Jesús León has the kind of matinee-idol looks that compel little old ladies to fan themselves briskly with their theater programs. A 28-year-old tenor from Hermosillo, Mexico, he has symmetrical features; perfectly straight, white teeth; and a dark, curly forelock, loose strands of which fall coyly across his forehead.
León sings the role of Leonardo, a star-crossed lover, in UCLA’s world premiere of Lorca, Child of the Moon, a full-length opera composed by Ian Krouse, the chair of the UCLA Department of Music, and directed by Margarita Galbán, the Los Angeles stage director who wrote the libretto. The Lorca in Lorca is Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet and dramatist.
Thirteen days before the curtain is scheduled to rise for the first of four performances at the Freud Playhouse Theater in March, León and five other members of the Lorca cast perform at an invitation-only preview for UCLA neighbors in the James West Alumni Center on campus. León wears a dark suit jacket over a black mock turtleneck. He is to sing the opera’s love duet with the soprano Khori Dastoor, 24, a half-Indian, half-Indonesian beauty with a glass-shattering top note and a waistline unusually tiny for the opera stage. It is 10:30 a.m., by Dastoor’s reckoning “a little early” for a hot love scene. But the preview is important, especially for Krouse. Dastoor pops a throat lozenge in her mouth and smoothes the skirt of her dress.
Krouse, in a dark knit top that sets off his silvery-white hair, stands alongside Mona Lands, the accompanist, who is at a black Steinway piano that has been rolled into a corner of the room. Krouse’s eyes are fixed on León and Dastoor. The music is lusty, virile and has moments of soaring abandon; the conductor Jonathan Stockhammer ’92 says Krouse “jumps naked into the ocean” in this particular scene. It is definitely the work of the composer’s younger self. Now age 49, Krouse wrote it more than 20 years ago.
At the end of the love duet, Dastoor remains in León’s embrace, but her left arm falls slack at her side. There is dead silence in the room, then an eruption of applause.
The response delights Krouse. The love scene comes in the third and final act of the opera, and there’s a lot riding on it. If audiences like it, they’ll walk out of the Freud Playhouse having had a nice evening at the opera. If they love it — if it gives them chills in the way that great opera does — then Lorca might have a life beyond the UCLA campus, which is Krouse’s fervent hope.
“If it doesn’t go to the next level, then I’ve failed, to some degree,” Krouse says after the preview.
That may be exhaustion talking. Krouse has been running on fumes for weeks. But there is no denying that he has invested a huge part of his life in bringing Lorca to the stage. And while he and Galbán gave life to Lorca, neither of them has any idea how it will turn out. In the world of opera, anything can happen.
With just three weeks to go before opening night, Aren Der Hacopian, 28, one of the opera’s stars, pulls himself out of the cast because of a health issue. The singer’s departure leaves Evan Hughes, 21 — a bass baritone to Der Hacopian’s lyric baritone — to handle the physically stressful role of Lorca four performances in a row. It’s a big job with a lot of pressure, especially for such a young singer. “I guess all I can try to do is be in the moment about it,” says Hughes.
Lorca cast members won their roles in November, and twice-weekly rehearsals started after winter break. All but two of the singers are UCLA students, and most are enrolled in the university’s small, highly selective voice program. Juliana Gondek, the chair of the voice and opera division and a soprano with an international reputation, sings a role; León is her private student. All of the musicians in the orchestra are currently enrolled Bruins. The choreographer is Mari Sandoval M.A. ’80, who has brought in several professional dancers to lend their footwork to the flamenco dancing.
Many in the cast have long lists of credits. Dastoor has been on stage since she was 9; Ralph Cato, 50, a doctoral student in music, spent many years on stage in Europe. “But a lot of these kids are fresh out of high school, and maybe they’ve been in a musical or two,” Gondek says. “Not only are they having to learn very difficult music that hasn’t been performed before, but they’re also being asked to dance and act. So it’s really a baptism by fire.”
