CD: Davies/Lyric Opera of Chicago: Bolcom: A View from the Bridge

It looks as though fall has finally arrived, and you know what that means: we're launching another heady season of concerts, recitals, musicals, and operas. You still have time to catch a requiem for All Souls Day, yes, even this week, and perhaps you could start mulling over which concerts and singalongs you'll catch later in the season.

And opera season is in full swing too, offering with it a bona fide Washington premiere of a truly American opera: William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge, at the Kennedy Center until just November 17th.

My exposure to 20th century opera has been pathetically limited, but I had my heart set on properly hearing A View from a Bridge. This most American of operas features a libretto by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein, and Bolcom's genre-sampling score. Would you believe an opera with doo-wop passage? I kid you not.

That said, we are in emotionally and musically demanding territory here. The story is set in 1950s Brooklyn, amid the Italian-American community, and concerns the tensions, jealousies, and betrayals churning within one particular family -- themes familiar enough to anyone who's heard Puccini or Verdi, or read a lot of classic European drama.

The current Washington National Opera production, starring Kim Josephson (Eddie Carbone), Catherine Malfitano (Beatrice Carbone), and Gregory Turay (Rodolfo) from the Chicago premiere, was, to my thinking, a must-see. But through an embarrassing mix-up (and nothing to do with the end of Daylight Savings Time, either), I arrived at the Kennedy Center when Saturday's performance of A View from the Bridge was already in progress and my only recourse was to peer through a forest of latecomers. The opera glasses were a help. My height was not.

Believe me, I shed a few tears when I realized I had inadvertently missed the initial scenes of the opera, but then Gregory Turay, as the immigrant Rodolfo, sang "New York Lights" and brought on tears of a different sort. I've been hearing about "New York Lights" (AKA "I Love the Beauty of the View at Home") for some time and wanted to catch this paean to the city where so many of my own immigrant relatives first set foot. I was not disappointed, from the opening notes of Bolcom's theme to Turay's hushed and delicate conclusion to the aria. It's a transcendent moment.

But if Turay has that sunny, golden tenor that is everything an opera composer dreams of, it's Kim Josephson (baritone) and Catherine Malfitano (soprano) who break your heart as a long-married couple confronting some painful truths. At the center of their story is their orphaned niece (a fine Christine Brandes), who has just come of age and unwittingly provokes a rivalry among the men of the household. All this unfolds beneath the gaze of a watchful chorus, which utters commentary and warnings like some collective conscience, its very presence invoking myriad stories of New York immigrants. Immigrants, New York, and tragedy -- themes dear to my heart, in one form or another.

If you are unable to attend any of the performances this month, or would like to relive one, New World Records offers A View from the Bridge in a two-disc set. The recording not only features Josephson, Malfitano, and Turay in the roles they created for the American premiere, but preserves the work's essential drama. Affecting too is Timothy Nolen (baritone), who, as Alfieri, must narrate this tale of the slow unveiling of a family's secrets.

Musically, it's quite a journey. The dissonant cries of domestic drama are interspersed with playful or lyrical moments -- with Eddie's doo-wop-singing buddies, for example, or Rodolfo's so-called jazz rendition of "Paper Doll," which seems like the encore the Three Tenors forgot to do. But whatever beauty, humor, or harshness the opera explores, it's the fiery, fierce, vulnerable Josephson, partnered with Malfitano, who remains at its heart.