Here’s the second part of my recent interview with conductor Anne Manson. Our focus at this point shifted to a discussion of Orphée and to some of the various musical aspects of Glass’ score.

BK: It seems to me that once you get into opera and works for the stage, it’s possible to make a stronger connection to our own experiences. We can relate to something there in a way that we can’t in Verdi or Puccini, where the music there often feeds our emotional responses. In a piece like Orphée, the music doesn’t do that.

AM: [Orphée] is first and foremost a piece of theater, and that’s part of the success of Philip Glass’ music when he writes for the stage. He understands something about theater, and I think that this opera connects with us because it’s a very, very strong piece of theater. Also, in a very strong production.

BK: In thinking about the sound world of the opera, there is an evocation of French music…

AM: Absolutely.

BK: …which at times reminds me of Poulenc or Milhaud, but I’d be hard pressed to pin that down.

AM: I heard that he wrote this piece, or he wrote a lot of it, when he was living in France for a year. I don’t know if that’s true or not. There’s definitely a French kind of harmonic world – I think more of a kind of Satie-like world—and he uses that more in the voices than in the [accompaniment, which is] fairly diatonic. A lot of the extended harmonies – the major 7ths and minor 9ths and so forth – are in the voices, but I do think that it gives what sounds to our ear a very French color. And it’s not just that. The way he sets the language, he’s trying to set the language in a naturalistic way. He’s not setting it in a chanting, Satyagraha, way. He’s trying to write a through-composed piece, so the orchestration, what we play in the orchestra, does not sound like what you’d get in a through-composed piece, but the voices are written that way.

BK: At times the vocal line seems to be closely tied to the harmonic content, and at other times the connection is just barely there.

AM: Yes. And it’s quite difficult to pitch.

BK: It’s a very interesting effect, and it seems to imply that the two are operating on different planes. You have the accompaniment and you have the vocal line, which is almost like spoken dialogue in a film. They’re not necessarily pitched together.

AM: In working through the piece and hearing them sing it and watching them act it and sing it at the same time, I do wonder whether [Glass] uses those dissonant moments to show some degree of strangeness, or a step removed, something that’s a little out of reality. And a lot of the piece is, you’re not sure what reality is.

BK: One of the other thing I’ve noticed is the unusual phrase structure. There’ll often be large sections within a scene where we get four- bar and five-bar phrases.

AM: Yes.

BK: And within the same scene, [Glass] also has a nested section written just in four-bar phrases. The analyst in me wants to see some connection between this and the drama. But I also wonder if that’s related in any way to Glass’ involvement in writing film music, where a scene will have its own internal rhythm that the music has to match. Maybe it’s a way of notating that flexibility.

AM: I don’t know about that. I saw the film [Orphée] when I was preparing the opera the first time and it’s been several years since I’ve seen it. I don’t know whether, within the actual pacing of an individual scene, he’s trying to capture the timing of the film.

BK: That irregular phrase structure really stood out when I played through the piece. And in the scene in the second act after Orphée, Eurydice, and Heurtebise return from the underworld, it helps to reinforce the off-kilter situation they find themselves in. At other times, it’s not immediately obvious and might be entirely subconscious.

AM: In that scene with the three of them – you mean the scene that’s really hard [laughs] – I think [Glass] is shooting for a little bit of a French farce feeling, so it’s all moving kind of fast and funny.

BK: And with the alternating meters, everything is just a bit off its axis at that point.

AM: Right, right.

BK: We should probably address a few of the perceptions – or misperceptions – some people have about Glass’ music. I’m coming to realize that Orphée has an especially rich score, and I suspect that audiences may find some of their assumptions thrown into question when they experience it.

AM: One of the things that happened when I was preparing this piece was that I spoke to a composer I know who knows Philip’s music and knows Philip, and also who has a friend who plays in his ensemble, and he said that one of things people don’t always realize about Philip is that when he plays his own music, it’s quite free. He takes time, he expands. I saw him do [a concert version of] Einstein on the Beach at Carnegie Hall just a year or a year a half so ago, and my friend was absolutely right. It doesn’t have a rigid quality that I think people sometimes associate with this music. And I’ve tried very hard to do that with this opera, to choose points where it can be free and let it be free. I’ve talked to the orchestra a lot about listening to the stage and following the stage, so that we’re not putting the singers in a strait jacket. There are certain scenes, like the one you were just describing, where it goes and they just have to stay with us, but there’s a fair amount of flexibility. I feel the more you take advantage of that flexibility, the richer the piece gets.