Lorca is a production of Opera UCLA and a showcase event for UCLA’s 2004–’05 Year of the Arts. With its blend of literature, dance, theater, opera and folklore, Lorca shows off the university’s multidisciplinary offerings to grand effect. But the opera traces its origins to a nonprofit theater called the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (BFA). Now located in the old Lincoln Heights jail near downtown Los Angeles, the BFA brings classic Hispanic theatrical works to Los Angeles audiences. The Cuban-born Galbán, an actress and director, started the group in 1973 with two theater friends, the Mexican film and television actress Carmen Zapata, and Estela Scarlata, a set designer born in Argentina.
Lorca is the sort of writer who inspires slavish devotion, but he has few disciples as passionate as Galbán. Of the poet and playwright, she says: “There is no one like Lorca.” The intensity of Galbán’s emotion is on full display during the long weeks of rehearsals. Hands dug deep in the pockets of her corduroy slacks, muttering in Spanish, she paces like a basketball coach on the sidelines, her team down by two points with seven seconds left on the clock. Galbán knows exactly what she wants, and when she doesn’t get it, she makes palms-down, back-and-forth motions with her forearms and marches up the steps to the stage: “Estop! Estop!”
She coaxes and cajoles. She sidles up to one of the dancers, Irit Specktor, and whispers in her ear. “Mi amor, more sexy, for me?” When all else fails, she presses the palms of her hands together in supplication: “Pleez, pleez! My lovely ladies! Mis bellezas! Act! Act!”
“You can’t fake it in front of her. You have to either feel it or not do it at all,” says Karin Mushegain, a 24-year-old master’s student who plays a gypsy in Lorca.
In the 1980s, Galbán won a development grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to write a theatrical work that would introduce American audiences to the great Spanish poet. There is little she does halfheartedly, and she dove into the project with her customary zeal. Her research took her to Spain and the small town of Fuente Vaqueros. For several weeks, she pored through archives at the poet’s birth home, a two-story house of whitewashed stucco that is now a museum and library. There she found invaluable documents — “letters to friends, lovers — everything,” along with filmed interviews with Lorca. Much of this material would be incorporated verbatim into Galbán’s libretto; except for the bridges connecting one scene to another, every word that she wrote for Lorca is from the writer’s pen or mouth.
Lorca thought of himself as ugly. He was short and stocky, with dark, wide-set eyes. He always wore his hair combed back. Early in 1936, he finished writing The House of Bernarda Alba, the final play in the trilogy that started with Blood Wedding and Yerma. In August of that year, just after fighting broke out in the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was dragged into a field and shot to death by an anti-Republican firing squad. He was 38.
Physically, Hughes has little in common with the writer he portrays. The singer is a slender 6-foot-4, with a narrow face and high, patrician cheekbones. If it were not for his youthfulness and the soft dark curls that fall over one side of his face, he would appear to have stepped out of the canvas of an El Greco painting. He isn’t worried about the physical portrayal; few in the audience will know what Lorca looked like anyway. It’s the psychological portrayal that’s tricky.
Lorca was a closeted homosexual, obsessed with death, tormented by unfulfilled desire for men and motherhood. There are so many layers to his personality that it’s no wonder that Hughes and Der Hacopian — while he was still in the cast — had a difficult time figuring out how to play him. But Galbán doesn’t expect a nuanced performance. The two baritones are “opera singers, not actors,” she says. What she really wants is that audiences go home with the idea that Lorca valued free expression above all else, no matter how unconventional or shocking its manifestation.
“Everything we’re singing is some sort of subtext for sex, so keep that in mind. Use your imagination.” About a dozen young women are in Royce Hall rehearsing the washerwoman scene, and Gondek is urging them to vamp it up. The rehearsal room is long and wide, with a mirrored wall on one side and a ballet barre on the other. The girls are in colorful fringed shawls and long skirts that they have dug out of their closets to wear until the costume designer, Carlos Brown (Like Water for Chocolate, A Day Without a Mexican), finishes the gathered skirts and lacy camisoles that they will wear on stage. In the scene they are rehearsing, the women have been scrubbing clothes against rocks on the riverbank but their minds are elsewhere. Prodded by Gondek, the girls get frisky. Junior Karen Vuong hikes up her skirt, raises a bended knee and wiggles her pointed toes. Others toss their hair back playfully. Galbán likes it. Leaning against the barre, she smiles and claps her hands gleefully. “Eso! Eso! (That’s it!).”
