Radical Ritual

J.S. Bach, a sensible man and singularly rational composer, had no place in his life for opera, no calling for the stage. But the stage has repeatedly called for his music. His cantatas and passions have been dramatized by modern directors. Bach has been background for dance, for theater, for cinema.

Now Los Angeles Opera has mounted a production of the Mass in B minor. To put a mass on the lyric stage is a moderately eccentric undertaking for any opera company, slightly more so for a young one that has still but scraped the surface of the conventional operatic repertory. But masses are ritual, ritual is stage-worthy, and Achim Freyer’s stunning production of the B-minor mass unveiled Saturday afternoon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is altogether mesmeric.

It is also, for this young company, a coup. Although a major figure in German theater, opera and the visual arts, Freyer’s stage work in America has not been seen other than his startlingly seductive designs for Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aron” in a production at New York City Opera more than a decade ago. San Francisco Opera has announced a long-famed Freyer production of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischutz” from Stuttgart for the season after next.

There are reasons why Freyer’s work has not been welcomed on American stages. It is wild; it is obscure; it is prohibitively expensive (requiring extensive rehearsal time); and it sometimes angers. A couple of years ago at the Salzburg Festival, I feared that the fuming audience was ready to slit Freyer’s throat because of a new staging that turned the “The Magic Flute” into a circus of clowns. But in subsequent seasons, this sublime production became a hit.

Freyer can also be frustratingly uneven. In the 1980s at Stuttgart Opera, this painter and former associate of Bertolt Brecht mounted his version of a Philip Glass opera trilogy that included exuberantly fantastical and unforgettably beautiful productions of “Satyagraha” (finally released last month on DVD) and “Akhnaten,” along with his own Postmodern deconstruction of the already Pomo deconstructivist “Einstein on the Beach,” which reduced it to an arduous charade of abstract movement and surreal characters floating in space discussing philosophy.

The Mass in B minor, created for the Schwetzingen Festival in 1996, is the successful son of this “Einstein” in that it, too, is a study in abstract movement, and seeks no immediately recognizable visual corollaries to the text. The design--a schematic head painted on the scrim, various drawings of body parts scattered about the stage--appears to be that of a Pomo Leonardo. In interviews, Freyer has explained that, for him, Bach’s mass represents the anatomy of the human soul.

The set is a cube, surrounded by black, spectacularly lit in glowing colors, with images magically appearing and disappearing on scrims. Freyer’s style tends to be to reduce whatever text he is working with to an essential concept (here the dissociated, eyes, ears, arms, feet) and then to mess things up, often with brash, bold, painterly gestures, which can include flamboyant cartoons. Letters and numbers often appear on Freyer’s sets, and they do here as well.

Relegating chorus and solo singers to the pit with the orchestra, Freyer enacts the drama he feels in Bach’s music with nine members of his own ensemble. These shadowy, shrouded, vaguely post-apocalyptic figures with bulbous shoes suggest Giacometti sculptures come to life. They hobble on stage like the walking dead, twitter like machines, fall into ball-like clumps. Acrobats, they assume impossible postures. They stand in a row, arms moving like Shiva as Swiss Army knife. It is a ritual world in which we enter and get lost. Fall for it, and you may never want to leave.

The musical performance added its own curiosities. The tenor-turned-conductor and Bach specialist, Peter Schreier conducted a chamber-size Los Angeles Opera orchestra and chorus. The instruments were modern, but Schreier’s approach featured the quick tempos and clipped articulation advocated by authorities in early music performance practices.

The playing and singing was light, with dancing rhythms, all impressively demonstrating the heartening improvement of orchestra and chorus.

Bach’s mass is essentially a choral work, with the occasional aria or duet, and some opera-goers are likely to feel shortchanged by having four young German singers--soprano Simone Nold, alto Annekathrin Laabs, tenor Marcus Ullmann and baritone Stephan Loges--not only hidden in the pit but also acoustically remote. At least from a seat in the orchestra section (the sound from the pit tends to rise more efficiently to the balconies), these singers sounded distant and small-voiced, their individual roles approaching accompaniment.

That, for some opera-goers, may be too high a price to pay for this arresting theatrical experiment. I thought I heard a boo or two (boos and bravos can sound oddly alike), but most of the audience Saturday seemed riveted by the experience. I have never sat among a Los Angeles Opera audience so quiet, so focused, so continuously rapt in its attention. And I hope as word gets around about this production, it widens the scope of opera going. Anyone who cares about music, dance, theater, the visual arts, the elevation of the spirit or the divine made manifest has reason to visit the Music Center.

*

Bach’s Mass in B minor repeats Wednesday and Saturday, Feb. 13 and 15 at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 16 at 2 p.m., $34-$165, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. (213) 365-3500.