Little Women: An Opera in Two Acts

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Music reviews of Little Women: An Opera in Two Acts

Music Review: Old Fashioned - Yet Sophisticated
Rating: 4 Stars

Adamo is also a fine librettist. The lyrical moments are verbally poetic which calls forth rapturous music. Look again at Meg's aria. It reads like good poetry. It doesn't rhyme, but it has strong rhythm and some beautiful imagery. And the construction of the recitativo scenes is very well done also. This is not a sung play, but a real operatic libretto.

The drawbacks of the opera are really in the dramatic subject itself. Though Adamo tries to inject drama in the opera by hanging on a conflict between Jo and the passage of time, this is a bit intellectual really. The novel's basic problem is that it is a series of lyric episodes with wonderful characters, but nothing really ever happens. This problem remains in the opera. It is more of a series of lyric scenes ala Eugene Onegin. This can make for moments of boredom for those who prefer opera to be shattering like Wozzeck, or biting like Three Penny Opera.

The one other problem with the opera is that much of the music tend to "Micky Mouse" the stage action, especially in the more playful moments. It can make for a confusing listening experience during some of the scenes. The orchestra is crowded with interesting music motives that are dropped a moment later. Adamo could have taken a page from Russian opera here and organized the scenes with unifying devices, as Mussorgsky does in Boris, or Debussy does in Pelleas. We don't need every emotional shift illustrated in the music...just the big ones.

The performances are uniformly well sung. Stephanie Novacek is wonderful as Jo, and Margaret Lloyd sings "Thing Change" marvelously. Patrick Summers does an expert conducting job.

All in all, this opera deserves it's success. It is lyrical enough to satisfy the old-fashioned opera goer, and yet it is sophisticated in it's harmonic idiom and meaty.

Description of Little Women: An Opera in Two Acts

Little Women is about change and letting go of the past. This theme and the dramatic conflict it engenders are beautifully encapsulated in two fine Act I scenes: Jo's "Look at us, Laurie: we're perfect as we are," and Meg's aria, "Things change." Adamo's music is equal to the challenge of his ambitious agenda. The 18-piece orchestra sounds bigger than it is, perhaps because it's always active, moving the story along on its own or commenting on the characters and action. Adamo writes big arias and unapologetically includes expressive coloratura passages. He even dares to write a Schubertian aria on the text of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land," repeating it (with variations) in English. And he injects some humor into the opera, as heard in the delightful scene of Brook's proposal to Meg, an arch snippet about surtitles, and Jo at the offices of a trashy tabloid. The singers are all first-rate, but the opera rises or falls on Jo, the kind of meaty part singers would kill for. Stephanie Novak is marvelous here, singing with passion and projecting Jo's innocence as well as her journey to self-knowledge. Patrick Summers leads a definitive performance of the opera. The recording is drawn from live performances in March 2000. Ondine, a Finnish company, has done American music proud with this release. --Dan Davis

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