Santa Fe, N.M. — At Santa Fe Opera, every note is a high note. This rustic tourist town is 7,000 feet above sea level; the opera's open-air theater stands 500 feet higher in the foothills of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Backstage, oxygen tanks are provided so singers can take rejuvenating hits of the pure stuff.
"Most people get over the altitude, but some don't," Santa Fe Opera general director Richard Gaddes observes. "I want to put up a sign in the press room as the critics are leaving: 'Remember the altitude.' "
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday July 23, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
Bright Sheng -- An article in the July 20 Sunday Calendar about Chinese composer Bright Sheng incorrectly stated that Leonard Bernstein did the orchestrations for "Arias and Barcarolles." Bernstein wrote the work, and Sheng did the orchestrations.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday July 27, 2003 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Bright Sheng -- An article in the July 20 Sunday Calendar incorrectly stated that Leonard Bernstein did the orchestrations for "Arias and Barcarolles." Bernstein wrote the work, and Bright Sheng did the orchestrations.
Here amid the butterflies and desert wildflowers of the opera's lofty campus, as lovely as it is oxygen-starved, levels of tension -- and hope -- are also elevated as the opera company prepares to present the world premiere of Chinese composer Bright Sheng's "Madame Mao," opening Saturday.
Colin Graham, director and librettist of the new opera, has reduced lung capacity, the unfortunate lasting effect of a heart medication, and calls the effect of the altitude "pretty devastating." The women's parts in "Madame Mao" range unusually high -- or, if in the lower range, contain enough impassioned screaming -- to make them all the more difficult to perform in thin air, conductor John Fiore says.
Problems with the altitude aside, presenting a new opera always comes with higher costs and higher risks than showcasing the tried-and-true. Even though the opera combines the familiar history of China's Cultural Revolution with fictionalized events, "Madame Mao" remains an unknown quantity. The production, which employs eight dancers and elaborate costumes, has a budget of $1.5 million, half again as much as the Santa Fe Opera average.
Still, the person who is risking his musical reputation with his first full-length opera, composer Sheng, seems curiously untouched by either high altitude or high anxiety. His first name, Bright, is the English translation of his given name, Liang, but might as easily refer to his personality, sunny and naturally caffeinated.
He notes that he often doesn't bother to eat -- and after observing him at work in the dry heat on his first day of rehearsal with the company, one begins to suspect that he runs on solar power.
Now the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Michigan ("He was my mentor; I studied with him for the last five years of his life so it means a lot to me, this title"), Sheng, born in Shanghai in 1955, lived through the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. He conceived the idea of an opera about the tragic life of Chairman Mao's wife, Jiang Ching, more than 10 years ago, in 1991 -- the year she committed suicide by hanging herself in her prison cell.
"The Cultural Revolution had nothing to do with culture, or revolution," asserts Sheng, who lived with his family away from the tumult of the major cities in a sort of self-imposed exile in Qinghai, on the Tibetan border, where he developed a lasting interest in Chinese folk music. He moved to the United States 21 years ago. "It was a power struggle between Mao and his rivals at the highest levels of the Communist Party of China. But in order for him to regain power, he had to make the whole country chaotic, paralyzed -- it was pure anarchy."
Sheng has just landed in town, but rehearsals have been going on for a week, resulting in a sort of operatic anarchy into which the composer must now somehow fit.
He bounces into his first piano rehearsal in striped T-shirt and Tommy Hilfiger sneakers. Though sun streams through the windows, the rehearsal room feels clouded with pent-up doubts and questions that conductor Fiore and the two singers involved have accrued while working through the material before Sheng's arrival.
It's a tough scene: Chairman Mao, portrayed by bearded, silver-haired Alan Opie, is dying. Mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon, as the aging Madame Mao, is at his bedside. By now, the Maos despise each other.
In "Madame Mao," Jiang Ching is played by two singers: soprano Anna Christy as the ambitious actress Madame Mao was in her youth, and Redmon as the embittered "white-boned demon" she becomes in her later years. The two singers often appear together onstage, two sides of the same character. In this scene, however, Redmon is alone with Opie. Opie's powerful baritone threatens to push the walls of the small room out a foot, maybe two. "The cries of the dying and the dead echo through the ruins of my life," he sings.
Redmon is struggling with allergies. "Every day is an adventure in horrible phlegm," she offers cheerfully. She is also caught in a minor power struggle between Sheng and Fiore, who are debating the finer points of one of her passages.
Sheng is concerned with "mood": "You have so much color; I hear that now; I want that," he tells Redmon, reaching out with one hand to squeeze an invisible roundness, a fruit both nonexistent and enticingly ripe. Fiore is more worried about pacing. "I tend to like to keep things going; it's hard to keep the tension going," he frets.
