United States Williamstown Theatre Festival – Barber, Vanessa: Soloists, Musicians of the Heartbeat Opera / Dan Schlosberg (conductor). Williamstown Theatre Festival Annex, North Adams, 20.7.2025. (ES-S)
In its first-ever foray into opera – and as part of a broader effort to reinvent itself – the storied Williamstown Theatre Festival partnered with New York’s Heartbeat Opera for a stark, haunting reimagining of Vanessa, Samuel Barber’s 1958 Pulitzer-winning score (alas long-absent from major American stages). Directed by R. B. Schlather and stripped to its emotional and instrumental essence, the production unfolded like a mythic chamber tragedy – eerie, seductive and suspended in a liminal space between memory and delusion. If Vanessa has often been treated as a lyrical outlier in American opera, this 100-minute, intermission-less version adapted by Jacob Ashworth made a persuasive case for its enduring psychological power and formal elegance.
Barber’s Vanessa, with a libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, his partner, tells a story of longing, illusion and emotional inheritance. A woman who has shut herself off from the world awaits the return of a former lover, only to fall for Anatol, his son, who in turn seduces and abandons her niece, Erika. What begins as romantic misrecognition unfolds into a drama of cyclical damage, with desire, delusion and resignation passed down from one generation of women to the next. Barber’s score, long dismissed as conservative, resists such easy categorization. Its lyricism is tempered by harmonic instability, chromatic shifts and a tendency toward unresolved tension. While the surface idiom may recall Richard Strauss, this version – especially in its pared-down orchestration – feels closer to Britten’s chamber operas: taut, inward and psychologically fraught. Vanessa moves within enclosed spaces (both physical and psychic), favors half-lights over full climaxes and relies on orchestral textures to trace its characters’ unspoken conflicts. Moments of soaring melody are undercut by ambiguity; the lushness, such as it is, conceals fractures. Beneath the surface, this is music of claustrophobia, fragility and deep unease. It breathes with the characters but, just as often, withholds resolution, as if circling the very truths the libretto dares not name.
Schlather’s staging treated the opera less as linear narrative than as a suspended, emotionally charged world where meaning circled rather than advanced. To start with, the performance took place in a claustrophobic repurposed space – the Williamstown Theatre Annex – tucked inside a half-abandoned strip mall in North Adams. Schlather, who also designed the set, stripped away period detail in favor of stark abstraction in black and white: one long wall and a few scattered chairs, repositioned throughout the performance, perhaps playing the role of a muted chorus rather than merely being props. The covered mirrors mentioned in the libretto were conspicuously absent, reinforcing the atmosphere of repression in a household that refuses to confront its haunted past. Characters drifted and returned like figures in a surrealist dream, their exaggerated shadows overlapping on the wall – at times evoking the fractured interiority of Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Silence and stillness became as potent as any musical climax, with choreography that rendered gesture as expressive as text. Throughout, Schlather’s mise-en-scène allowed the libretto’s ambiguities to accumulate rather than resolve. Its elliptical exchanges, sudden emotional reversals and obsessive repetitions were not explained away but revealed as part of a larger architecture of isolation. The effect was not to decode the opera’s mysteries but to deepen them, drawing the audience into a space where memory, projection and fantasy remained inseparable.
Dan Schlosberg’s newly-crafted chamber arrangement scaled Barber’s original orchestration down to a septet of piano, harp, violin, cello, trumpet, trombone and clarinet – placed along the side of the stage and fully visible. What might have seemed reductive in concept proved revelatory in a remarkably cohesive execution, drawing out the score’s restlessness without sacrificing its lyrical core, all under Schlosberg’s energetic baton. Far from limiting the opera’s expressive palette, the lean instrumentation distilled it through contrast and transparency, heightening the prevailing sense of fragility, allowing harmonic tensions to surface more cleanly and vocal lines to breathe with greater intimacy. Brassy jolts gave way to spare piano figurations, while harp and cello often traced the emotional contours left unstated in the libretto. Time and again, voices emerged in striking counterpoint with individual instruments, forging timbral pairings that sharpened character and clarified emotional nuance.
Vocal writing in Vanessa is demanding in subtle ways: it requires elegance, range and a capacity for restraint under pressure. What’s needed isn’t volume or grandeur but a kind of poised legibility – singers who can let Barber’s veiled emotions speak without forcing them into high relief. This cast approached the score with visible dedication and dramatic focus, though the results were uneven vocally. Ori Marcu as Erika offered the evening’s most compelling performance. Her mezzo-soprano was richly colored and emotionally responsive, capable of quiet resolve and sudden intensity. In ‘Must the winter come so soon?’, she delivered not only technical control but atmosphere – a haunted stillness that resonated with the emotional stasis of the entire production.
Inna Dukach in the title role projected dignity and vulnerability with a warm middle register and clear dramatic intent. But the role asks for greater flexibility and ease in the upper lines, and at times her soprano lacked the dynamic nuance needed to fully realize Barber’s expressive potential. Roy Hage as Anatol sang with clarity and earnestness, but the role’s ambiguity – its shifting balance between seduction and detachment – remained largely unexplored. Baritone Joshua Jeremiah’s Doctor brought theatrical specificity and rhythmic vitality to his scenes, infusing the role with a subtle blend of compassion and irony. As the Baroness, mezzo Mary Phillips embodied restraint and command, anchoring the family’s silence with quiet authority rather than vocal amplitude.
Across the ensemble, the voices did not always feel sufficiently malleable. Barber’s writing calls for more than line and pitch: it asks for inflection, texture and interior tension. In ‘To leave, to break’, the climactic canon-quintet, the emotional convergence was clearly marked, but the music’s radiant potential remained just out of reach – a conclusion more conceptual than transcendent.
This modest yet inventive Vanessa production suggests that opera’s future lies not only in new works but in how imaginatively we can revisit the ones that we already have.
Edward Sava-Segal
Production:
Libretto adapted by Jacob Ashworth
Music arranged by Dan Schlosberg
Director & Scenic design – R. B. Schlather
Cast:
Vanessa – Inna Dukach
Anatol – Roy Hage
Doctor – Joshua Jeremiah
Erika – Ori Marcu
Baroness – Mary Phillips
Musicians:
Clarinet – Louis Arques
Trombone – Sam George
Piano – Eliot Goldmund
Cello – Thapelo Masta
Harp – Adam Phan
Trumpet – Rebecca Steinberg
Violin – Johnna Wu