Yahoo News The Angel Esmeralda review – slender DeLillo fable fails to take operatic flight
Lliam Paterson’s The Angel Esmeralda was commissioned by Scottish Opera while he was its young composer in residence. But why it’s now receiving its world premiere at the Guildhall School in London rather than north of the border seems a less important question than what made Paterson and his librettist, Pamela Carter, think this 1994 short story by Don DeLillo could be the starting point for a viable piece of music theatre.
Set in New York’s South Bronx in the 1970s, it’s a slender fable focusing on two nuns in the deprived, lawless community there. Sister Edgar is old-school and committed to a life of contemplation, while Sister Grace is desperate to do what she can to alleviate the social problems around them. They hear of a miracle on the expressway: the face of Esmeralda, a teenage girl who was raped and murdered, has been seen in an orange juice advert. Edgar sees the face for herself, but when news of the miracle spreads, the advert is removed. Nothing has changed and Edgar returns to prayer.
As a short story, The Angel Esmeralda offers a vivid snapshot of Bronx life. But as the subject of an opera, in which characters need to be defined and some kind of emotional trajectory traced, it leaves a huge amount to be desired; neither the libretto, nor the music, come close to filling that vacuum, or to defining what the piece is all about – the need for miracles, the powerlessness of faith? Paterson certainly has facility as a composer, but his score slips too easily from style to style – pulsing American minimalism here, brassy Andriessen-like riffs there – often leaving the rather characterless vocal lines and the meaning they convey to struggle above it.
The immersive Guildhall production, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Dominic Wheeler, does its best to match the opera’s overstretched ambition. It’s double cast; on the first night Elsa Roux Chamoux was Sister Edgar and Harriet Burns was Sister Grace, while William Thomas as Brother Mike, a Franciscan friar, Damian Arnold as Ismael, the leader of a graffiti gang, and Collin Shay as a tour guide also made strong impressions. But the work itself leaves far less behind.
