Reviews

Power takes its toll on trapped ‘Tyrant’
By Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
June 9, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle

He’s a despot whose every whim and desire is indulged. In “The Tyrant,” the tender, rueful and gently ravishing solo chamber opera that opened Cal Performances’ Berkeley Edge Fest at Zellerbach Playhouse on Thursday, absolute power becomes the texture of an absorbing musical rhapsody. This superb, 70-minute piece has its final performance tonight.

Riding the streams and storms of Paul Dresher’s translucent score, tenor John Duykers gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as a king in torment.

We never learn his name or much about the country he rules. He spends most of the evening trapped inside a cage that serves as his confining castle, scrutinized by an assortment of mini video cameras, one of which he turns on himself in a metaphor of self-scrutiny. In the process, he reveals the nested memories, fears and premonitions of a man who is both losing his grip and discovering a dense new harmony of the spheres. “What a divine clamor!” he exults in the final moments. “Listen!”

This monarch is possessed by music. It’s a gorgeous vocalise, heard through an open window, that sets him off on an extended reverie about a woman’s voice. In this heightened state of hearing, he falls prey to phantom castle sounds — creaking walls, a pigeon in the rafters — that feed his paranoia and send him fleeing from his chamber and into the dark recesses of his own delusions. There are shades of “King Lear” and “Bluebeard’s Castle” in Jim Lewis’ libretto, inspired by an Italo Calvino short story. But the emotional landscape of “The Tyrant” is distinctive, a beguiling and treacherous terrain carefully mapped by music.

Six orchestral players, members of the composer’s eponymous Paul Dresher Ensemble, share the stage with Duykers. It’s altogether fitting that the Tyrant would wave his staff at percussionist Joel Davel or cock an ear as he conducts a haunting string-and-woodwind melody. The musicians aren’t just there as remote accompaniment for his monologue. The sounds they make, whether it’s a teasingly repeated pattern of piano chords, a lyrical throb that suddenly subsides or a taunting martial drumroll, are the very stuff and substance of who he is.

Orchestration, he says, is order. He refers to a Maestro who may be his predecessor on the throne, or possibly a god. The basic questions of life can be posed in musical terms. “And if no pleasure,” Duykers sings in one yearning phrase, “can it be called music at all?”

Dresher’s 2005 score is a marvel of expressive variety, molded for dramatic effect throughout. When the Tyrant is preening about the food, wine and sexual favors he enjoys, the music takes on a sense of bloated pomp that lays bare the character’s emptiness and unease. In a section of the score that compares the kingdom to “Heavenly Clockwork,” Dresher unleashes a stately musical twittering machine of ticks and chimes and whirring flywheels. Hints of Strauss, Poulenc and Penderecki come and go, like ripples sent shivering across the surface of a lake.

Duykers gives it all a dramatic focus and sense of purpose. Sloe-eyed and indolent in one scene, he turns raffish or terrified, quizzical or suffused in wonder. Dressed in a natty nautical cap and pinstriped suit at the outset, he’s a changed man an hour later. His throne has become an abandoned bunker and the trappings of power discarded as he creeps downward into the stony depths. Duykers’ voice probes every corner of the character, from striving intervals and bright intonation to downbeat spoken lines. Melissa Weaver’s invisible-hand direction and Tom Ontiveros’
color-wheel lighting are form-fitted to the cause.

Fragments of “The Tyrant” were performed last year at Theater Artaud. Now, for one last performance in Berkeley, the entire work is on offer. Concise as it is, without a scene or a musical phrase that seems extraneous, “The Tyrant” is expansive enough to propose an “American Idol”-style singing contest at one point. Here, clearly, is a show that contains multitudes.

Short, beautifully scored and unremittingly intense, Paul Dresher’s chamber opera creates a surprisingly complex and compelling portrait of its anguished anti-hero. The premise — that absolute power is its own punishment — is hardly new. But, as performed by the superb tenor John Duykers and six members of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the 65-minute work yields more psycho-political thrills than many evening-length works.

