Tobias Picker: Opera Without Words / The Encantadas
Naxos American Classics

Tobias Picker received a 2020 Grammy Award for BMOP/sound's delightful recording of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it's merely one of many operas by the American composer: others include Thérèse Raquin, Dolores Claiborne, and An American Tragedy, and forthcoming are Awakenings and The Danish Girl. This new Naxos American Classics release continues the opera theme but with a twist: Picker set Opera Without Words (2015) to a libretto by Irene Dische that he then removed, the composer preferring to let his richly expressive music speak for itself. The Encantadas (1983), on the other hand, does include voice, but its text, derived from a novella by Herman Melville, is narrated, not sung, in this case by Picker himself. More than three decades separates the writing of the pieces, yet the two form a complementary pair, each capturing in its own way the composer's imaginative sensibility and original compositional approach, and the performances by Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero's direction illuminate these works in a manner that will be hard for others to follow.

Upon receiving a commission to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the Albany Academy, Picker initially considered using Melville's Moby Dick as the text for the work, as the author had attended the school as a boy, but ultimately decided to use selections from The Encantadas (meaning “Enchanted Isles” and an older name for the Galápagos Islands), the 1854-published magazine piece that documents Melville's vivid account of his experiences while at sea on the whaling ship Acushnet. Picker's half-hour treatment provides an enchanting evocation of the site, his music a fitting complement to Melville's picturesque descriptions. The six-movement work, its parts titled alliteratively, unfolds as recollections by an old man reflecting on adventures long ago. In place of a conventional singer, Picker chose the melodrama form whereby recited text is accompanied by music that complements its mood and details. Colourful features of the setting and its creatures are described, allowing the listener to visualize the exotic flora and fauna Melville encountered. It's not tonally one-dimensional: while the otherworldly beauty of the site is conveyed, an undercurrent of menace is present too.

Picker's narration is compelling in its own right. His delivery isn't overly theatrical, but it is musical, and he utters the words clearly and with stentorian conviction. There's a dream-like character to the work, too, a quality openly acknowledged by the opening movement's title “Dream” and its text (“Sometimes, even now, … I recall, as in a dream, my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the Encantadas”). The music's similarly transporting, with Picker's scoring and sensitivity to timbre critical in helping establish moods of menace and mysticism. Belying its title, “Desolation” is surprisingly buoyant considering that its text presents a dispiriting portrait of a parched landscape where only reptiles abide (“Showers refresh the deserts, but in these isles rain never falls … The chief sound of life here is a hiss”). “Delusion” is as rambunctious, with the music marked by agitation and harsh sonorities, after which “Diversity” catalogues the islands' tortoises and birds, the narrator here struck by the agelessness of the former and bemused by the latter; Melville's writing has not only inspired Picker to write music of equally evocative power, it's captivating in its own right. Consider by way of example his portrait of the penguin, “Erect as men... they stand all around the rock like sculptured caryatides … On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops,” a wry characterization Picker musically matches with a comical waltz. Birds likewise inhabit “Din,” with the fifth movement capped by a climax conveying the “dissonant din” generated by the “gannets, black and speckled haglets, jays, sea-hens, sperm- whale birds, gulls of all varieties.” By contrast, “Dawn” ends the work with haunting, quietly majestic music intimating the dissolution of the narrator's dream-state. Picker's music is consistently engaging, with the narrator in places unaccompanied and in others partnered with the full orchestra and elsewhere a single instrument (a melancholy piano passage for the pelican).

The composer's virtuosic command of orchestration and form are equally evident in the five-part Opera Without Words, presented here in its world premiere recording. As mentioned, the work was conceived as an actual opera from which the text and voices were removed, with works such as Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words and purely orchestral recordings of Puccini operas mentioned by way of precedent. After Picker and Dische discussed issues of characters, text setting, and stage directions, he set her words not to voices but to instruments, though a separate version was retained so that Opera Without Words could theoretically be performed with the original words and staging restored. In the absence of the libretto, it's left to the movement titles to suggest a story-line, and one could perhaps glean one from “The Beloved,” “The Minstrel,” “The Idol,” “The Gladiator,” and “The Farewell.” In this instance, however, the listener's better advised to simply experience the material in its instrumental form and reap the considerable rewards it offers. In keeping with its opera-related origins, the piece's emotional terrain is dramatic and encompassing. Episodes of turbulence and bluster alternate with impish, sardonic, and romantic moments, the work treated by Picker as an opportunity to broadly explore symphonic design, melody, mood, and orchestration (special mention must be made of “The Farewell” for the intensity of its emotional outpouring). Horns, percussion, strings, and woodwinds are engaged in equal measure for the realization of Picker's conception. Admittedly, the narration in The Encantadas makes it the more immediately captivating of the two works presented, but each is a distinguished creation that upholds Picker's status as one of contemporary music's preeminent composers.

September 2020