BK: And he notates some of that flexibility. In Act One, the very end of the scene between Eurydice and Heurtebise…

AM: Exactly.

BK: The shifts in meter seem to suggest again the flexible rhythms of a film scene.

AM: But I also think it suggests a very effective use of theater. [Glass has] got a sense of the stage and of what’s happening between the two of them and he leaves a kind of breath there, a kind of pregnant breath, and if you take advantages of these moments, the piece really starts to breathe. It gets richer and it gets warmer. There’s a lot of room in this piece for warm, cantabile playing. Not rigid, clean playing, but changes of color in how you approach different sections, and I think that also gives the piece depth. I don’t know exactly how it works or why it works, but I can tell you it works. And at the end you can tell as a performer whether you feel you’ve made a satisfying journey or not. And even though the ending is unresolved, you feel it’s been an incredibly satisfying journey, and that’s partly because the music has variation in color and form and rhythm, and possibilities for expanding and possibilities for warmth, and also sometimes rhythmic drive that forces the action forward. I think there’s a fairly broad palette here that we can take advantage of, and that’s part of what makes it successful.

BK: You mentioned the lack of resolution. Another very effective device is that last chord [juxtaposing C minor and C major], a kind of musical and dramatic question mark…

AM: Exactly! The final chord! Sometimes I put that chord down and I wonder, will people know…

BK: It’s very different from the ending of Cocteau’s film, where the music is, in a strange way, more triumphant.

AM: I think the film gives more of an impression of a happy ending between Orphée and Eurydice. Certainly in this case, in this production, the ending is very open.

BK: The fact that things aren’t wrapped up at the end certainly gets us thinking about what’s happened and about the relationships that exist between these characters.

AM: It’s important to point out that it is a piece of theater and it will make you think, but you don’t have to think. It’s not something that’s going to be a huge challenge when you walk in, because what goes on is kind of entrancing, you get taken up by it. So it’s not a piece where you have to think, “Alright, here we go. We’re going to improve ourselves.” It’s very easy to watch and get caught up in this world and yet it also stimulates you. At Glimmerglass, people go out and have a box lunch or box supper at the interval, and you’d hear people asking [as soon as they left], “What does the Princess mean?”, “What does Orphée mean?”, everybody talking to each other…and it was really rewarding to hear that…a real level of engaged involvement on the part of the audience.

BK: Just one more question before we wrap up. What is it like to come back to this piece after a couple of years away from it?

AM: It’s really nice. It’s really nice. We worked very hard on it, not just to get the notes right, but to develop it as a work, to see where it took us, and it feels like a real luxury to come back to it again.

I interviewed Anne Manson, the conductor of Portland Opera’s current production of Orphée, two weeks ago today, but because of lingering problems with my recording software, I’ve only just been able to piece the audio portion of our session together in order to transcribe it for posting. My sincerest apologies to Anne for this unexpected technical delay.

Here is the first part of our conversation, in which I asked her to talk about her musical background and her interest in contemporary and 20th-century music.

BK: Did you grow up in a musical household?

AM: My sister and I always played instruments from a young age, so we were always playing together, duets and so on. And later when we got older, we got friends together to do Brandenburgs and that kind of thing. So there was a lot of music in our house. My father is not a musician, neither of my parents are musicians. But my father is English and grew up during the war in England and he went regularly to concerts and that what basically got him through the war I think. [Laughs] So he just loves music. He had lots of recordings and he played them a lot and he loved to listen to us play, even it was probably a horrible sound in the early stages. [Laughs] So it was a household that was really full of music.

BK: Was there a defining musical moment for you early on?

AM: Well, the defining musical moment for me was the one summer I got to go to Tanglewood in the Young Musicians program. And that was a bit of a turning point for me, because I had always done a lot of music and enjoyed music, but that was an intense immersion in music. And my teachers were musicians but we didn’t know a lot of musicians, and I wasn’t exposed to musicians or what musical life might be. So it was the first time I was in that context with a lot of people who had music as their life.

BK: How old were you?

AM: I was fifteen.

BK: You enrolled at Harvard as a premed student. How long were you in that program?