The opera, which opened Thursday in the Zellerbach Playhouse as the first offering of Cal Performances’ Berkeley Edge Fest, has its final performance tonight (the biennial new music festival continues through Sunday afternoon with a program devoted to composer Frederic Rzewski).

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s short story “A King Listens,” Dresher’s 2006 opera portrays the ruler of a nameless kingdom (audience members can supply the dictator of their choice), who is unable to leave his room for fear of being overthrown. Ensconced on an oversized throne in a cagelike structure (set by Alex Nichols, with lighting by Tom Ontiveros), cowering in terror at real and imagined threats, he experiences the outside world only through sound and the occasional furtive peek through a curtained window. Black and white security-cam images projected on rear screens evoke a creepy sense of full-time surveillance.

Staged for maximum dramatic effect by Melissa Weaver, the opera opens on the 20th anniversary of the tyrant’s ascent to power, with him writing — what else? — a speech designed to rally his subjects. Dressed in a pinstripe suit and diamond-crusted beret, medals pinned to his chest, Duykers looks every inch a king. But his paranoid musings — “So many enemies huddled just outside” — reveal a mind beset by madness.

Librettist Jim Lewis gets in some witty jabs at ego-driven rulers. The tyrant expounds on the perks of the job (“The sex is good”), and the speech-in-progress, with its familiar echoes of freedom under attack, ends up in a wad on the floor (“Not believable”).

But levity gives way to something more sobering as the opera proceeds to its dark conclusion. Tormented by an erotic longing triggered by the sound of a woman’s voice, haunted by the ghost of his predecessor — who may or may not be imprisoned in the dungeon below — and driven to the “rebellion” that leaves him vulnerable outside the palace walls, Duykers loses his grip, and “The Tyrant” achieves the frightening power of a fever dream.

Composed for piano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and percussion, Dresher’s score boils and surges with vitality, encompassing electric modernism, militant marches and moments of tender lyricism. The writing for tenor alternates between spoken text and virtuoso arias; Thursday, Duykers delivered them with dramatic authority and vocal allure. “The Tyrant” seems destined for a life of its own, but it may never get a better performance than this one.

SFist
June 9, 2007, SFist

No performance in Berkeley would be complete without a political statement. The Tyrant, a 65mn chamber opera west coast premiere which kicked of the Berkeley Edge Fest Thursday night at the Zellerbach playhouse, on the UC campus, does not disappoint. A tyrant, operatic tenor John Duykers, is confined to his throne, afraid of being overthrown if his august tush were to sit somewhere else. The libretto is loosely based on an Italo Calvino short story, so you’ll recognize the absurdist set up.

Despite wearing the beret of a dictator, Duykers comes across as pretty innocuous as far as tyrant goes: he anguishes about writing a speech for the 20th anniversary of the coup that put him in power, he is worried about his people loving him; he is weary of forcing people to sing for him, so much he’d rather set up an American Idol contest to identify the voice he overheard through his palace window. He is a lion in a zoo: a king trapped in a gilded cage of his own paranoid making.

Since he is stuck on his throne, he can only enjoy his kingdom through the sounds that make it through the walls. If you get over the fact that this is a conceit which humanize the tyrant and enter into moral relativity territory, it’s a cool starting point to make some music. Actually, Paul Dresher, the composer, and Jim Lewis, the librettist, do offer an epiphany to their tyrant, so don’t feel too bad empathizing with him.

John Duykers carries the performance with great conviction, falling more and more into the paranoia until the final leap into, what again?, folly or redemption? He is a tenor who as performed on the SF opera stage, so he can sing. But he has great acting chops and can give life to his character, he inhabits the role as comfortably as he wears his fancy shiny dictator suit. Actually, we have to admit that, in a small venue like the Zellerbach playhouse, the amplification of his voice was not necessary and rather poorly executed: crumbling a sheet of paper becomes a most annoying song, and we don’t really need to hear Duykers breathing through his nose so much. Duykers voice appeared tentative at times, most likely from not knowing what the sound system was going to give him.

