West Edge’s ‘Powder’ is a brash erotic adventure
With his brash and brilliant 1995 chamber opera “Powder Her Face,” the 24-year-old British composer Thomas Adès confirmed the arrival of a formidable talent, whose fearlessness and technical panache promised to transform the contemporary musical scene.
If this is what can be done in the arena of new music — this degree of vocal and theatrical magnificence, this level of fearlessness and artistic imagination — then why on Earth should we ever have to settle for less?
In a series of chronological vignettes, beautifully delineated in this production, we see the main character as a young gold-digger setting her cap for the Duke after an early divorce, then watch as she descends into nymphomaniacal excess, social exile and finally a sort of tragic grandeur.
Adès’ score draws on the angular acerbity of both, while adding a host of other strains — pastiches of tangos and popular love songs, a tangy Kurt Weill-ish instrumental palette dominated by brass and saxophones, and innovations like a rank of fishing reels whose ominous click-click-click conjures intimations of mortality.
Laura Bohn’s Duchess was a figure at once imperious and vulnerable, bringing a frank directness to the role’s more challenging aspects (including the opera’s famous compositional tour-de-force, a musical depiction of an act of fellatio) and rising to full-throated tragedy in her final moments.
Soprano Emma McNairy matched her Lulu from last summer for glittering vocal precision and charismatic stage demeanor, from a hilariously resentful hotel maid to a newspaper reporter nonplussed by the Duchess’ sudden outbursts of right-wing crankery.
Tenor Jonathan Blalock brought extraordinary vocal elegance and theatrical vividness to his assignments, and baritone Hadleigh Adams was a dynamo of precisely etched immediacy — most entertainingly as the trial judge who can barely restrain his prurient delight even as he condemns the Duchess’ erotic misdeeds.
Pulitzer’s staging has all the vigor and elusiveness of a Feydeau farce, with characters running in and out of the hotel room that forms Chad Owens’ economical unit set and Ray Oppenheimer’s lighting design offering endless witty commentary on the action.