It was a weird and dark irony of historical timing that brought“Sophia’s Forest”— a chamber opera about a refugee family trying to escape a sudden outburst of war — to the stage in San Francisco just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded halfway around the world.
For an audience in Grace Cathedral for this production, presented in a four-performance West Coast premiere by Opera Parallèle, it was all too easy to feel the resonances between the events onstage and those of the present day — bombs and gunfire, families’ lives disrupted, children terrorized into pathological silence.
Or at least, it would have been easy if any of those themes had emerged clearly amid the piece’s shadowy dramaturgy. Instead, “Sophia’s Forest,” which boasts an inventive score bycomposer Lembit Beecherand a libretto by Hannah Moscovitch, leapfrogs blithely across its various plot elements before briskly closing up shop.
The action cuts back and forth in time in ways that are not always easy to follow. Sophia, the refugee child from an unnamed war-torn country, grows into an adult who can look back on her early plight with touching tenderness. But young Sophia is also depicted both before and after the family’s emigration to America, and those scenes blur together.
More problematic is the fact that the opera’s slender scale isn’t nearly sufficient for the scope of the issues it wants to address — to say nothing of the extraneous material it includes. The piece runs barely an hour (at the second performance, on Friday, Feb. 25, a medical emergency in the audience halted the proceedings for 15 minutes), yet its ambitions are grand.
Sophia’s trauma in the titular forest would seem to be the main object, even though it takes up very little of the piece. A family member is killed without really being established as a character. Sophia and her mother have a difficult, testy relationship. The mother has a boyfriend.
In director Brian Staufenbiel’s production, all these disparate strands compete for scarce stage time, leaving Sophia herself — young, old or in between — something of a cipher. Her horrific history is alluded to but not quite dramatized.
What “Sophia’s Forest” does have going for it is Beecher’s evocative score, a haunted-house amalgam of spindly lyricism and eerie special effects that was conducted with terse directness by general and artistic director Nicole Paiement. The accompaniment is primarily for string quartet and percussion (the superb Del Sol Quartet and percussionist Divesh Karamchandani), and the writing is full of exquisite touches. There are brief bursts of sinuous melody, string harmonics that seem to land almost out of earshot.
Supplementing these are an array of sonic sculptures that Beecher controls remotely in real time. Towers of rotating wine glasses emit shimmery hums, and spinning bicycle wheels with sticks in their spokes click-clack ominously. These are used sparingly, but always to telling effect.
At the center of the splendid cast was soprano Maggie Finnegan, whose performance as the grown-up Sophia was a marvel of crystalline tone, melodic precision and poker-faced expressiveness.
女中音Kindra Scharich带来了痛苦和urgency to the role of the mother, even if her main perplexity (“What’s the matter with my war refugee kid?”) felt implausible at best. There were good contributions from baritone Bradley Kynard as the boyfriend, Charlotte Fanvu as young Sophia, and Victoria Ko (alternating with Samantha Fung-Lee) as Sophia’s sister Emma.
然而,尽管其半透明和精致implication, Beecher’s score ultimately feels insufficient to the heft of the opera’s subject matter. As events in Ukraine remind us, these are weighty affairs, full of artillery and explosives and heavy machinery. “Sophia’s Forest” touches only glancingly on all of it.
“Sophia’s Forest”:Opera Parallèle. 5 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26. $35-$145. Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F.www.operaparallele.org