[This article appears in the January/February 2022 issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.]
Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) is known for its adventurous interpretations of both classical and contemporary opera. When the 2020 COVID shutdown demanded that performance organizations devise new approaches to delivering art to audiences, the BLO distinguished itself by creating original, opera-based cinema. First came the partly animated “Fall of the House of Usher” last January then, in June, the BLO-commissioned opera miniseries “desert in,” which featured prominent queer characters and storylines.
“We wanted pure cinematic work, not to replicate what a live stage performance would be,” says Bradley Vernatter, the BLO’s acting general and artistic director.
The BLO’s latest film, “Svadba” (the Serbian word for wedding), was shot on Truro’s Ballston Beach in October. It’s a dynamic a cappella opera for six voices by internationally produced contemporary composer Ana Sokolović, who was born in Serbia and immigrated as a child to Quebec, Canada where she still lives. Director Shura Baryshnikov weaves the ethereal score with the movements of seven dancers in the story of a bride’s intimate gathering with her girlfriends on the eve of her life-altering wedding.
“Svadba” streams exclusively on operabox.tv starting January 28.
Vernatter credits BLO music director David Angus for selecting “Svadba,” with its richly textured rhythmic harmonies rooted in traditional Balkan folklore and music, for the film. “He was really moved and inspired by [Sokolović’s] compositional style. David comes from a choral background so he responded immediately to the ensemble nature of this work,” Vernatter says.
In August, six opera singers gathered in Mechanics Hall in Worcester to record the a cappella score. The singers appear in the film via footage shot during the recording sessions and provide the contrast between the worlds of the spiritual ancestors, represented by the singers, and the seven dancers, whose movements communicate the story. It is director Baryshnikov’s vision of a “call and response,” says Vernatter, between the modern, natural world of the dancers and the ancestral world of the singers.
One of the six singers is mezzo-soprano Mack Wolz, a graduate of Boston Conservatory now living in Phoenix, Arizona, where they perform with Arizona Opera. Conductor Daniela Candillari invited Wolz to participate in “Svadba” after they’d worked together at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis last summer. “It was a resounding yes,” says Wolz. “I lived in Boston for six years, from 2013 to 2019, when I was at Boston Conservatory so I’m super familiar with the BLO and the cool projects that they do.”
But learning a Serbian score that’s often made up of chants and rhythmic sounds “was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn,” says Wolz. “The Serbian language is a big hurdle to overcome … so much of this piece is made up of traditional Balkan songs sung before weddings.” But Candillari, who is Serbian, was able to provide the singers with extensive guidance including a recording of every line “so we could listen over and over and get the words in our heads and the sounds. That was extremely helpful,” says Wolz. “They also sent us study material. It was like going back to school because you’re learning a whole new type of diction. I learned the Serbian alphabet. My partner and I were living in New York [last summer] while I was [preparing], and they probably learned half the show over the time I was studying the text because it became my life for about a month and a half.”
Over the course of rehearsing and recording in Mechanics Hall, the singers—sopranos Chabrelle Williams; Maggie Finnegan and Brianna J. Robinson and mezzo-sopranos Vera Savage; Hannah Ludwig and Wolz—bonded. “I felt like I knew them for so long even after just five days,” says Wolz. That connection fit perfectly with the opera’s themes.
“It’s about sisterhood and deep friendship as [the bride] is about to get married, move away and create a new family and every thing changes. There is intense emotion but also playfulness in certain parts. But it is sorrowful too, because she’s leaving a life she’s known and that’s scary.”
Baryshnikov, the Providence-based dancer-choreographer and educator at Brown University, conceived of the two connected worlds of the film. The singers, filmed in the stark black-box recording studio, represent the spiritual ancestors whose voices guide the seven dancers led by Victoria L. Awkward as the bride and including Jackie Davis, Jay Breen, Emily Jerant-Hendrickson, Sarah Pacheco, Sasha Peterson and Olivia Moon in the expansive outdoor setting.
Baryshnikov, daughter of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Lange, “was the first to see a strong relationship to the natural world and wanted to explore that here in Massachusetts,” says Vernatter. “She was drawn to a beach setting. We considered several options, and since I’ve spent time in Truro with friends, Ballston Beach jumped out as poetic and romantic and just so bold for the way that Shura has conceived the film.” [x]
More at blo.org/svadba.
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