Auros superb in Beckett adaptation

(The Boston Herald, May 18, 2002)
Opera Review by T.J. Medrek

Auros Group for New Music's ``Opera: Samuel Beckett,'' at Longy School of Music, Cambridge, last night.

Auros Group for New Music celebrated the conclusion of its 10th anniversary season with a superb performance of Peter Child's 1984 opera ``Embers,'' part of a program titled ``Opera: Samuel Beckett'' at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge last night.

``Embers'' is much more than just a musical setting of a radio play by Dublin-born author and playwright Samuel Beckett. It's what Beckett himself would have written had his genius expressed itself in musical rather than poetic form. Auros' realization of the work, under the always-welcome guest conductor David Hoose and with baritone David Ripley as Henry and soprano Janna Baty as Ada, could not have been improved upon.

Henry is a writer haunted by memories of a stern father who committed suicide, leaving his son filled with self-doubt and a desperate fear of being left alone. Ada's role in their relationship is to keep Henry as grounded as possible - no small task. ``You wore him out living. Now you are wearing him out dead,'' she tells Henry, dismissing his obsession with his dead father.

Child wraps the vocal line around the text with uncommon skill and the kind of naturalness that should be a model for would-be opera composers.

The overall musical tone is despairing, but it's despair punctuated with striking wit - and even some marvelous in-jokes like an overheard piano lesson being taken by a most untalented pupil, Henry and Ada's daughter.

``It was not enough to drag her into the world. Now she must play piano,'' an exasperated Henry tells his wife in one of the work's few out-and-out comic lines.

``Embers'' was preceded by the world premiere of John Heiss's sweet, too-brief ``Fanfare for Auros' Tenth Anniversary'' and a performance piece by Beckett himself, ``Quad.''