Angel’s Bone tells the story of a married couple who find two fallen angels. The angels have not fared well in their journey to earth. Once they have recovered their strength and are feeling better, the husband and wife use them for their own personal gain.

The libretto is by Royce Vavrek (Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves – which LA Opera will perform in February and March of 2021.)

In awarding the Pulitzer to Angel’s Bone, the committee called it “a bold work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.”

In April of 2017, Du Yun told NPR about the work’s theme, “When we look at human trafficking, we always think that it’s far away from us. We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.”

Du Yun was one of the composers of Sweet Land which was recently produced and performed by Yuval Sharon’s The Industry.

While we won’t have opening night on May 1st to experience Angel’s Bone in person, at least we do get to see and hear the work that inspired Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim of the New York Times to write, “It’s an appallingly good work when you consider that it takes on the subject of child trafficking and mixes in elements of magic realism and a musical cocktail of Renaissance polyphony, electronica, Modernism, punk rock and cabaret.”

Photo of Angel’s Bone performed at the New Visions Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2018. (Credit: Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department)

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To mark both anniversaries, Camerata Pacifica began a Why Beethoven? project last year. The two-year celebration concludes at the end of their just-started 2019-2020 season with a performance of the Beethoven String Quartet in B Flat Major, Op. 130 with its original ending. Last season concluded with the same quartet, but with its revised ending.

I recently spoke by phone with Spence about his original goals for Camerata Pacifica, where he sees the ensemble today and through it all I got insight into his views on classical music today and the role Los Angeles plays in its future.

How was Camerata Pacific carved a place for itself in the classical music world in Southern California?

What we’ve done much more generally is bring a mainstream audience into the 21st century with us. Our mission talks about affecting positively how people experience classical music. At the end of every season my goal is to make the audience more capable listeners than I had at the start of the season. I think we’ve done that. Over three decades this has become a well-honed audience. If you don’t want to come and lean in and listen, because I expect you to do that, don’t come. There are a whole bunch of other groups I can recommend to you.

What was your vision in 1989 and how does Camerata Pacifica today reflect what you envisioned?

I’m glad to say that we’re living the dream. You are a writer in the classical music business, you understand and this is no indictment of you personally, but no other industry writes so poorly about itself like the classical music industry. Tobacco does a better job and they kill people. I don’t think it is as bad as it was. This is the golden age. This is the second renaissance for classical music. 

We’re immersed in this whole Beethoven notion, but we’re still presenting concerts by rules established in 1800 and the wheels are coming off that machine. The large paradigm institutions have to make massive corrections. Filling a 3,000 person concert hall is a problem, particularly for regional symphony orchestras or operas. Filling smaller halls is being lead by chamber music and it offers a broader range of repertoire. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be a part of. If you can’t listen to Toru Takemitsu, then you’re not hearing Beethoven. That’s been an assertion of ours for 30 years.

How important is the pairing of well-known composers with lesser-known composers in order to grow appreciation of classical music?

I think it is critical for the audience. In the latter half of the 20th century you had a small number of white males deciding who was going to be listened to and what was recorded and broadcast and that’s all collapsed. And that’s fabulous. The arrival of the iPod shuffle is brilliant. Young people are not defined by genre. They listen to what they listen to with an open mind. Classical music is always going to be a minority participation sport because it requires greater participation. We’re never going to get a market share of 95% – it will always be 1 or 2 percent. But that share will always be there. There are always smart people who want to think for themselves. Whether Millennials or Gen X or what you want to call it, you are going to have smart curious people. If you have smart, curious people they can be brought to our product. We are stewards of this art form and we, too, as audience members, should be handing it off to the next generation better than we received it. This is what I think about every day.

You have a unique way of looking at what an audience is and/or should be.

I’m not interested in the music lover. A music lover has fairly rigid ideas of with they think is good or bad music. They are usually thinking of 18th or 19th century work written in a linear manner. What I’m interested in are the intellectually curious and it’s going to be Beethoven and George Crumb and Huang Ruo and they will ask “Why?” I want to reach those people. I believe there is a massive audience of intellectually curious who don’t come because they think of it as dusty or boring. Why the hell you’d drop 50 or 100 bucks on that I don’t know.

How would you describe the state of the arts in Los Angeles as we move into the 2020s?

Nobody has asked me that question before. I think Los Angeles is where it is at. I think the LA Philharmonic is doing a superb leadership job. The growing work done, particularly by Esa-Pekka Salonen, that was superb work that has helped create an audience whether happily or unhappily, they expect to be presented with new music on a regular basis.

I think the future of classical music is looking west into the Pacific. And I think Los Angeles and Southern California is poised to do that. Even in the time that we’ve been performing here there’s been an explosion of chamber music groups. You look at Yuval Sharon’s The Industry, some of the off-stage stuff LA Opera is doing – which is critical, Green Umbrella, Jacaradana, we’re trying to work together and show audiences what’s out there and present it collaboratively.

When you see so much going on – good ideas and bad ideas – whether  all these things survive, that’s the sign of a healthy artistic musical environment. Because that’s what you want – constant new ideas and most of them, by the nature of being, aren’t going to work. The more you have, the more that will work. That’s just simple. I think in Southern California we’re seeing that, which is exciting.