AM: Well, it isn’t a program. You just do the courses that you need. I started out majoring in a combined degree called history and literature, and after a year or so I switched and majored in music, and then I did science classes as well. I didn’t major in biology or chemistry or anything like that.

BK: We tend to think of the sciences and the arts as compartmentalized activities, but I’d say there are some strong connections.

AM: There are some very strong connections. Most of the people I played with or sang with in college were majoring in math or physics. I actually think that science and math are very creative. They both have the intensely creative, imaginative side, and they have the side which is a lot of repetitive work. And we have the same.

BK: How did you end up in London?

AM: [In the fall of 1983], I started at the Royal College of Music, and then after I was there for several years – I had a scholarship to study there – they took me on as a fellow at the Royal Northern College of Music and I spent two years in Manchester. The fellows there do a lot of conducting and are almost members of staff, kind of a cross between a student and a member of staff. You run the contemporary music ensemble—that was when I started to get very interested in contemporary music—and then you also conduct orchestral concerts sometimes. You have supervisors who give you advice.

BK: That was around the same time as Mecklenbergh Opera.

AM: What happened was that I did a production of Figaro with an English director—theater director, really, not so much an opera director—and after we did it he suggested that we start an opera company together and we did, and that was Mecklenburgh Opera. And out first production was in 1988.

BK: How long did the company last?

AM: I was with Mecklenburgh Opera until 1996.

BK: Did Mecklenbergh program only contemporary music?

AM: No, no. It was 20^th-century. Initially we wanted to do operas that were being done in Europe, a lot of them were from Central and Eastern Europe that were simply not being seen in Britain or in Western Europe. So that’s what we started out doing, and then we started doing a broader range of 20^th-century chamber opera and also commissioning new operas ourselves from British composers.

BK: I’m interested in how performers gravitate towards certain repertoire. Is there something about 20^th-century or contemporary music that connects with you?

AM: I don’t know if I can define that. I’ve always done contemporary music and I’ve always loved 20^th-century music, and even early 20^th-century music – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and so forth. But to me, nothing is more sublime than a Mozart opera. And in orchestral repertoire, I do a lot of Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms – central classical repertoire. There’s no question that there are works I connect to and works I don’t connect to, at least not as a conductor. I do not connect to the Tchaikovsky symphonies as a conductor, but there’s a huge range of music that I do connect with. I find it very rewarding to work on pieces by living composers and to have contact with living composers. I truly believe that it enriches audiences’ experiences to listen to that music. I really think we can’t just listen to the music of dead people, even though that’s some of the greatest music and it would be a pretty poor life without it. We need to broaden ourselves, and that also enriches our experience when we listen to a Mahler symphony or a Puccini opera. I wouldn’t say that I’m more drawn to contemporary music than a Brahms symphony, but one of the great things about being a conductor is that you have this incredibly broad, rich repertoire, and I feel incredibly lucky that we have it.

I had lunch yesterday afternoon with Laura Grimes, who recently left the Oregonian to take up as Managing Director of Third Angle New Music Ensemble. We chatted about a few of the group’s upcoming projects, the future of print and electronic media in the area, and the value of collaboration among local arts organizations. (As some of you may recall, Laura and her husband, Bob Hicks of Art Scatter, were early supporters of this blog, so I always enjoy touching base with the two of them whenever possible.)

Speaking of collaborative efforts, one very cool piece of news to come out of our meeting is that Third Angle will be the pit orchestra for the Portland Opera Studio Artists’ production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, which opens at the Newmark Theatre in late May and early April. This venture marks an ongoing partnership with the Opera and other performing groups in the city, which in the past has included BodyVox (Carmina Burana, The Foot Operas) and Portland Baroque Orchestra (La Calisto).

Philip Cutlip as Orphée (Photo courtesy Portland Opera/Cory Weaver)

I first met baritone Philip Cutlip, who’s singing the title role in Portland Opera’s current production of Orphée, at the University of Puget Sound in the mid-1980s. We were in the Adelphian Concert Choir, we took several classes together, and we hung around with many of the same people. Although Philip and I eventually lost contact, we reconnected when he was in town a little over a year ago to sing the solo bass part in Beethoven’s Ninth with the Oregon Symphony. We re-reconnected just a few weeks back during the final set of Orphée staging rehearsals, and last week we found time to grab some lunch, catch up a bit, and talk about the opera. Here’s a portion of our discussion.

