Lisa Bielawa: Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser
Orange Mountain Music

Years in the making, Lisa Bielawa's multimedia opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser was first presented in an episodic twelve-part form on the Southern California public television station KCET in June 2017 (online, too) and can now be experienced (and appreciated) anew in this comprehensive DVD-and-double-CD package by Orange Mountain Music. Nearly two-and-a-half hours long, the work pairs the San Francisco-born composer's music with a libretto by Erik Ehn and direction by Charles Otte. On logistical grounds alone, the achievement is staggering: displacing the presentation from a single opera stage set, Vireo was shot in multiple locations, including a monastery on the Hudson River, an abandoned train station in Oakland, and in California's Redwood forests, and one episode was even filmed on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. It's worth noting that Vireo was conceived from the outset as a film-based opera project and thus has little in common with the familiar film document of a staged opera.

The protagonist of Ehn's libretto is Vireo, a fourteen-year-old girl whose visions bring her under the scrutiny of doctors, psychiatrists, and witch-hunters. Adding to the destabilizing nature of the story, the episodes move between medieval Europe, seventeenth-century Salem, and the present. In keeping with a such a saga, the music is often passionate and intense; it never lapses into full derangement, however, and there are also stretches of ruminative material where Bielawa's music advances at a languorous, measured pace. Vireo isn't without lyrical moments, too, the musical character of its passages sensitively geared by the composer to match the emotional tenor at play. As composers go, she's clearly one of the more intrepid. Though many of her works have been presented in the concert hall, some, Vireo included, have been designed for performance in other contexts, a particularly striking example Airfield Broadcasts, an hour-long work for hundreds of musicians that's been presented on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and at Crissy Field in San Francisco.

Among the performers are teenage soprano Rowen Sabala (in the title role), sopranos Emma MacKenzie and Deborah Voigt, mezzo-sopranos Laurie Rubin, Maria Lazarova, and Kirsten Sollek, baritone Gregory Purnhagen, and tenor Ryan Glover; instrumentalists prominently featured include violinists Jennifer Koh and Vijay Gupta, cellist Joshua Roman, harpist Bridget Kibbey, piccolo player Lance Suzuki, toy pianist Kate Campbell, hurdy-gurdy player Randall Matamoros, and drummer Matthias Bossi. Instead of backing its singers with a conventional orchestra, multiple outfits appear, among them Kronos Quartet, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), Alarm Will Sound, PARTCH, PRISM Quartet, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus (Bielawa was Artistic Director of the latter from 2013-18). Hundreds of musicians and singers are called upon for the work's execution, and they're visible, too: in place of the conventional pit orchestra placement, Vireo's musicians are inside the action, visible on camera and very much part of the visual design.

Yet as massive as the forces used for the production are, Vireo possesses the intimate character of a chamber opera. Yes, numerous music ensembles do appear, but generally one at a time, the shift from one to the next mirroring episodic changes within the production. Most of the time, the number of singers performing is small, too, and when a chorus joins in, its size is also modest. A fascinating tension thereby pervades the presentation between the incredible wealth of resources deployed for its realization and the intimate interactions in play at any given moment.

Vocally, the presentation is rather sprechgesang-like, the singers delivering the material in a style occupying a middle ground between melodic delivery and spoken word. In classic opera form, motifs act as unifying elements, their repetition bolstering the evocative impact of the work. Two of the more memorable motifs appear at the outset when a plaintive figure voiced by Kronos violinist David Harrington initiates the opening episode and Sabala, sixteen years old at the time of the opera production, voices her haunting, six-note “My name is Vireo” melody for the first time.

Playing the part of a teenager girl, her delivery is suitably youthful and naturalistic (complemented nicely by MacKenzie, who's often her singing partner). If Bielawa seems especially sensitive to the work's vocal dimension, it's perhaps attributable in part to her own stint as a vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992. Rich vocal polyphony is certainly one of Vireo's distinguishing aspects, its effect enhanced by the clearly discernible contrasts in the singers' voices. Special mention must be made of Sabala, who's required to sustain her performance for the full duration of the production, but Purnhagen, Lazarova, Glover, and Rubin give strong performances, too.

Otte, at one time an assistant to Robert Wilson and the director of Philip Glass's multimedia opera La Belle et La Bete, is well-equipped to take on Vireo's considerable challenges. A somewhat dream-like effect is established when the singers move through the sets with the musicians positioned within the scene and a visible Bielawa conducting. Indicative of the mobility of the handheld camera that tracks the singers is a sequence in episode three (“Needle”) where it follows Vireo up and down stairs as she moves through an auditorium. While a great deal of footage derives from that single camera, other parts feature treatments of various kinds, including layering, mirroring, and multi-image displays; one episode even transitions from black-and-white to colour. Each of the twelve episodes is effective as a stand-alone yet is also effective when experienced as a cumulative whole.

The CD and DVD presentations provide complementary yet rather different experiences. Minus the visuals, the aural-only component accentuates the intimate character of the musical content; with the elaborate visual design included, the DVD emphasizes the complexity of the choreography. The latter also naturally adds greater clarity to the narrative dimension, and it certainly provides no shortage of striking moments, the appearance of Kirtsen Sollek as a cow one of the more memorable (she also appears as a lion). Among the striking visual sequences are ones in episode ten (“Ice on the Sargasso”) that show Vireo and Caroline driving a red Valiant through the snow with hurdy-gurdy player Randall Matamoros in the backseat as well as the image of Koh playing violin with snow falling around her.

May 2019