opera review

Yes, I've been to two operas in one week. That's unprecedented for me. In fact, going to two operas in one year is probably unprecedented for me. This one was worth driving out to Livermore for, and B. came with me.

Of Mice and Men, music and libretto by Carlisle Floyd, Livermore Valley Opera

Carlisle Floyd, like Douglas Moore and Robert Ward, whose works I've also seen, was one of the masters of mid-20C American vernacular opera. His best-known work is Susannah (1955), which sets the biblical story of Susannah and the elders in the Tennessee mountains, but he considered his masterwork to be Of Mice and Men (1970), a straightforward adaptation of the Steinbeck novella.

It's a more chromatic score than I was anticipating, but it's largely lyrical, saving dissonance for crisis scenes, and the presence of a diegetic ballad singing character and a lot of repetition in the lyrics give the music an illusory strophic feel.

Strong singing, easily heard above the (reduced) orchestra, especially from Véronique Filloux as Curley's unnamed wife, Matthew Worth as Slim, and San Jose regular Kirk Eichelberger as Candy. Candy's dog was played by an actual dog, a well-trained golden retriever. Not well-cast for the part, as it didn't act old and sick, but there's only so much you can expect from a dog. Still, an actual dog.

The most remarkable moment musically was a duet between Curley's wife and Lennie (Matthew Pearce), just before she invites him to stroke her hair. It's one of the few extended duets in the opera. Floyd has added Curley's wife deciding to leave him and pursue her dreams of fame in Hollywood, so she sings of that while Lennie sings of his own dreams of having rabbits to pet. It weirdly resonates with all the duets in operatic history between oblivious couples with different dreams, and that these two aren't a couple only makes it weirder. Plus of course that both their dreams are illusory.

There are several other places where the libretto tinkers with the plot. The character of Crooks is gone, partly folded in to Slim and Candy. The farm that George (Robert Mellon) hopes to buy is one he found in a newspaper ad, not that he just knows about somehow. Much of what George says to Lennie is cut. There's no "I got you and you got me" between them. And while, after fighting Curley, Lennie wails to George "You told me to do it," in the opera he never did. Very odd.

Still, a good composition, excellently sung and presented, a pleasant and comfortable theater even with too-narrow seats and a noisy weekend festival going on in the front yard.