(Boston Phoenix, May 23-30, 2002)
by Lloyd Schwartz

HOOSE IS ONE OF THE RARE MUSICIANS whose interests in the past and in the present are equal. He was the guest conductor for the most ambitious work in the final concert of this tenth-anniversary season of the Auros Group for New Music: Peter Child's 1984 chamber opera based on Samuel Beckett's radio play Embers, which capped a Beckett evening that began with a rare screening of his 1964 silent film, Film, directed by Alan Schneider, in which Buster Keaton embodies the archetypal Beckett character ("hastening blindly along sidewalk, hugging the wall on his left, in opposite direction to all the others"), and which gives us, despite moments of hilarity, the unflinchingly tragic side of the Keaton character, his intense and perhaps fatal desire to be alone in the world - unmistakably himself even though we see him, until the very last frames, only from behind.

Embers is a complex piece, largely a monodrama la Krapp's Last Tape, but with the main character's wife also playing an important role. Henry is trying to connect to his father, a suicide; Ada isn't helping. Henry is a writer, and his thoughts as he walks by the sea are hard to separate from his story about a man and his anaesthesiologist friend. Child's intricate scoring (beautifully played here, and eloquently conducted) suggests the sea in its ever-shifting moods. Or Henry's own mindflow. Baritone David Ripley, repeating his premiere performance of 17 years ago, was in sturdy voice and gave himself wholeheartedly to this role's extreme vocal demands (ranging from spoken declamation to falsetto), though the minimal staging by MIT's Michael Ouellette wasn't enough to help him create a vividly focused character. Perhaps any staging would distract from the words. Unlike Krapp rewinding his tape, Henry has nothing to do but think. Soprano Janna Baty, however, waiting patiently in silence for nearly half the opera, conveyed meaning, nuance, and a consistent character in every note of her brilliant voice, and in her smallest gesture.

Beckett's language is a kind of verbal fugue. It doesn't need additional music, which doubles the length and stretches the timing. Child's opera has the large dramatic turning points, but despite its beauties, it rather smoothes out the moment-to-moment quicksilver of Beckett's tone, in which every phrase seems to be an emotional contradiction of the one before. The setting is very sympathetic to the singers, but no opera exists in which every word comes across, and in Beckett, every syllable counts.