Articles on The Tyrant

Seattle Times

Solo chamber opera “The Tyrant” is a tour-de-force

By Melinda Bargreen
Seattle Times music critic
May 3, 2005

Music lovers with long memories will remember a particular flowering of talent at Cornish College of the Arts, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when an imposing infusion of talent arrived on the faculty. Tenor John Duykers, and composers Paul Dresher and Janice Giteck, were among the leading lights, along with flutist and new-music impresario Paul Taub.Dresher and Duykers left Seattle, but the Cornish connection continues in Dresher’s new “The Tyrant,” a solo chamber opera composed for the tenor, with a Jim Lewis libretto and staging by Melissa Weaver. “The Tyrant” was commissioned by Taub’s Seattle Chamber Players, whose members and two guests formed the six-piece ensemble accompanying the singer/actor. (The commission is a joint one with three other ensembles.)

It is a pleasure to report that “The Tyrant” is a tour-de-force — a gripping music-theater piece that is witty, poignant and wonderfully effective. Dresher’s original “maxi-minimalist” style has grown and expanded to a more mature style with considerable freedom, though you can still hear those gently oscillating motifs from time to time. Amplification, probably necessary in the Behnke Center with these forces, helped make everything (including the soloist) clear.

Duykers was absolutely mesmerizing in the role of the king who dare not leave his throne for fear of being overthrown. It’s hard to imagine anyone else as eerily effective in the role he has made so wholly his own. One of the world’s pre-eminent specialists in contemporary music, Duykers still commands a pliant and suitably majestic tenor, more than capable of meeting the score’s stringent demands.

But he is considerably more than a singer. His thoroughly detailed presentation of the Tyrant waxes and wanes from imperious irony to yearning, terror, paranoia, infatuation (with a beautiful voice heard through his window), despair and resignation. This performance will be recorded, along with Duykers’ interpretation of Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” but it should be filmed as well; what Duykers does with his face and body, as well as his voice, should be commemorated for posterity.

The virtuoso ensemble, led by Christian Knapp, was everything it should be. Two instrumental pieces, each with theater aspects, preceded the new Dresher work: John Zorn’s “Music for Children” and Viktor Ekimovsky’s “The Princess has pricked her finger — and all the Kingdom fell asleep … ” These were mere foothills; “The Tyrant” is a mountain.Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Duykers brings ‘Tyrant’ to life

By Philippa Kiraly
Special to the Post-Intelligencer
May 3, 2005

Tenor John Duykers returned to Seattle Sunday night in an unforgettable portrayal of a tyrant, his persona one all too recognizable in many Third World countries and some in so-called more civilized countries, too.

His vehicle was the world premiere of a concert theater song cycle, “The Tyrant,” by composer Paul Dresher and librettist Jim Lewis from a tale by Italo Calvino. Seattle Chamber Players commissioned it and performed the 45-minute work at On the Boards along with two shorter pieces.

Oddly, this was the second soliloquy of an obsessed man in music presented this past week in Seattle: The first was Schumann’s “Manfred” performed by the Seattle Symphony, yet “The Tyrant” elicited more recognition, more understanding even, for Duykers’ character.

On a small dais that has become his whole living space, the Tyrant’s fears, needs, paranoia and, most chillingly, his methods of getting what he wants are there before you in Duykers. Sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, and always audible, he disintegrates before your eyes and ears.

The credit for this tour de force performance — planned as a companion piece with Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King” for a compact disc — has to be divided between the three: Dresher for atmospheric music (including a moment when percussionist Matthew Kocmieroski tossed a garbage can full of cymbals out on the floor and rhythmic piano notes in the background pounded like the pulse of the tyrant); Lewis for memorable words, and Duykers for bringing it all to life.

Melissa Weaver directed with imagination, Tom Ontiveros designed the lighting with flair and conductor Christian Knapp held it all together.

Earlier in the program, violinist Mikhail Shmidt of the Seattle Chamber Players, pianist Oksana Ezhokina and Kocmieroski played a brief work by John Zorn, and the four Seattle Chamber Players (Shmidt, cellist David Sabee, flutist Paul Taub and clarinetist Laura DeLuca) performed “The Princess has pricked her finger — and all the Kingdom fell asleep” by Viktor Ekimovsky, a hypnotic work in slow motion in which even the performers seem barely awake.