Galbán’s libretto for Lorca reflects the author’s obsession with themes of death and violence, but also passion and lust. It’s new territory for a lot of cast members, even those who have grown up at Hollywood’s front door, where such things might seem old hat.
In January, soprano Alison England, who lives in Paris, came to UCLA to give a master class for the Lorca cast in Schoenberg Hall. England, who has spiky red hair and a personality like that of a lunatic aunt, knows Lorca well, having performed all three principal female roles in a 1987 workshop production. England is encouraging the singers to use their bodies more. “Physicalize it, don’t conceptualize it,” she tells them, setting the tone by rolling on the floor and laughing like Carol Burnett.
In Act II, which is drawn from the play Yerma, Hughes, as Lorca, has a tender but complicated scene with Kyung Chy, 30, a soprano from Seoul, Korea. Chy, who plays the barren Yerma, has a heart-shaped face, dewy complexion and a beauty mark above her upper lip. In the scene, love and lust are mixed with yearning for children and childhood. England wants the two singers to let passion take over, but that’s easier said than done when your classmates are watching and the lights are turned up. England reassures them: “Go ahead.” As the scene plays out, the hall grows quiet. A photographer who has been shooting pictures of the rehearsal sets down his camera. When the singing stops, England congratulates Hughes and Chy on a wonderful performance. Chy, who is the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and married, walks off stage, her head bowed.
Lorca was an accomplished pianist and sometime composer before gaining fame as an author, and the rhythm of his writing, Krouse says, suggests that “what he clearly had in mind was that a lot of the text should be sung.” At the time that Galbán began working on her Lorca theatrical piece, Krouse was already working with the BFA on a separate Lorca project. The relationship between the BFA and Krouse began in 1982, when Carmen Zapata telephoned USC looking for someone who might be interested in writing music for English translations of the poet’s work. Krouse was then 26 and pursuing a doctorate in composition. Nearly 6 feet tall, he had dark brown hair that fell to his shoulders in soft curls, heavy eyebrows and fine features. Krouse had grown up in South Bend, Ind., in a home filled with books and music — classical, opera, folk and Broadway musicals. There was no television in the house. His father, Philip, was a math teacher, and his mother, Charlotte, a mostly amateur pianist. Krouse learned to play piano from his mother, but his favorite instrument was the guitar.
After graduating from Indiana University at South Bend with a double major in guitar and composition, Krouse came west to pursue advanced studies. As a guitarist, he was prodigiously talented and played with an intensity that would later cause him trouble.
In 1979, Krouse joined with two friends, Terry Graves and Kenton Youngstrom, to form the all-guitar ensemble, The De Falla Trio (later the Falla Guitar Trio), named after the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), who was a friend of Lorca. Signed by Columbia Artists Management Inc., the three guitarists kept up a busy touring schedule. In 1983, they made their New York debut and went into the studio to cut an album. Released the next year on the Concord label, Virtuoso Music for Three Guitars was named record of the year by Stereo Review.
For Krouse, the success was not to last. For some time, he had been minimizing the symptoms of a serious condition then called tendonitis but now known as “overuse syndrome.” It started with pain in his right hand. Before long, the left hand was afflicted. After a while, he lost the use of the middle finger of his right hand. “I couldn’t even brush my teeth or use a pencil,” he says. “I eventually threw in the towel. Fate, I guess, was telling me I was supposed to be a composer.”
In the summer of 1984, a looming deadline triggered a creative spurt in the composer that would be the envy of anyone who has stared at a blank sheet of paper. The NEA wanted work samples quickly. During a lull in the Falla Trio’s concert schedule, his career as a concert guitarist apparently doomed, Krouse planted himself at an upright piano in his Orange County home. Within three months, he had written 80 percent of what would become Lorca, Child of the Moon.
It is easy to fall in love with Krouse’s score. The music is catchy but not cloying. The composer quotes heavily from Spanish folkloric music, as well as songwriters from his pantheon of musical heroes like The Beatles and Cole Porter. Some of the borrowed phrases might sound instantly familiar if heard out of context, but Krouse wove them into a musical architecture that is uniquely his own. Working at his piano one day, he stumbled on an unusual five-beat phrasing that he really liked. The unorthodox phrasing abstracts the original material and gives the composition an edgy modernness.