BK: You were here a little over a year ago September for the Beethoven Ninth with the Oregon Symphony. What have you been up to since then?

PC:  I’ve been singing pretty steadily in the last year. I did another concert after that, I did Pearl Fishers, I got to go to Amsterdam and sing at the Concertgebouw for the first time. I got to sing some Bach cantatas with Frans Bruggen. I did some auditioning, and then I sang a bunch of Messiahs with [Nicholas] McGegan and [other conductors] in December…I went to Barcelona again last summer for the month of July to sing [the Mandarin] in Turandot. That was sort of my paid Spanish vacation. And then I did Pearl Fishers again in Minneapolis. And then I came here.

BK: Where do you go after this?

PC: I get to go home for two days and then I go to sing Valentin in [a concert performance of] Faust in Washington, D.C. There’s a company called Washington Concert Opera. Then I actually get to stay home for three weeks, and I have some time off. I have one week of concerts in December, and then I get to hang around home for about a month or a month and a half and be with my son. And I can’t wait.

BK: So you’re in a pretty good place in career right now.

PC: Yeah, singers always complain about two things – having too much work and not having enough work. When it rains, it pours…I have some gaps that are making me nervous. [A bit later in the interview, Philip elaborated on this point. "I'm making a living. I'm a successful singer. I'm not a superstar. But I'm gone a lot. When I count up my days for the IRS and it's often over 200 days a year that I'm not home."]

BK: Your association with Glass goes back to, what, 1995 or 1996?

PC: I think I must have auditioned in 1995.

BK: And that was for Les enfants terribles?

PC: Yes. And we rehearsed that a lot. I think it was in the winter of 1996. We debuted it in Zug, Switzerland. [Glass] played – he didn’t do every single performance, but I’d say he did about three-quarters or more of them. I don’t know how many we did total, but we did a lot. We must have done at least 70 or 80 performances between the European tour and then the U.S. tour.

BK: Was the recording [of Les enfant terribles] made during the run, or was that a separate project?

PC: It was separate. It was a studio recording, where we were all separately recorded on different days.

BK: What was Glass like to work with?

PC: Totally as you would expect from the way he talks.  As a performer, he’s not a control freak at all. He was one of the keyboardists – there were three keyboardists – and we had a conductor, and about half of her job was making sure that Philip Glass didn’t watch the show and forget to play. He would admit that. He would just say, “I get so entranced with what’s going on onstage that I lose concentration.” So she would be bringing him in at the right time. That was pretty funny. But he was so laid back and always ready to chat about philosophical concepts or that kind of thing. One of the singers on the tour was also a budding composer, so he talked to Philip a lot about the art of being a composer. Not just composing but what you have to do to sell your product.

BK: How did you land the role of Orphée at Glimmerglass in 2007?

PC: How did I get hired? I know they had cast somebody else. I hadn’t auditioned or anything. I got a call because that guy had canceled in about November or December of 2006, and I knew then that they thought, “Who’s the Philip Glass baritone?”, and that’s what got me the job. And it was just offered to me on a plate, if I wanted to do it, which was great. And I think that, in general, I just fit the role really well, in terms of my body type and my voice. The [original singer] may have had reservations about singing the role because it’s really high, it’s an unusually placed role vocally. And it just worked out great, though. But they mailed me the score – I said I had to look at the score before I can accept the job, and I [thumbed through it] and went, “Yeah, I can sing all those notes,” and I didn’t look at it again for several months. But then when I started really working on it, I thought this is going to be torture, because it was so high and hard….[At the time] I just couldn’t imagine it being anything but a job. But it actually turned out to be something pretty spectacular.

BK: How long did you work on the role?

PC: To learn the role took me a long time. And I did something that I’ve never done before. I programmed it all into my computer using a music notation software called Sibelius. There wasn’t a recording, and I often use a recording as a memorization tool, and I’ll either record myself with a pianist, or find an existing recording if it’s a standard repertoire piece. I just made my own recording. I recorded everybody’s part, so it was like a multi-track recording of me singing everyone’s role. Even the Princess and Heurtebise. I just sang it a lot. It had to find its way into my voice. I had to find a way to sing it healthfully and in a way that didn’t just kill me, because it’s really high. It’s not as high as Pelleas, but the tessitura hangs high. And we did lots and lots of changes in rhythms to make the French a little more natural sounding.

