Pride at Poison
Despite appearances, June was busy for Poison Put to Sound. Earlier in June, I profiled Ellis Ludwig-Leone for Brooklyn Rail. And I just turned in my biggest assignment yet, which is coming out later this summer. Not to mention I celebrated my birthday!
There’s been no shortage of Pride concerts deserving coverage. But maybe this has created in me just an ounce of resentment as, after all, classical music is queer year-round. This is all to explain the intermittent posting.
Though Pride programming can sometimes feel pandering, this was not at all the case for New York Choral Society’s The Unicorn, which I saw at NYU Skirball on May 30.
The performance paired Leonard Bernstein’s The Lark with Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore — both medieval-inflected pieces by these contemporaries.
In his program notes, director David Hayes’s situated The Lark — Bernstein’s incidental music to Jean Anouihl’s play based on the life of Joan of Arc — in relation to the Lavender Scare. With slightly heavy-handed acting from Sam Turlington as Joan, The Lark’s true star was countertenor soloist Chuanyuan Liu, sweet-sounding in both Latin and French.
Menotti’s The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, which the composer called “the most deeply and personally felt of anything I’ve written,” was played at the funeral of his lover, Samuel Barber. The piece is described in Hayes’s notes as a “coded fable” about queerness: “There once lived a man in a castle, and a strange man was he.”
The Unicorn, et al., with which I wasn’t before familiar, was reminiscent to me of Carl Orff — with Turkish percussion, topsy-turvy winds, quirky cello solos, and fairytale harp, all played by soloists from the Experiential Orchestra. A troupe of dancers from EMERGE125 pranced in white scarves and chainmail masks.
But what really struck me was Menotti’s assonance-filled libretto — “proud husbands velvety-plump” bickering with “embroidered silk-pale ladies — mixing melancholy with childlike humor. My favorite line: “He died of what?” “Of murder”
I’ve been looking forward to drag queens Sapphira Cristál and Monet X Change’s “Soundcake” — which opened Lincoln Center’s “Summer in the City” on June 12 — since it was first announced.
Directed by James Blaszko (the mastermind behind Cristál’s RuPaul’s performance), with a “sickening symphony” conducted by David Bloom, “Soundcake” left nothing to be desired in terms of production value. (Even Thorgy Thor sounded solid on violin, though she needed rosin.) That is, except for one thing:
“Turn the mics up!” shouted frustrated queers as Cristál sung an aria from Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. “I am the humble angel of creative genius,” read the doctored subtitles, “a fragile instrument yet a vessel for men.”
Anyone could have predicted balance issues: two queens (not professional singers), one high in falsetto, up against full orchestra, outside. Luckily, these were mostly resolved after the first intermission.
Micing aside, Cristál — who is Eastman-trained, with a “six-octave range” — was having an off-night, verging flat in her upper register. But X Change, a bass, sounded great throughout, especially in a Bellini aria, as well as rapping in “Hip Habanera.”
The chemistry between the two — especially the chorus of high-and-low “no no’s” in “Scandalize my Name” — reminded me of Only an Octave Apart.
The strongest parts of “Soundcake” delved into the “layers of history” cementing drag and opera. (I noted a Tamar-kali call-out.) Cristál and X Change cited Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman as influences, respectively, and Pretty Lamé (tenor Joshua Sanders) made a guest appearance. “Opera is drag,” they said — and, I’ll add, drag is opera.
One segment, titled “How Classical Music Became Queer as Hell,” used the brilliant phrase “unethical tuck” in relation to castrati. And I was touched by Cristál’s warbling rendition of “Ombra ma fu,” an aria “written for a castrato, sung by a nonbinary drag queen.”
But I couldn’t help but compare Cristál’s straining “O mio babbino” to Teiya Kasahara’s performance the night before, as part of ChamberQUEER’s Constellation Festival — just as campy, but for all different reasons. More on that later.
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