Krouse and Galbán picked some of their favorite moments, and went into the studio and recorded them. “We sent the tape to Washington, D.C., and they loved it,” he recalled.
With two more grants from the NEA, the BFA staged three workshop productions of Lorca, in 1985, 1987 and 1991. The workshops generated a lot of good buzz in the theater world. When the lights went down at the BFA’s 99-seat equity-waiver space, there were important people in the audience, among them Gordon Davidson, the founding artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, and the stage director Peter Sellars. Though Lorca received scant attention in the press, the response among theater people was positive, even glowing. One person and another talked about doing it here or there. And then, nothing.
“The piece went into a kind of dormant phase after that workshop,” Krouse says. “We realized that it wasn’t a little intimate chamber opera. It had to be a full-scale, grand opera with costumes and dancers and a set and all the trappings. And neither the BFA nor I had all the connections and resources to do that.”
At the same time, Krouse’s life had taken an entirely different turn. In 1990, he joined the music faculty at UCLA. A couple of years later, he met Chika Kawahara, who became his second wife. (His first marriage ended in divorce.) In 1995, the couple had their first child, Ryan, followed by Eryn two years later, and Arlen in 1999.
“I never forgot about the piece,” Krouse says. “But as you get older, a decade can blow by.”
In the summer of 2003, Krouse “awoke with a sudden fire in my belly to finish the piece and produce it.” A year earlier, his best friend, the Falla guitarist Graves, died of a sudden heart attack at age 48. “I thought, that could happen to me, and if it does, Lorca will not be finished. It will be useless.”
In the coming months, “a quasi-obsessive, creative explosion to get this to happen” seized Krouse. With the score not yet orchestrated — or even finished — he returned to his piano and pounded on the keys with such ferocity that tendon problems returned to the thumb and pinky of his right hand.
As department chair, Krouse would not have time to conduct Lorca himself, but he knew who he wanted to take his place. A Los Angeles native, Jonathan Stockhammer lives in Berlin and works mostly in Europe, where he is known especially as a conductor of new music. (Last September, he conducted a 26-piece orchestra that performed at Trafalgar Square for a new soundtrack by the British pop duo the Pet Shop Boys to the 1925 silent movie Battleship Potemkin.) Stockhammer grew up in a musical family — his father, David Stockhammer, is a violist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. When he started studying with Krouse, he was hardly anyone’s idea of a future symphony conductor. “I was a little phobic, nervous. I talked quickly. I didn’t have the kind of projection of my ideas and personality that is essential for a conductor to have,” Stockhammer says. Krouse saw past the oddities and detected in his young protégé the mental agility and temperament of a great conductor.
Stockhammer, 35, meets with the orchestra for the first time on Feb. 9. Only five weeks remain until the curtain rises on Lorca, not nearly enough time to get the musicians in shape. On a blustery evening, Stockhammer is in his office on the second floor of Schoenberg Music Building, talking about the challenges that lie ahead. Reminded of the few days that remain until opening night, Stockhammer rises silently from his chair and walks to a rain-splattered window. “Excuse me. I’m going to jump. You know the way out.”
If Stockhammer is anxious, the young musicians and singers would never know it. During rehearsals he wears a Buddha-like smile and seems possessed of a preternatural calm. Orchestra rehearsals are in Schoenberg, in a high-ceilinged room with a tiered floor and big acoustic tiles on the walls. The string instruments are to Stockhammer’s left, the winds to his right. There are drums, tam-tams and a xylophone in back, and a big, shiny tuba behind the clarinets. Stockhammer perches on a stool, his left leg outstretched, right knee bent, a baton in his right hand. The score is on a stand in front of him. Krouse’s music is rhythmically complex so the pages are heavy with notes. Stockhammer cautions the musicians to avoid the temptation to “play with gusto” this first time around. “Stay as relaxed as possible and listen more than you normally would,” he says.
