Angeles. Berry, Bottoms and Lamarre were in the original cast which also included Davóne Tines and Anthony Roth Costanzo.

The small orchestra was conducted by Marc Lowenstein (who also led the LA premiere) and included Anastasia Samsel (fl), Maxence Duariat-Rancurel (perc), Jiacheng Xiong (pno), Reese Revak (hpsi), I-Hao Cheng (vln), Yunji Jang (vla), Joan Herget (cello), Dimitrios Mattas (bass), Gretchen Gettes (gamba), and Theodore Cheek (theorbo). The predominantly Monteverdi continuo (viola da gamba, theorbo and harpsichord) sat separately from the modern instruments.

The entire event ran for about 90 minutes. Neither opera played continuously, which means Poppea was heavily truncated to essential events (including Fortune, Virtue and Love’s prologue, Poppea’s plotting, Ottavia’s fretting, Seneca’s suicide, Ottavia’s departure from Rome, Nero and Poppea’s love duet). Lewis’ opera can stand on its own, but for this combined realization scene beginnings and endings overlapped with Monteverdi.

In The Comet, Jim and Julia discover they are the last New Yorkers alive after a comet strikes the land. Jim is a working-class black man, and Julia is a privileged white woman. Believing themselves Earth’s sole survivors they envision creating a new utopian society. But a honking car interrupts their reverie and Julia’s father and her boyfriend appear and whisk Julia back to normalcy. Jim is joined by his wife, Nellie, who also survived the comet, however, their infant son did not.

Lewis’ music was modern. Not squawky or showy, but dissonant and active. I suspect most of it was notated, but with areas permitting improvisation or asynchrony. After extended instrumental solos, Lowenstein would acknowledge the performer, which suggested to me that some parts were freer than others. Berry was impressive as Jim, commanding the stage as he sought to make sense of a damaged world, and when Kreucher appeared as the second survivor, their lines and portrayal of a complex situation was convincing.

In the Monteverdi, Gray’s Seneca attempts to halt Poppea’s ascendancy, but no, he must kill himself on Nero’s orders. Here too was a singer expressing a character compellingly and effortlessly. Nero is a soprano, or a counter-tenor in this production, and Higgins was no less of a talent. Poised and clear, the action literally revolves around him, and his appearance as Julia’s father towards the end (in completely different costume of course) surprised even though it made so much sense.

As must have been self-evident in Monteverdi’s time as it is in ours, Poppea’s story extends past the double bar. The opera concludes with a triumphant Poppea celebrating with Nero, but we know they do not live happily ever after. The irrational Nero eventually tires of his new queen, kicking her while pregnant. Despite the lively music, foreboding hangs in the air.

The operas’ concluding emotions powerfully coincide. It’s not clear whether the decision to transform Nero and Poppea’s concluding duet into a quartet adding Jim and Nellie was Sharon’s or Lewis’, but the full orchestral treatment of “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” with the two pairs of singers was heavenly. Perhaps Lewis knew Monteverdi’s closing duet would be tough to follow, and incorporated it himself. Sharon and Lewis must be aware too that for several reasons (text, style, etc.) scholars question whether Monteverdi actually wrote this last number. Regardless, the final emotional and musical alignment was magical.

I am no astrologer, but I suspect The Comet / Poppea might reappear in New Haven in 2025 or ’26. Do not miss it.