Welcome to the Voice: A work by Steve Nieve and Muriel Teodori
Composed by longtime Elvis Costello keyboardist Steve Nieve and set to a surreally episodic, multilingual libretto by his life partner, Muriel Teodori, thissingspiel/dramatic oratorio describes the obsessive passion of an opera-loving steelworker of Greek extraction (Sting) for a diva (Barbara Bonney), a not-unheard-of situation in either real or reel life. Although Dionysos (the hero) seems to hover on the edge of becoming a textbook psycho-stalker (the cover photo of a hard-hat kissing his saw does little to dispel this impression), all ends well, if unbelievably. Blue-collar boy not only narrowly avoids incarceration (Elvis Costello appears as a police officer) but even gets next to the ermine-collar girl. Scored for string quartet with piano and reed improvisations, the work's avowedraison d'êtrewas to allow voices from various backgrounds, classically trained and otherwise, to encounter one another on a level playing field. This might have been more successful if the singers were better matched in terms of texture and production. As it is, the sopranos soar effortlessly, allowing the music to do the work, while the male pop stars take the opposite approach, working up a sweat at the drop of an emotion. Musically, despite arresting juxtapositions between conventionally melodic power-pop and 20th-century atonality--to say nothing of a blazing concluding "yes" sung by all involved--the composition comes across more as a study in parallels rather than a unifying force. But even so, the point does get across, and so ambitious and heartfelt an adventure is always worth checking out.--Christina Roden