United States Sarah Kirkland Snider, Hildegard: Soloists, Members of the Orchestra of LA Opera / Gabriel Crouch (conductor). The Wallis Annenberg Middle for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, 6.11.2025. (JRo)
In an exquisitely wrought rating, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider brings the soundworld of the medieval polymath Hildegard von Bingen to life on the opera stage. Snider’s earlier work included the tune cycles Penelope and Unremembered, however that is her first foray into opera – she wrote the music and the libretto. Her music is hypnotic and non secular, evoking each Hildegard’s compositions and Minimalism. It’s a chic rating that at moments blossoms into excessive drama, defying expectations and creating actual pathos.
As Hildegard, soprano Nola Richardson was the centerpiece of the manufacturing, focusing the opera along with her dramatic presence and the crystalline great thing about her voice. The manufacturing was over two hours lengthy, and she or he was on the stage and singing for many of the night. With an instrument as stunning as Richardson’s, I used to be laborious pressed to know why she and the remainder of the solid wanted amplification. I longed to listen to the purity of her sound with out the homogenizing impact of a lavalier microphone. The Wallis is an intimate area with wonderful acoustics, which made the choice much more perplexing.
Snider’s instrumentation was excellent. Eleven members of the LA Opera Orchestra had been fastidiously performed by Gabriel Crouch. The harp signaled the non secular, the winds had been in dialogue with the voice and the strings enveloped the singers.
If the music was superb, the idea was much less so. Hildegard’s accomplishments in music, drugs, philosophy, writing and pure historical past had been overshadowed by the non-public, social and political implications of her life. These included her (maybe) romantic love for Richardis von Stade, a younger nun, and the bodily sufferings of the 2 girls (Hildegard with migraine, Richardis with epilepsy). There have been Hildegard’s conflicts with the patriarchy within the particular person of Abbot Cuno, and the rape of Richardis and a subsequent being pregnant. All this contributed to the narrative, however it was overplayed to the detriment of Hildegard the artist.
Because the timorous Richardis, Mikaela Bennett’s heat and lustrous soprano was a dramatic counterpart to Richardson’s Hildegard. The supple baritone of David Adam Moore contrasted effectively with the rigidity of his persona as head of the Abbey the place Hildegard and her nuns had been sequestered. Roy Hage was a sympathetic Volmar, a monk and Hildegard’s confidant. Mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert as Margravine von Stade was a drive to be reckoned with each in voice and characterization.
Beth Morrison, a inventive producer identified for championing new opera and music theatre, has plans to tour the manufacturing in a wide range of venues. This necessitated the design of an adaptable set to be repurposed for small levels and black field theatres. Within the elegant area supplied by the Wallis, nonetheless, the set felt undersized and flimsy. A extra expansive imaginative and prescient was wanted to fill the stage – maybe within the vein of Robert Wilson’s Minimalist aesthetic. Marsha Ginsberg designed a good-looking, movable golden field with round openings that served as a research and scriptorium and two fashions of German abbeys, however these had been dwarfed by the proportions of the stage and proscenium.
The video designs of Deborah Johnson had been projected onto a tall rectangular backdrop. Foregoing using Richardis’s illustration model (her illuminations might be present in a model of Scivias) or medieval portray of the interval, Johnson created an amorphous model of crude, hazy pictures of saints, objects and panorama. This gave a ‘new age’ high quality to the visuals and positioned the good twelfth-century Hildegard in a imprecise setting with out specificity to time or place. One picture of frolicking nuns in a bathe of moondust would have delighted Isadora Duncan.
The path of Elkhanah Pulitzer was usually delicate, save for the inclusion of the dancing devils of Hildegard’s nightmare and the clumsy shifting of furnishings onstage by the solid (although I did benefit from the machinations of two masked vultures who lent a hand). Costumes by Molly Irelan had been easy and harmonious, hand gestures designed by Laurel Jenkins lent poetry to the motion of the characters, and the lighting by Pablo Santiago was subdued and applicable.
As a first-time librettist, Snider trusted the collaboration of the directorial and manufacturing workforce and, maybe due to that, the opera felt like a piece in progress. As a composer, nonetheless, she wanted solely her distinctive expertise to create a mesmerizing and transcendent rating, one that’s certain to endure.
Jane Rosenberg
Featured Picture: Nola Richardson (Hildegard) and Chloë Engel (Faceless girl) © Angel Origgi
Manufacturing:
Libretto – Sarah Kirkland Snider
Director – Elkhanah Pulitzer
Inventive producer – Beth Morrison
Units – Marsha Ginsberg
Costumes – Molly Irelan
Lighting – Pablo Santiago
Projection – Deborah Johnson
Sound – Drew Sensue-Weinstein
Motion – Laurel Jenkins
Dramaturg – Annie Jin Wang
Solid:
Hildegard von Bingen – Nola Richardson
Richardis von Stade – Mikaela Bennett
Abbot Cuno – David Adam Moore
Volmar – Roy Hage
Angel – Raha Mirzadegan
Margravine von Stade / Clementia – Blythe Gaissert
Mechthild – Patrick Bessenbacher
Otto – Paul Chwe MinChul
Faceless girl – Chloe Engel
