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Posted on Sun, Mar 31, 2013 : 5:59 a.m.

UMS, U-M presenting epic 'Oresteia of Aeschylus' trilogy, with album release planned

By Susan Isaacs Nisbett

Back in 2004, a package arrived at conductor Kenneth Kiesler’s studio at the University of Michigan School of Music. It contained three huge scores along with a note from the publisher: “Sent at the request of William Bolcom.”

Thus began a musical odyssey that culminates Thursday evening at Hill Auditorium with a rare, first complete U.S. performance of Darius Milhaud’s “Oresteia of Aeschylus” trilogy. Naxos will record the approximately three hours of music live for release on CD.

Milhaud’s three works, for chorus, orchestra, vocal soloists and speakers—he didn’t like to call them operas, but that’s more or less what they are—are based on Aeschylus’s “Oresteia” trilogy, as translated into French (from English, not Greek) by Milhaud’s contemporary, the literary titan and diplomat Paul Claudel.

PREVIEW

"The Oresteia of Aeschylus"

  • Who: Distinguished cast of vocal soloists; U-M Symphony Orchestra and Percussion Ensemble; U-M Choral Ensembles and the UMS Choral Union; Kenneth Kiesler, conductor.
  • What: Trio of Darius Milhaud works, performed together for the first time. In French with English supertitles.
  • Where: Hill Auditorium, 825 N. University Ave.
  • When: Thursday, April 4, 7:30 p.m.
  • How much: $10-$60. Tickets available via the UMS Michigan League Ticket Office, 734-764-2538, and online at ums.org.
Written from 1913 through 1923, the three works recount the blood-revenge dramas of the House of Argos, from the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, his wife; through Orestes’ revenge-murder of Clytemnestra, his mother; to Orestes’ acquittal by the goddess Athena—who stops the cycle of violence by offering a new form of justice and turning the Furies (forces of evil) into the Eumenides (forces for good).

The outsize events seem to require a cast of matching scope. Thursday’s participants, some 450 in all, include three choirs from the U-M; the UMS Choral Union; a cast of distinguished vocal soloists; the U-M Symphony Orchestra; and the U-M Percussion Ensemble, all conducted by the U-M’s Kiesler. The works are performed in French, unstaged, in concert form, with supertitles in English.

The concert, in this 100th anniversary season of Hill Auditorium—the hall was completed in 1913, the year the first part of Milhaud’s trilogy appeared—commemorates 100 years of collaboration between the School of Music and the University Musical Society; it is a UMS co-production with the School of Music, Theatre & Dance.

The scores that arrived at Kiesler’s studio that fateful 2004 day did not land there by accident. Bolcom, Pulitzer Prize-Winning composer and Kiesler colleague, had studied with Milhaud and, keen on the score, had broached the idea of an “Oresteia” performance at U-M.

Nor did the scores represent the full picture of what lay ahead. They were the three acts of only the last piece, “Les Eumenides,” a molehill (though an hour and 45 minute one) that only suggested the height of the musical mountain to be climbed. There were two more works to come, if Kiesler was tempted: “L’Agamemnon” and “Les Choephores” (“The Libation Bearers”), which would take the entire evening to a little shy of three hours worth of music.

The average choral concert, noted Jerry Blackstone, who has prepared the UMS Choral Union, the U-M Orpheus Singers and Chamber Choir for the show (Eugene Rogers prepared the University Choir) contains about 80 minutes of music.

This one, Blackstone said, has about 150 minutes of music. "Each of the three operas stands on its own, so we don’t need to do all three, but we are. It’s so much music to get all ready at the same time.”

For a long time, Kiesler said in a recent phone conversation, he did nothing but stare at the pile of music. Or rather, look away.

Ken-Kiesler.jpg

Kenneth Kiesler

“It was too daunting at first,” he said. “I didn’t even want to look at it.”

It was not just the size of the work, but the harmonic language, he said. And then, years later, when he was able to listen to the piece—in a rare recording from Milhaud’s lifetime provided by Milhaud’s son, Daniel, he didn’t much care for it.

“When I listened, I really didn’t like the piece,” he said. “’Les Eumenides’ I had to do in installments, I couldn’t make it though.”

In a perverse way, the recordings, which were so badly balanced you could hardly hear the chorus or orchestra, reinforced Kiesler’s resolve to see the work performed and properly recorded. “All the color and tunes were lost from the orchestra,” he said. “What I’m attempting to do, is to bring out the texture of the piece, to create a foreground, middle ground and background so everything works together.

“My other goal is for it to be completely understood as if it’s a play in which the acting singers have the motivations and the history. In the early recordings they sang rhythms and notes, with just a few days to put it together—kind of the way we treat new music these days.”

This performance, by contrast, has been actively in the making for months now—just as was the case for Bolcom’s monumental “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” which the School of Music masterminded into performance in 2004, under UMS auspices and also for a Naxos live recording. And if you count the time that Kiesler and others have spent correcting mistakes in the score and filling in missing choral parts, to say nothing of readying translations that really aid listeners’ comprehension, the preparation stretches back even further.

Both Kiesler and Blackstone remark on the differences in style in the three pieces. Ten years makes a lot of difference: in the size of the orchestra; the use of spoken word; and harmonic complication. And, of course, as Kiesler said, “’Rite of Spring’ happened in 1913, and everything in the world changes.”

The characters get complicated, too: Athena, for example, is sung by a trio of three women, creating a very magical effect, Kiesler said. It is difficult music to work on, and difficult music to assemble. There’s a cast of nine soloists, all but two from outside U-M; many choral parts are for women only or men only, crying out for separate rehearsals beyond those of the four choral groups involved.

Blackstone, rehearsing three choirs for months now on little but Milhaud, said he sometimes feels like he’s trapped on “a Pandora radio station where all I hear is Milhaud. I would like a little break. But now, when we put it all together, I think it could be incredibly thrilling, but I just don’t yet have this whole perspective. It’s like a marathon, you don’t have perspective until you end it.”

Echoes Kiesler: “Everybody will be very relieved, happy and exhilarated when it’s done. It’s very challenging”

But, said the man who couldn’t get through “Les Eumenides” at one gulp when he first heard it: “The music is fantastic.”

No one, he said, should be worried about the music’s polytonality, for example—any musical disorientation it causes “wears off quickly on the ears.” Yes, in “Les Eumenides,” there are, he said, “Layers of different meters, choirs and the orchestra playing in different keys, major and minor and three whole tones away. It’s beyond bitonal, it’s polytonal. It’s difficult for the soloists to find their notes.”

But what one hears, he said, is wonderful color and jazzy chords rather than three different keys.

And then, of course, there is the drama: a riveting, time-tested story.

Writes Kiesler in program notes for the “Oresteia:”

“Milhaud’s trilogy after Aeschylus has, for me, reopened and broadened the rich realm of Greek mythology. The themes of passion and jealousy, violence and revenge, prudence andpropriety still resound within us and in our world. Topics of sexual and gender parity, familyrelationships, balance of power, and influence in a world of haves and have-nots, not to mentionloyalty, steadfastness, allegiance, obedience to those in power, and the economic and socialstratification of society — all continue to vex us and show how deeply our human nature connectsus to our predecessors. They remind us how far — for all our progress — we still have to go.”