Tobias Picker
Awakenings
Jarrett Porter, Joyce El-Khoury et al; Odyssey Opera; Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose
BMOP Sound 1094 103:38 mins (2 discs)
Heroic failure is grist to the operatic mill; but a physician’s inability to only briefly awaken patients who have been asleep for decades suffering from encephalitis lethargica is an entirely different kind of failure.
Unless you are Tobias Picker, one of the most consistently interesting among the present generation of US theatre composers. Working with his regular librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman, Picker transforms the story of Dr Oliver Sacks’s work with surviving victims of the sleeping sickness pandemic of the 1920s into a music drama that is every bit as gripping as the movie made from Sacks own account of his time at New York’s Beth Abraham Hospital in the 1960s, depicted in his book of the same title, Awakenings.
Framed by the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, who sleeps again at the end of the opera, it is also about Sacks’s own awakening to his love for men. At the heart of the opera is an emotional love triangle between the patient Leonard, who loves Nurse Rodriguez, who loves Sacks. Sacks and Rodriguez finally share a kiss in the dramatic penultimate scene.
Picker’s score ebbs and flows through a contemporary Romantic vein that he has made his own with a fine ear for instrumentation. Gil Rose, conducting an ensemble with strings, winds, a harp, tuba and piano, relishes a Ravel-like waltz when the patients feel the first benefits of the drug L-Dopa.
An utterly dependable cast is led by Jarrett Porter as Sacks and the young Mexican tenor César Delgado as Rodriguez. Keith Klein is a dark-voiced doubting boss to Sacks.
However, the real vocal honours belong to Joyce El-Khoury as Rose imagining that her husband is coming to visit as she retreats again into darkness. Christopher Cook