Paul Moravec: The Overlook Hotel: The Suite From “The Shining”
BMOP/sound

Paul Moravec & Mark Campbell: The Shining
Pentatone

With two releases appearing at virtually the same time, Paul Moravec (b.1957) is having, as it's said, a moment. He's hardly an unknown quantity—the American composer's produced over 200 orchestral, opera, chamber, choral, and lyric pieces and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2004—but the time seems ripe for a renewed appreciation. A clear through-line connects the releases when the world-premiere recording of his two-act opera The Shining leads naturally into the recent set by Gil Rose and the BMOP that couples the suite from the opera, The Overlook Hotel, with three other works.

Created by Moravec and renowned librettist Mark Campbell (b. 1953), The Shining is based, of course, on the 1977 Stephen King novel that inspired the memorable film version by Stanley Kubrick. The opera was commissioned by Minnesota Opera and received its world premiere in St. Paul in May 2016. Subsequent stagings occurred in Colorado, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Kansas, with this presentation by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City Chorus, Kansas City Symphony, and conductor Gerard Schwarz captured live in March 2023. Since its premiere, it's been a critical and popular success, and certainly the general familiarity of the story serves as an ongoing enticement for operagoers. In the key roles are baritone Edward Parks, soprano Kelly Kaduce, and treble Tristan Hallett as Jack, Wendy, and Danny (“Doc”) Torrance, plus bass-baritone Aubrey Allicock (Dick Halloran), tenor Roger Honeywell (Lloyd, the bartender), tenor Wayd Odle (Delbert Grady), and baritone Malcolm MacKenzie (Mark Torrance, Jack's father).

In simplest terms, the story revolves around Jack, who's been hired as the caretaker for the remote Overlook Hotel in western Colorado in fall 1975, and his wife Wendy and son Danny. Gruesome secrets about the hotel's troubling past involving murders, suicide, and Mafia mob hits are discovered by Jack as Danny's psychic abilities likewise reveal themselves. Jack is driven to kill his family as a blizzard approaches and, with him descending further into madness, hotel apparitions appear. Ultimately, he decides to let his family live and with them out of harm's way perishes when the hotel's boiler detonates and the building goes up in flames.

Campbell largely hews to the novel's story-line—how could he do otherwise?—though some changes were made. While all three tellings are primarily set at the Overlook, the opera's replaces the snowy maze sequence in the film with a calming epilogue set at a Maine hotel; the time frame's also been compressed from months to weeks, and the role of Jack's abusive father is expanded in the opera. Differences notwithstanding, the opera's trajectory is consistent with those of the novel and film in presenting a story that grows progressively more harrowing, with the mayhem of the physical action developing in concert with Jack's psychic fracturing. Moravec's score uses leitmotifs for the characters that evolve in tandem with the narrative's unfolding and uses foreboding orchestral interludes to foreshadow the nightmarish developments to come. It's the repeated oscillation between natural and supernatural events, as well as the swooning ballroom sequences with its partygoers, that amplifies the disconnection Jack undergoes as the weeks pass.

Opening portentously, the music quickly establishes the unsettling sound-world of the opera. In the early going, rhapsodic passages convey the hope the family feels upon arrival at the hotel and the promise the future holds. Darkness floods into the score but incrementally, and Moravec reflects the dramatically contrasting emotional shadings of the narrative in his writing and orchestration. As expected, urgency, intensity, and agitation escalate in the second act as Jack's grasp on reality loosens. Being a recording of a live performance, onstage noise surfaces now and then, and the occasional humorous interjection induces titters of audience laughter. A bit of profanity appears too, a reminder that the opera was created in 2016, not centuries ago. Understandably, the performance, 108 minutes in total, doesn't have the pristine clarity of an in-studio recording but is certainly clear enough.

Roaring with Herculean force, Parks is effective at conveying the mounting threat Jack poses. As Wendy, Kaduce conveys the distress of a wife confronted by an increasingly unhinged partner (though a slightly less pronounced vibrato would have been preferred), and in a critical role Hallett performs solidly as Danny; Allicock, as the boy's friend and confidante Halloran, Odle (Grady), and Honeywell (Lloyd) are excellent also. Arias aren't abundant, though the one by Wendy in the first act's third scene (“I never stopped loving you”) is rendered beautifully by Kaduce, and the one with which Halloran concludes the work (“These woeful days”) is movingly delivered by Allicock.

It's proven to be a popular opera, but is The Shining a ‘great' one? While every work should be assessed on its own terms, it's not in the same league as a musically brilliant creation such as, for example, Berg's Wozzeck, and were a critics' poll conducted to determine the greatest recent American opera between The Shining, Kevin Puts' The Hours, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, and John Corigliano's The Lord of Cries, I'd be surprised to see The Shining top the list. Regardless, Pentatone honours Moravec and Campbell's creation with its customary deluxe presentation, here a sturdy box containing the two CDs and a booklet featuring commentaries, synopses, photos, and, thankfully, the libretto. As it always does, the label spares no expense in presenting its products handsomely and with integrity.

