Singing Walt Whitman's praises

"Reckoning Time: A Song of Walt Whitman" is composer Peter Child's and librettist Alan Brody's take on the life that is rumored to pass before one's eyes at the moment of death. The eyes, the life and the death are those of the great Romantic poet Walt Whitman and the moment is suspended, scored, scripted and verbally enacted between the swell and slump of his last labored breath. In that timeless dreamscape stir Child's exquisite music and Brody's personal writing and thoughtful theatrical machinations. But in the end, we're left with nothing more of Whitman than what we knew or suspected in the first place. The author's song of himself tells us over and over to adore Whitman sympathetically and unequivocally and, by extension, to stroke and reassure the corpus of misunderstood, oppressed genius.

Thursday night in Jordan Hall, John Oliver led his chorale and orchestra in the world premiere of this dramatic oratorio with baritone James Maddalena as Whitman and actor Michael Ouellette in the speaking role as Whitman's young, working-class lover Peter Doyle.

Where "Reckoning Time" does succeed dramatically i in its structural design, elaborating Whitman's childhood memory of the carol "I saw three ships ..." into acts separated by the appearance in his self-summary of ships. The dramatic purpose of this carol is made plain in the same frame with the last ship, which carries William Carlos Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Maya Angelou, the great progeny of his literary legacy all beckoning him to join them. All the seams come together here -- Whitman's first memories ferry him to his last; the impact of his life sprawls abundant and multifarious in the teeming future of 20th- century poetry.

Child's music is like yet another ship, but one in which ride his antecedents -- Ives, Britten, Mahler, Berg, Puccini. Like Italian Romantic opera, Child uses the orchestra to paint recitation, subtly moving the action forward through changes in harmony, texture and orchestration. The score is beautiful in detail and viewed in the large, it escalates in complexity, intensity and dissonance from beginning to end like the death shudder itself.

Maddalena's singing brings the piece just the right conversational demeanor. Because it was written to eschew grief in favor of joy, Ouellette's Doyle works as a sympathetic, intimate friend but not as a lover. This is a difficult piece, and the chorus sounded a little nervously tight-throated at times.