Founded in 1994, Ensemble Parallèle is a professional, nonprofit organization that develops and performs contemporary chamber opera. This includes not only works conceived for chamber ensembles but also chamber arrangements of productions originally composed for “grand opera” settings. The current production of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby, which opened last night in the Novellus Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is the perfect example of the latter approach and the advantages it affords. Gatsby was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 1999 and made full use of the Met orchestra. The Ensemble Parallèle production used a reorchestration by Jacques Desjardins, funded in part by the Aspen Music Festival, requiring only two flutes (one doubling on piccolo), two oboes (one doubling on English horn), three clarinets (one doubling on E-flat clarinet and saxophone, another doubling on bass clarinet), two bassoons (one doubling on contrabassoon), two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, one tuba, three percussionists (including timpani), piano, banjo, six violins (three in each section), two violas, two cellos, and one bass. The stage band of the original version (single players for clarinet, doubling on saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tuba, drum set, piano, banjo, and violin) was left intact.
The overall result was a greater transparency in Harbison’s score, providing a better appreciation for how insinuations of jazz from the period of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel weave their way in and out of the composer’s rhetorical use of harmony and counterpoint. Just as important, however, was that the staging of the opera was scaled down to match the reduction of instrumental resources. The entire Novellus Theater (not just the stage and audience areas) could fit into the stage and audience space of the Metropolitan Opera House with room to spare. This is not always a good thing for Met audiences. While it works very well for suitable “grand” designs and staging conceptions, more intimate offerings often suffer. To be perfectly blunt about the matter, the number of Met productions of operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that I experienced and found satisfying could be counted on one hand (and I would not even need that many fingers when it comes to George Frideric Handel). In this context Ensemble Parallèle may have done a great favor to Harbison.
While there is nothing “Mozartian” or “Handelian” about either Harbison’s score or Fitzgerald’s tale, there is an intimacy to the novel, which Harbison seems to have recognized and cultivated as its driving force. It is hard to believe that such intimacy could have been communicated across the Met stage. This is a story of a collection of highly flawed (and often despicable) characters; and, through both the libretto and score of Harbison’s opera, we on audience side have the opportunity to get under their respective skins. That path often begins by looking straight into their eyes, almost in face-to-face confrontation. This is possible in the Novellus Theater in ways that are unimaginable at the Met. (Opera glasses are a woefully inadequate approximation to this experience.)
The result is that, while we no longer have Fitzgerald’s device of Nick Carraway as first-person narrator, we share Nick’s role in observing the warped relationships that emerge around him and consume him. We sympathize with no one in this story, which is exactly what Fitzgerald expected of us. Director Brian Staufenbiel found just the right dispassionate approach to take in bringing these characters to life, and Conductor Nicole Paiement elicited performances through which they were entirely convincing even though they were singing, rather than speaking.
Among the performers, Jason Detwiler was particularly effective in Nick’s pivotal role; and Susannah Biller as his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, managed to capture all that was decadent about the Jazz Age without ever covering up the inner ugliness of her character. At the same time one could appreciate that outer beauty that draws Jay Gatsby (Marco Panuccio) to her and ultimately becomes the instrument of his doom. On the instrumental side the ensemble in the orchestra pit seemed to get off to a rough start, particularly where intonation was concerned. However, it did not take long for them to find a “voice” consistent with those on stage; and the band on stage gave a solid account of its contributions to the party scenes (complete with crooners).
Taken as a whole, this was a highly ambitious effort for Ensemble Parallèle. Indeed, considering the work that went into the reorchestration, one might be bold enough to say that it was more ambitious than Harbison’s original project. It is thus important that the results have turned out both impressive and rewarding and may well have breathed new life into an opera whose proper place may have finally been found in a chamber setting.
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