Review: ‘Bird Talk,’ ‘Bon Appetit!’ show opera’s intimate side

by Jay Harvey, Indianapolis Star

The popular image of opera as something large-scale and grandiose doesn’t tell the whole story.

Chamber opera manages to convey many of the thrills of its magnified cousin, but with the advantage of musical and emotional intimacy.

Indianapolis Opera’s current production of Lee Hoiby’s “Bon Appetit!” and Dominick Argento’s “A Water Bird Talk” take the genre down to practically the onstage minimum.

Only one singer in each show carries the dramatic and musical burden, though both are supported by apt, colorful orchestration.

“Bon Appetit!” captures the ebullience of Julia Child’s cooking show in its lively early days. Emily Lodine portrays America’s own camera-ready French chef, who’s assisted by a pair of tidy but sometimes a little unrestrained sous-chefs in preparing a chocolate cake.

In the second performance Saturday night, Lodine followed Hoiby’s nimble setting of Child’s own words (adapted by Mark Shulgasser) with exquisite timing and understated drollery. She swayed between insouciance and detailed warnings as the cake took shape. When puffs of flour escaped the pans and floated to the floor, Child praised her “self-cleaning kitchen” as her dutiful assistants swiftly took care of the spillage.

With members of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra supplying light-textured accompaniment under the baton of James Caraher, Lodine reflected the down-to-earth zest Child was noted for. If “Bon Appetit!” could be said to have had a dramatic climax, it was the jovial contest between the mixer and the wire whisk, resulting in a tasty tie.

“A Water Bird Talk” posed a greater test of the potential of one-singer opera. Argento’s orchestral palette here is considerably more variegated than Hoiby’s; it has to be, because the character of the Lecturer is going through a soul-searing conflict about the meaning of his life. The monologue is laced with wit and anguish, and requires virtuoso vocal security to deliver.

Robert Orth turned in a first-class impersonation of an amateur expert on his subject lecturing to a ladies’ club — a man tormented by unhappiness into digressions of Wagnerian scope. His miserable marriage is the source of most of these wanderings. Orth’s versatile baritone was supplemented by a turn at the piano, where the Lecturer lovingly reproduces bird calls, then is moved by the thought of his anti-musical wife to launch into the stirring old hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation.”

A screen behind Orth was filled with a selection of Audubon slides of waterfowl, including the pied-billed grebe, whose woebegone existence the Lecturer readily identifies with. It also incorporated thevideo designs of Barry Steele, most movingly when Orth-as-Lecturer appears to soar against a blue sky flecked with clouds, free at last from earthbound woes.