Wozzeck Sung as Film Noir

                                   John Duykers as The Captain and Bojan Knezevic as Wozzeck

                                                         Photo courtesy of Ensemble Parallèle

                                                                   By Albert Goodwyn

Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, derived from Georg Büchner's play, takes the hapless title character through moral depravity, weird science, illegitimacy, jealousy, infidelity, and murder. The music of the early Twentieth Century opera, just produced at Yerba Buena Center by Ensemble Parallèle, is modern with aggressively atonal passages perfectly suited to the brutal happenings on stage, tempered by lushly romantic passages. On a set with shapes as biting and angular as the music, accompanied by video projections, a stellar cast of local artists gave a performance to rival any other opera company in The City.

Set in a small garrison town in Germany about 1835, Wozzeck is a lowly army barber. As he is shaving his Captain, the officer chides him for having an out-of-wedlock child with a prostitute. Marie the mother dotes on the preadolescent child, but she and Wozzeck no longer get along. In fact she has her eye on a new conquest, the pompous Drum Major. After he rapes her, Wozzeck's jealousy can no longer be contained. He kisses her one last time by a moonlit pond, then stabs her. Searching for the knife, he comes to a bad end.

Berg's hybrid style of avant-garde music was sensitively performed by an ensemble of musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under the energetic conducting by Nicole Paiement, Artistic Director and Founder of the Conservatory. She describes the score as being "at turns terrifying, serene, transparent, and then obscured." The singers were all ably articulated the nuances of Berg's jumps and slides into and out of melody and dissonance.

As the half-mad Wozzeck, bass-baritone Bojan Knezevic never fails to thrill and elicit sympathy with his rich, highly trained voice. The recent graduate of scholarship programs at San Francisco Opera is also a skilled actor, projecting his emotional plight with an internal consistency of facial gestures. His intensity is matched by SFOpera compatriot bass-baritone Philip Skinner as The Doctor who experiments on Wozzeck and finds his dead body. Having worked together in several other operas, the two play off of each other with genuine character and both produce flawlessly rich, entirely different voices. But tenor John Duykers as the bumptious drunken Captain tended to overawe them with his comic interpretation and assertive voice. Mezzo-soprano Patricia Green as the tragic Marie sang the high notes of her soaring plaintive pleadings with a pure sustain.

Ensemble Parallèle's cinematic-style staging made elaborate use of large-scale video projections of live singing and prerecorded clips to set scenes and to highlight the action. The monochrome projections and the steely dark set gave the show a nourish style. Seeing the singing faces enlarged on screen at the same time as watching them live made for a different operatic experience. The show brought together grand opera and theatre. The Ensemble has a lengthy history of ambitious, greatly successful operatic productions, the last being Lou Harrison's Young Caesar. They will next participate in the Pacific Rim Festival in April with an all-Varèse concert.