A superb complement to The Shining is the seventy-minute portrait disc from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and conductor Gil Rose featuring four orchestral works by the composer. The featured attraction is The Overlook Hotel, Moravec's opera suite, but the three others are as deserving of attention. The company has been a long-time advocate of the composer, with releases issued in 2012 (Northern Lights Electric) and 2017 (The Blizzard Voices) also featuring his material.

While three of the pieces have to do with physical structures, the imaginary Overlook Hotel, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the Great Western Staircase in the New York State Capitol Building in Albany, Moravec's quick to clarify that it's the emotions, memories, and thoughts engendered by these spaces that interest him most and not so much the structures themselves. With its associations with visceral horror well-established, the hotel offers plenty of dramatic material with which to work. Likewise, so many momentous historical events are associated with the majestic Brandenburg Gate, it too lends itself to a musical treatment. Thirdly, Serenade is Moravec's musical homage to the sculpted faces and figures carved into the Western Staircase of the Capitol Building. The outlier here is thus the ballet score Scorpio Dances, though it's in no way a lesser work for being so. The Overlook piece is scored for a full orchestra, the others for chamber.

As resoundingly shown by the opera, Moravec's writing is directed by the content of the piece in question. Rather than fit subject matter into some pre-ordained musical conception, in other words, he lets himself be creatively guided by the character of the piece in front of him. As a result, it's as possible for one work to draw for inspiration from Bach and another atonality—even if harmonically Moravec's music is grounded in the tonal tradition. Emotional expression is as important as formal and technical considerations, such that a typical work by the composer satisfies on multiple grounds.

Having dealt with the opera already, little in the way of background detail is needed for The Overlook Hotel, except perhaps to clarify that the suite focuses less on the Torrances and more on the hotel's ghostly denizens, among them Grady, Lloyd, and Mrs. Massey, the dead lady in room 217, and the ‘40s-styled dance-hall music with its phantom celebrants. Given that focus, it makes sense that the ominous, oft-queasy music would drift in a rather hallucinatory manner from one episode to the next, the mood uneasy, the tone haunted, and the structure collage-like. Nightmarish glissandos and quasi-romantic episodes alternate with buoyant swing, the transitions at times abrupt and jarring. Moravec exploits the BMOP's timbral resources to maximum effect, with percussion, harp, piano, strings, and horns combining to bring the disorienting visions into being. The impression created is of past and present intermingling and memories and thoughts swimming together.

For the ballet score Scorpio Dances, Moravec looked for inspiration to George Steinmetz's desert photographs. Presented in a fifteen-minute single-movement form, the music is predictably less unsettling than that in The Overlook Hotel suite and, despite the high-energy churn of its opening section, considerably more serene and soothing. As the music gradually settles, it begins to exude a somewhat pastoral quality that suggests wide-open spaces. Passages flow elegantly together in orchestral writing that's alluring, enveloping, and elegiac, and flute and clarinet add to the outdoorsy warmth of the music. If the opening calls John Adams to mind, what comes after invites comparison to Copland and Barber.

As mentioned, Serenade was inspired by the ornate Great Western Staircase at the New York State Capitol. Also known as the “Million Dollar Staircase,” it required fourteen years to complete, involved over 500 stone carvers, and displays historical figures, regular folks, and even animals. The composer's conception advances through four parts, beginning with a stately “Ascent” that, in fact, undertakes a step-by-step climb and in doing so conveys a sincere and tender yearning. The noble second movement “Capitol Unknowns—Part I” pays heartfelt tribute to the memory of non-famous personages, its strings-heavy outpourings deeply felt and affecting. The light-hearted scherzo “Capitol Critters” evokes the image of cats and squirrels scampering up and down the stairs, after which “Capitol Unknowns—Part II” reinstates the dignified grandeur of the second movement.

Patterned after J. S. Bach's second Brandenburg Concerto, Moravec's Brandenburg Gate is his attempt to capture the spirit of joy felt by Berliners and citizens around the world when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Presented in a tripartite, fast-slow-fast format, the work uses as its foundation the infamous B.A.C.H. motif Moravec's historical predecessor used as a type of musical signature and that has been liberally worked into this 2008 creation. The rhythmically driving opening movement hurtles forth with unbridled enthusiasm, its swagger countered by the subtly eerie repose of the central movement. Four soloists perform alongside the chamber ensemble, with the violinist, for example, playing a tender solo and the flutist, trumpeter, and bass clarinetist all enjoying moments in the spotlight. Moravec describes the ample use of pizzicato in the exuberant closing movement as onomatopoeic in suggesting the sound of “hammers and chisels picking away at the Berlin Wall.”

The Overlook Hotel might be the presumed attention-getter, but the others, Scorpio Dances perhaps most of all, are hardly secondary to it. No matter the piece, Moravec's music is performed splendidly by the BMOP and Rose, and once again the company has done the composer and the listening audience a great service in making such material physically available and in such fine form. As the orchestra inches ever closer to its 100th formal release—Moravec's is its ninety-seventh—there's no better time than the present to acknowledge the vital contribution Rose and the ensemble have made to the contemporary music landscape.

April 2024