A Tasty Morsel of Things to Come in Opera

Opera is an art form in which the integration of music, drama, pacing and visuals is key, making the experience of opera highlights or excerpts a definitely lesser thing. On the other hand, presenting an opera as a work-in-progress can serve practical and artistic functions, stoking interest in further evolution and/or funding.

Those matters counted in a stripped-down version of composer Robert Strassburg’s new opera, “Congo Square,” on Saturday night. Based on the early years of Walt Whitman, as a journalist in mid-19th century New Orleans, the opera received a “premiere” in teasing, piecemeal form, under the auspices of the opera workshop at Cal State Los Angeles, where Strassburg is a professor emeritus.

Strassburg worked from a libretto by Willard Manus and Andrew Horton. They deal with the wising up of young Whitman (sung solidly by Roger Patterson), who elatedly arrives in this “Paris of the South,” which he finds “throbbing with love, throbbing with life,” especially in “Congo Square,” where the slaves are allowed to bask in indigenous cultural revelry one day a week.

In this short version of the opera, grimmer realities quickly surface. The narrative incorporates an aspiring black opera singer Omar (strongly presented by Aaron Nigel Smith), his female counterpart Amede (Gwendolyn Lytle, a charismatic presence) and a doomed white opera composer (Craig Gilmore, suave of tone and manner) are caught in a tense, potentially melodramatic story. It’s lined with Strassburg’s skilled, tuneful and abidingly tonal musical vocabulary.

The impression was one of a dramatic whole cut into a patchwork. But based on the heartfelt musical evidence, our appetite was whetted to hear more. Ergo, the tease was a success, especially in an age where new American opera is almost unthinkable.