Stockhammer does not push but coaxes. On one afternoon, León and Dastoor are practicing the love duet, along with Kalil Wilson, 23, with whom León shares the role of Leonardo. León’s singing is achingly beautiful, which for Stockhammer is a problem. He wants less beauty and more grit.
“You do that aria very nicely,” Stockhammer says softly. “What you can add to that is a little more poison.”
“Poison,” León repeats, narrowing his eyes and nodding his head slightly.
“Yes. It’s an ugly, ugly moment. Maybe you could make it a little more ugly.”
“A little more ugly,” León repeats.
On a warm afternoon, the singers meet in Schoenberg Hall for rehearsal. The girls wear spaghetti-strap tops, jeans and flip-flops. One sings “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies as she settles into her chair on stage. “OK, folks. We’re going to start with Act II, Scene III,” says Daniel Cummings, the assistant conductor, raising his baton to signal the rehearsal pianist, Myhang Thi Huynh.
Krouse slides into a seat about 10 rows back to watch. There are about two dozen students rehearsing, but the stage this afternoon belongs to Chy. The singer’s casting as Yerma, who yearns for a child in her womb, was inspired. When she sings, motherhood “just radiates from her,” says Lands, the accompanist. At the time she auditioned for the UCLA opera program, Chy was hugely pregnant with her son, Elliot, now age 2.
“The only thing that fit her was her Korean national costume,” Gondek recalls. “So she came in wearing this gorgeous, silk sort of kimono, and she looked like a million bucks. She opened her mouth and out came this beautiful sound, and we said, ‘Ooh, we gotta have her.’”
Rehearsals for Lorca coincide with two other big productions on the music department’s winter–spring calendar. The musical Lakme: Redux ran for four performances in late February, followed by Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, which will open on April 29. Music students don’t have the luxury of working on one production at a time, so cast members often arrive at Lorca rehearsals red-faced and heaving, having scurried down the hallway from other rehearsals, loaded down with backpacks, water bottles, cell phones and music scores. It’s good practice for life post-UCLA; professional opera singers race between auditions and jobs as they try to patch together a living.
But the juggling act can be confusing. In addition to her principal role as the bride in Lorca, Dastoor was the Brahmin priestess Lakme of Lakme. All told, she had four simultaneous boyfriends — fictional and otherwise: León and Wilson in Lorca; Nathaniel Reynolds, who played her dashing lover, Gerald, in Lakme; and Matthias Metternich, the Lorca chorister who is her real-life boyfriend. It sounded complicated. “You have no idea,” she says, chuckling.
The rehearsal room can be a peculiarly intimate venue. Cast members hug, kiss and caress. In Schoenberg Hall, Mushegain and Hughes sit next to each other to listen to Chy sing an aria. Mushegain slips her right arm under Hughes’ left and lets her head fall on his shoulder. The two are just friends, but they look like love-struck teenagers in a movie theater. Sometimes, for no obvious reason, two cast members throw their arms around each other, tighten their grip and rock from side to side. Dastoor says the affection is a survival technique in a business that is tough and surprisingly lonely. “You know, when you get up on stage, you’ve really only got each other,” she says.
At a Royce rehearsal, Vanessa Michelle, the stage manager, shares a tip with the cast. “OK. You know the basic rules. If you make a mistake, just keep going. Nobody will notice.”
A couple of weeks before opening night, there’s a spike in the intensity level of rehearsals. All of the activity has moved into Freud: fittings, run-throughs, set construction, lights. There are no more days off; rehearsals are over when Stockhammer says they are. Gondek cautions the singers to take extra care of their health and their voices. Hughes makes sure he gets 10 hours of sleep a night and drinks water by the gallon.
The odd thing is that nobody is looking for perfection. A perfect performance, Stockhammer says, “is quickly forgotten.” When singers take chances, mix it up a little, try different things — that’s when you get a memorable performance, the conductor says.
When the curtain rises on opening night, Stockhammer says, his job is basically over. The singers know what they need to do. The musicians have the music in front of them. All that is left for the conductor to do is give everybody permission, with a nod or gesture, to get on with their jobs. From time to time he might need to steer them back on track if they wander off course.
Other than that, he just gets out of the way and lets it happen.
