Hear the Xenakis Oresteia at the Miller, and understand, instantly, why ‘70s audiences craved the glaze, the ease, the glamour of the program of last Sunday’s Reichabend at Le Poisson Rouge.
This Oresteia only began in 1966. Xenakis wrote its chorus-plus-winds-and-percussion incidental music for a production of the Aeschylus that year in Ypsilanti, Michigan: he added two monologues, both for baritone-as-countertenor, later in 1988 and in 1992. Conceptually, though, this music is to Reich’s what ‘60s (and ‘70s) splatter painting is to the cool, pretty, enameled surfaces of Warhol silk-screens. Out with angst: in with gleam.
In Oresteia, in almost every way, Xenakis is Reich’s opposite number. Reich’s rhythm is regular as your mother’s heartbeat. Xenakis punctuates his cadenza-for-theremin falsetto vocalism with spastic and deafening bursts from the tom-toms. Reich’s timbres are silver and velvet: vibraphones glisten, clarinets confide, vocalists purr like kittens in cream. Xenakis’ horns yawp, his contrabassoons heave: could a teakettle rage, it would shriek like his piccolos. Reich (though not only Reich) retrieves the reviled triad from Boulez’s wastebin (crowded, that: hey, Igor!) and rotates it, admiringly, like a crystal in the light. Xenakis? Forget harmony: he treats equal temperament as if it meant him harm. Lines flee to the quarter-tones between half-steps as if sliding into home base. Choirs bark, shout, yammer and howl, but can barely voice a minor third before Xenakis shoos them into noise. Even Xenakis’s concluding music of “peace” is a din of shouting choristers hammering away at handheld metal pipes: rarely has tranquility so threatened the eardrums.
I was content to hear Oresteia as a time-capsule (dates notwithstanding) of earnest ‘60s brutalism. I continue to question it as an opera, which is how it was presented. Xenakis added those two solo pieces tailored to the gifts of his performer-colleague Spiros Sakkas to choruses which were written to punctuate—not carry—the Aeschylus play; but still named the result (not Notes on, Fragments of, but) simply Oresteia. A professionally intelligible (if hardly inspiring) choice: but who, then, can be surprised when Xenakis’ opera sounds like a frame without a picture?
What’s missing from this Oresteia is the moral thinking, the noble ambivalence, the lure of reason which are everywhere urgent in the original Aeschylus. Also missing is any but the most jejune conception of character: also missing is basic dramatic judgment. For example: I’m sure Spiros Sakkas, in his day, was a distinctive and urgent performer. But what is the intrinsic (as opposed to collegial, or economic) reason why the superhuman goddess Athena is played by the same falsetto/baritone who, earlier in the score, portrays two coupled mortals arguing their destinies? Xenakis has written plaintively of feeling adrift in his century: “I was born too late: I had missed two millennia. I didn’t know what there was for me to do in the twentieth century,” he confided to Bálint András Varga. He came by his fascination with the past honestly: and this fascination evokes his best moment in Oresteia, when the chorus, channeling the Furies, hounds Orestes for matricide in a terrifying firestorm of ululating women and whipcrack woodblocks. Savage! But: do we read the Greeks only for savagery? Do we consult Lady Macbeth only for fragrance advice?
To a millennial audience, the Greeks (Euripides compellingly, but Aeschylus, too) remain modern. But Xenakis loved the primitive; so that’s what he writes. His opera is dinner music when the entrée is the still-beating heart of a Mayan virgin. Yet Oresteia hints that Xenakis, more than he acknowledges, belonged to his century: or, at least, to a central decade of it. I refer here to his all-too-1960s terror of the plainspoken. Attend his instrumental extremism, his refusal of the consonant; the equation of shrillness with strength, of confrontation with mere volume. Xenakis seems so concerned that traditional notions of taste and skill will tame his work that his Oresteia most often sounds composed with no taste, or skill, at all. Historically understandable; but it’s good we’ve moved on.
Miller Theatre succeeded in creating a production so black of hue and so elegant of mien that no one ever laughed. In rôles (Agamemnon/Cassandra, Athena) that perhaps only a divine lunatic could consummate, the falsetto/bass Wilbur Pauley was elegant and committed. Luca Veggetti’s dancers were graceful and specific within a somewhat limited gestural range: neither the chorus nor the ICE ensemble held anything back, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York, appearing briefly at the finale as angeli ex machina (before those handheld pipes clanged) struck a welcome note of vocal grace. It was good to have heard Oresteia firsthand, at full strength. Such an opportunity is one of the reasons one loves New York.
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