All photos courtesy of Camerata Pacifica

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This Friday and Saturday, Gilfry plays the Narrator in The Loser at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel. This is part of LA Opera’s Off-Grand program. The production, directed by Lang, originated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016. It’s one act and it finds Gilfry on a platform above the orchestra section and playing to the upper levels of the theatre.

Lang based The Loser on the novel of the same nam by Thomas Bernhard. As the Narrator, Gilfry assumes the role of the person revealing the story of the time when the Narrator, his friend Wertheimer and pianist Glenn Gould were part of a master class taught by Vladimir Horowitz. Seeing how brilliant Gould was, the other men realized they would never measure up. As the story begins, Wertheimer has committed suicide.

“I would say this definitely takes the place of therapy,” Gilfry says about the libretto. “He can figure out Wertheimer, he thinks he’s got Glenn Gould figured out. If you look back at anther couple steps, all of them are Thomas Bernhard. He took the character of Gould to be similar to himself and another to be the offshoot of his personality. You have Bernhard represented in three branches – the three faces of Thomas. It’s very much a self-taught therapy.”

The opera employs a shadowy figure on the piano (Conrad Tao) who may be Gould or the spirit of the musician. Gilfry said just the concept alone intrigued him and particularly how Lang wanted to stage The Loser.

“I thought the ideas were so audacious. The first idea was that I would be suspended. But I don’t think I could do that for an hour. But the concept of it – being that the performer is directly in front of the mezzanine, the orchestra is empty and the main stage is dark – this all sounded really intriguing and something I’d like to try.”

Though Gilfry has performed other modern work (by composers Matthew Aucoin and Jake Heggie as examples), he says Lang’s post-minimalist work is a whole different challenge.

“In the first movement the time signature is always changing and the orchestra is fragmented. There’s only a four-piece orchestra with sparse orchestration. One instrument is pizzicato and plays rarely. And the vocal line is really fragmented. It’s very challenging to memorize. The thing that’s so wonderful about David’s music is the story and words are in bold relief.”

Gilfry has to be very still initially, the opposite of what is normally expected of opera stars.

“As we were working on it, David had this idea – be absolutely still for the first scene. You have a lot of silence where you have 4-6 beats of absolutely nothing and the last word you say fills the air. And you have the tendency to try and fill it in. But I realized that was completely the wrong approach for David’s music. It’s anathema to the way he composes and the life of his music. ”

What is ultimately revealed is not so much material information about Gould or Wertheimer, but more clearly a sense of the Narrator and his own feelings about being an artist. The Narrator’s struggle, Gilfry says, is not one that he has faced.

“I’ve never really tried to be an artist. I’ve just sort of done my own thing. I have felt competition with colleagues to be as much as an artist as I have seen some of my colleagues – the famous singers throughout the ages. Most of my competition has been my own mental feeling. I’ve never felt like I’m not an artist, but I’ve never felt like I am.”

Precisely as he finishes the last sentence he realizes that he’s wearing a t-shirt that says “LA – Los Artists.” A big laugh comes forward from that baritone voice that Gilfry thinks may wrongly have been placed where it was.

“Something I discovered, but I had from the very beginning, is a very good low range. I have great range for someone who sings as lyric baritone. I feel misplaced. I have this whole other part that rarely gets explored. When [David and I] first started working, we just started singing through stuff. He wanted to learn my voice. I guess I came in singing a few low notes, so he wrote the whole thing around that.”

So challenging is this part that Gilfry has counted how many words there are. But it very clear that the degree of difficulty and the unique qualities of Lang’s writing compel Gilfry to continue to perform The Loser.

“I’m right up there in the face of the audience. It’s almost like doing a cabaret show only it’s highly-scripted and it’s much harder music. As much as I have complained about the difficulty, it’s not like anything you’ll hear from any other composer. The vocal line starts out extremely fragmented, but by the end the words get extremely compressed. There are 3,894 words in this little piece. That’s a big task.”

All production photos courtesy of BAM/ Photos by Richard Termine

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Lang, best known to local audiences for Anatomy Theatre, based this work on the novel The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. It tells the story of a man who committed suicide as told by his friend (Gilfry). They had both been piano prodigies at a master class conducted by Vladimir Horowitz. Glenn Gould also attended and it was there that the two men realized they would never achieve the same heights that Gould would.

Over the course of the one-hour opera, The Narrator, as Gilfry’s character is named, ultimately reveals far more about himself than he does about his recently-deceased friend.

Lang serves not just as composer and librettist, but also director and conductor for The Loser. The opera premiered in 2016 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Anthony Tommasini, in his review for the New York Times, said of the work, “the score is a model of how music can animate words. The text is set with impressive clarity, and Mr. Gilfry sings every phrase with crisp diction and dramatic point, delivering phrases with virile energy, sudden bluster, or, during vulnerable moments, an aching confusion that takes you by surprise.”

Check back on Wednesday for our interview with Gilfry.

Photo by Richard Termine/Courtesy of LA Opera

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