Philadelphia Enquirer

A world of his own

By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic
May 18, 2005The tyrant is there on stage — his name and kingdom not specified, but you can guess — planted on a throne, vehemently preaching about the danger of letting down his guard for a second. “Rumor has it that your spies are not your own!” he intones. “Your grip is slipping!”

But on a happier note:

“The sex is quite good. No complaints there. Plenty of women. All types. Men, boys, even — if that be your proclivity. Which it’s not. Let’s make that perfectly clear.”

Red-state voters seeing The Tyrant, which plays in repertory with Slow Fire at the Prince Music Theater through the weekend, probably will know just which real-life figures the central character portrays: Saddam Hussein crossed with Bill Clinton. Blue-state voters are likely to debate which of many Republicans (Richard Nixon for starters) are the target. About 40 minutes later, blue and red might be united: The tyrant isn’t about kings and presidents, but our own private delusions.

The catalyst in all of this is Paul Dresher, the San Francisco-based composer who has long been one of the most dynamic fixtures on the alternative-music-theater circuit, his works making the rounds at receptive havens in Seattle, Minneapolis, Charleston, S.C.’s Spoleto Festival USA, and Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater.

Now 54, Dresher has an extensive-enough repertoire that he’ll send out a production truck to crisscross the country — Appleton, Wis., was one recent stop — with any number of odd theatrical apparatuses, such as a stage set that resembles a giant metronome and doubles as musical instruments he created for the piece.

The two works being presented at the Prince are music-theater pieces written for a solo stage performer. Slow Fire, an older work revived by popular demand, depicts a beleaguered middle-class father played by celebrated performance artist Rinde Eckert, whose voice and physicality easily achieve operatic magnitude.The Tyrant has existed for only a matter of weeks, written for singer John Duykers, known among opera audiences for his idiosyncratic Mao Tse-tung portrayal in John Adams’ Nixon in China.It’s significant that Dresher’s tyrant is nameless: “I’ve been reluctant to use current events as a starting point. I don’t think we know enough about the impact of grand historical moments until they’re long past.”

Still, such subjects lend themselves to a medium closer to guerilla theater than grand opera. Like East Coast minimalist-based composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Dresher had to create his own group, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, in 1985 to accommodate his singular vision, both for concert and theater works.

“Every year I ask myself if it’s worth it anymore. The funding has been going away for the kind of work we do. I’m not [director] Peter Sellars, who can galvanize a roomful of people. I’m anti-megalomaniacal,” he said. “We do pure art – not because it’s good for you or because we’re trying to make the world a better place. We may do all those things. But we’re not about identity politics.”

But like many mavericks, Dresher seems unstoppable – not out of egotistical determination or even belief in what he’s saying about the world at large. Indeed, what world would that be? Though raised playing guitar-based rock-and-roll, he is just as influenced by his studies in Hindu classical music, Ghanaian drumming, and music from Bali and Java.

“I love our traditions, but I don’t think they’re our only tradition. I look at Western harmony as this is an amazing creation – something that’s been built upon for centuries,” he said. “And yet I look at Indonesian music, and it’s rich with possibilities for change and evolution as well. One tradition doesn’t in any way diminish the significance of another.”

Whether composing for the theater, concert works such as his superb Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band (now recorded on the New Albion label), or scores for the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Dresher describes himself as tapping into an inner world that can be strangely oblivious to outside events. Even after his first wife, Robin Kirk, succumbed to cancer in 1999, his work stopped only for a month. You’d also be hard-pressed to notice musical differences since his remarriage, to Australian Shakespeare scholar Philippa Kelly.

“When I was younger, I’d see Crater Lake or the Grand Canyon, be very awed, and feel the need to express it in music. I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Sometimes I’m sad about this. But the best music creates a vision of a world that’s different from what we’re in on a daily basis. The work that I do is so thoroughly an internal process. Music exists inside of me. It goes on all the time.”

Also important is his exploration of the netherwords between speech and song. When talking about influences on his vocal writing, the oration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. looms larger than the tunes of Giuseppe Verdi. “I’m always wanting to make our singing more like the way we speak,” he said. “When I’m setting a line of text, I go through hundreds of ways of singing that line, to find a natural speech way to do that and turn it into melody.”

So what would that mean were he to receive a commission from some truly traditional opera singer, like Renée Fleming? “I’d feel honored,” Dresher chirped. “I wouldn’t ask her to do things she couldn’t make work. When I write, I’m writing for a band. And that approach is manifested with any other skilled performer.”