BK: When you were preparing this role, did you watch the film?

PC: Oh, yeah. I watched the film early on. And I thought at first all of this is kind of campy [and] dated. But it was kind of mesmerizing after a while. Some of those images.

BK: What was it like coming back to the role after having been away from it for a couple of years?

PC: It was nice. I’ve never repeated a production before either, which is great, particularly this one, which is so special and specific and non-traditional. The first time around was a huge, huge amount of work, because the framework Sam [Helfrich, the director] gave us was bare bones, and together we all fleshed it out. This time, we did things differently, but a lot of it was based on the Glimmerglass [production].

BK: It’s not typical to have the opportunity of working with the same people again.

PC: No. And I hope it keeps going, they keep doing it everywhere…

BK: I just have to say that I want to live in that set.

PC: It’s a great set. It’s great when we would take breaks. Everyone just sits down on the couch. Usually you’re just stuck sitting on weird, uncomfortable furniture, but here you’ve got beds, magazines.

BK: It looks like a condo in the Pearl District.

PC: It’s very comfy, very cool.

BK: You mentioned Glass’ involvement with Les enfants terribles in 1996. Was he involved at all with the Glimmerglass production of Orphée?

PC: There was a plan to get him up there, but he couldn’t do it. And as he said to us, “I really wish I could come to your opening, but I’m going to be somewhere else. I’ve got to make a living.” He’s like the hardest working man in minimalism. [Laughs] He just keeps going and going. [During the European tour of Les enfants terribles] we’d have three days off – we’d be going from Athens to Palermo—so we’d get three days off because we had to drive the set and we flew, and Philip would go to Beijing or somewhere so he could play a concert or give a symposium. He was always on the go.

BK: This is the first time he’s seen this production?

PC: Yeah. He probably hadn’t seen the opera or listened to it or anything since the mid-90s, so I’m sure it had been twelve, thirteen years. I know he was pleased. You could just tell.

As we finished eating I asked Philip how he would describe Orphée to potentially apprehensive audience members. “It’s great theater,” he said. “It’s a theatrical experience. It’s the sum of its parts and it’s great.”

I had hoped to have something posted this morning in anticipation of tonight’s performance of Orphée, but between running errands and prepping for my pre-opera talk (one hour before curtain in the first balcony), there just hasn’t been any time.

In lieu of that, let me at least share a few of Cory Weaver’s excellent production photos from Monday’s orchestra dress.

From this morning’s Philip Glass round table – my brush with greatness.

Thanks to Operaman for having his camera at the ready.

I’m off to meet Operaman for coffee, and then we’re both heading over to the Portland Opera offices, where we’ll join other local journalists and bloggers for a round table discussion/interview with Philip Glass.

Stay tuned for more on that later this afternoon…

UPDATE: In addition to Operaman and myself, the “other local journalists and bloggers” at this morning’s round table were James Bash (Northwest Reverb and Oregon Music News), Bob Hicks (Art Scatter), Marty Hughley (The Oregonian), and Brett Campbell (Willamette Week).

I’ll have a separate post up about the event–complete with photos–shortly.

Here are a few of titles I’ve been reading in preparation for my pre-performance talks on Orphée.

1. Philip Glass, Music by Philip Glass (Da Capo)
2. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Writings on Glass: essays, interviews, criticism (Schirmer)
3. Robert Maycock, Glass: a portrait (Sanctuary)
4. K. Robert Schwartz, Minimalists (Phaidon)
5. Keith Potter, Four musical minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge)
6. Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Indiana)
7. Robert Hughes, American visions: the epic history of art in America (Alfred A. Knopf)
8. James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (Reaktion)

An ad for Cutty Sark in the October 25, 1982, issue of Newsweek, featuring Philip Glass.

Here’s something I put together yesterday to illustrate how music can influence the way we perceive and interpret visual imagery.

The following clip comes at the very end of Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 film, Koyaanisqatsi, and includes Philip Glass’s original score.

That same scene, except now with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Did your perception of what you saw on screen change at all after watching the second video?

I’ve got my own ideas about this, which I’ll share later. For now, I’m more interested in your responses, so please post them here.