Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

"The Little Prince" at City Opera

In stark contrast to �The Mines of Sulphur,� City Opera is presenting this fall a new opera to which you can bring the kids. So it was that, surrounded by squirmy kiddie-poos, I checked out last night�s performance of Rachel Portman�s �The Little Prince.�

The famous tale by Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry charts the interplanetary travels of a little prince who�s trying to save a rose he loves. Eventually finding his way to Earth, he encounters a pilot who has crashed in the desert, a wise and friendly fox, and a snake of dubious intentions. While the opera is pretty sloppy, enough of Saint-Exup�ry�s magical story does shine through that the evening doesn�t pass altogether unpleasantly.

Portman, known for her many film scores, has two big problems: harmony and rhythm. Her harmonic pallet is extremely limited. All she can muster are major and minor triads that float through the sort of aimless modal realm far too warmed over by soundtracks. Now, �The Little Prince� hardly calls for a composer of great expressive breadth; but, as undifferentiated as the harmony is, some sort of rhythmic variety should be deployed to relieve the musical homogeneity. No such variety comes, however, and the melodies remain entirely tethered to measure-marking arpeggios and oom-pah oom-pah dance patterns.

Nothing wrong with relentless rhythmic regularity, of course: only, if you�re writing opera, your librettist better be Alexander Pope � and Nicholas Wright is no Alexander Pope. The result? Portman rushes passages of text in an awkward attempt to match Wright�s end-rhymes to her cadences; unimportant words receive undo stress; odd dead spots crop up between lines of singing � especially in dialogue; and the few attempts at vocal polyphony are a mess.

However inept the moment-to-moment music may be, the opera never totally stalls: pretty music, when combined with a great story, does go a long way. Portman thins and thickens her orchestration gracefully, though the conductor�s effusions do drown the singers out at times. Boy soprano Jeffrey Allison does a heroic job as the Prince (though Portman gives him little to sing but flip-flopping perfect fifths), and Keith Phares keeps a steady keel as the Pilot, who also narrates the story. The set, which frames the action in a giant circle from which characters pop like in �Laugh-In,� is clunky, though the lighting design (by Rick Fisher) is absolutely ravishing. In the end, I�d just rent the DVD.

posted by David Salvage 11/15/2005