The musical atmosphere matches the rather oppressive mood of the dictator. It swings in between different styles, but is anchored into a limited palette of sounds and a somewhat minimalist instrumentation. Dresher does not allow it to veer into lyricism and keep a nice tension going throughout the piece. There’s tons of fun in the score too, with a demented clock-themed piece and some sweet songs of yearning for peace and quiet toward the end. And there are some digressions in the libretto to bring some fresh air: sex life is good for kings, do we learn. Who would have suspected? And also, if someone tells you: “our way of life, our very freedom, has come under attack”, don’t believe them, opines this dictator, to an awkward chuckle of the audience.

The orchestra (the Paul Dresher Ensemble) contains only six instrumentalists, all excellent. Percussionist Joel Davel has the tasks of setting a beat throughout the performance will juggling several xylophones and gongs and drums, and he does it with quite some flair. Berkeley grad Paul Dresher came on stage and took a bow at the end. Dang, when we go back to our alma mater, nobody stands up and claps for us.

The Edge Fest continues with another performance of the Tyrant tonight at 8pm, and another concert of the music of Frederic Rzewski tomorrow (the first one was last night) at 3pm. It is an instrumental performance with piano (with Rzewski himself and Ursula Oppens at the keys) and percussions, but some of the works -say, one 2004 piece titled Bring Them Home!, reflect the opposition of Rzewski to the Iraq war, so you’ll get your Berkeley political helping.

Festival Review
By Michael McDonagh
June 9, 2007, San Francisco Classical Voice

Most summer music festivals program only the tried and true. But not Cal Performances’ Berkeley Edge Festival, which offered three programs in its third biennial festival June 7-10, featuring two composers — Frederic Rzewski and Paul Dresher — in two venues on UC Berkeley’s night-jasmine-scented campus. Rzewski was represented at Hertz Hall on the June 8 concert I attended, and also on June 10, both of which Jeff Dunn covered for San Francisco Classical Voice.

On Saturday afternoon at a talk hosted by Sarah Cahill, I heard Ursula Oppens play Rzewski’s famous and influential 1975 work, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, which clocked in at 50 immensely varied minutes. Then Rzewski played his own 1977 Four Pieces for Piano, which is even stronger, and often more lyrical, and which took some 32 minutes.

Both pieces seem to extend the 19th-century piano virtuoso tradition of such composer performers as Liszt and Chopin. Both are technically demanding, with rapid changes of musical texture and rhythm. Oppens and Rzewski made each one speak loud and clear. Rzewski has been a musical force of nature since the 1960s, and it’s easy to see and hear why. His ideas are powerful — and sometimes political (are you glad someone is?) — and they connect both viscerally and intellectually with an audience.

Political content was both text and subtext of Dresher’s solo chamber opera The Tyrant, written for tenor and six instruments, on Saturday night at Zellerbach Playhouse, next door to Zellerbach Hall. Dresher and his collaborators — tenor John Duykers, who has worked with him a great deal over the years, and who commissioned this piece; librettist Jim Lewis; director Melissa Weaver; and set designer Alex Nichols — all took full and sophisticated advantage of the commodious and intimate 547-seat non-proscenium stage.

A King — Who Listens?

Dresher and Lewis’ political parable of paranoia and guilt, based on Italo Calvino’s 1986 story “A King Listens,” is right up Dresher’s alley. His solo piece for Rinde Eckert, Slow Fire (1988), caused a huge stir in San Francisco and on tour. The Tyrant is similarly focused on an alienated individual.

In the latter work, the central nameless character is under a form of house arrest of his own making, locked within his palace on the eve of the 20th anniversary of his bloody ascent to power. Everything haunts him — the place, his father, the people, even his own role as head of state. Calvino’s story, as much as Lewis, Dresher, and Weaver’s reimagining of it, makes the tyrant experience everything through sound. This is, of course, a natural fit with music.

Dresher’s composition is scored somewhat thinly for the Paul Dresher Ensemble, which consisted of Karen Bentley Pollick, violin; Alex Kelly, cello; Tod Brody, flute, piccolo, and alto flute; Peter Josheff, clarinet and bass clarinet; and Joel Davel, percussion. The choice of orchestration appears to have been a wise decision, for it both shows off and supports Duykers’ remarkably varied performance.

Virtually every word in the English text was audible and comprehensible. The transitions between speech and song, though hardly in the class of opéra comique, helped the pacing along. You wouldn’t know it from reading the text alone. The secret had to be Dresher’s sense of timing and rhythmic flexibility. He has created an updated sort of sprechstimme, a speech-song that is not as annoying as, say, Schoenberg’s much-lauded but hard slog Pierrot Lunaire (1912) and the same composer’s monodrama Erwartung (1909). The extensive inner monologue provided solid backing for Duykers’ highly theatrical performance (madness always plays well, whether onstage or off).

Dresher’s music for his intermissionless 65-minute Tyrant, which seems modeled a bit after Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) — the English George, that is, not our present stateside one — made his loneliness come alive. He’s caught in an open-air cube on a high Robert Wilsonish chair, and lighting designer Tom Ontiveros and sound engineer Gregory Kuhn show how trapped he feels.

Director Weaver had the good sense to stay out of Duykers’ way. Directors can sometimes do more by appearing to do less.

The Tyrant
By Jaime Robles
June 7, 2007, Piedmont Post

A violin’s anxious tremolo. A flurry of instrumentation. The man seated on the high-backed chair is frantically writing. He wads up the paper and throws it on the floor: He is the tyrant, struggling to write a speech commemorating the 20-year anniversary of his revolution. The spasmodic quavering of the instruments resolves into a flute solo. The man stands and mimes opening a window in the cage like structure that is his throne room. “It’s pointless to open your palace’s window,” he sings. “Long gone is the hubbub of the city … its flood of voices … its symphony of sound.”

So opens The Tyrant, the hour-long chamber opera by Paul Dresher that was part of last week’s Berkeley Edgefest. Loosely based on writings by Italo Calvino, the opera explores the interior world of the tyrant–how absolute power erodes his humanity and his sense of freedom. Dresher wrote the piece for tenor John Duykers, who is especially suited for this one-character work, for the piece demands a wide array of theatrical as well as vocal skills: foremost, it needs someone who isn’t afraid to show the decay of a man’s soul and to have that echo in his voice. Bel canto isn’t the goal. Not to say that Duykers’ voice isn’t beautiful, but that it can express the unspeakable as well as beauty. Further, Duykers has both subtlety and tremendous physical strength. Simply singing for an hour is a feat.

Dresher tends to work with a minimalist palette, only occasionally portraying extremes of emotion through vocal dynamics; rather, emotion is conveyed musically through continuous and subtle shifts within the harmonic tensions between the supporting instruments. The strings and percussion in particular emphasized a driving emotional unease in the music. Six members of the Paul Dresher Ensemble, some of the Bay Area’s finest musicians, were the chamber orchestra.

Fittingly, the central metaphor of the libretto is sound. The tyrant is a kind of composer or conductor, who refers to his predecessor as Maestro. The sounds of life become what he calls “a heavenly clockwork”–reflected in the instrumentation, which is often a musical “word painting” of the text. “These sounds … are funneled in this sonic reservoir /where you float ecstatic … By these sounds is told / The story of your majesty … The story of your reign.” The tyrant’s impending demise comes to him also as a series of small noises–instrumental squeaks, squawks and groans.

The most beautiful interlude is when the tyrant hears the voice of a young woman: “Innocent, pure / A girl singing / Simply singing.” He believes that she is singing a lullaby to a child and he wants to find her–to “return to life again.” He imagines singing a duet with her, harmonizing: she is “the one who can hear you … Your banished voice.”

The staging of The Tyrant was as refined and polished as the music. The musicians were onstage, on either side of the tyrant’s cage. Three long cloth panels formed the sets by acting as screens, first for shifting color then for projections of real-time security-camera images in negative of the tyrant as he prowled his cage. Alexis Nichols designed the sets and Tom Ontiveros the gorgeous lighting. Melissa Weaver’s direction was exquisitely understated, underlining word and music with the barest and most succinct of gestures.