Review: 'Marnie' stays in shadow at Nico Muhly's opera

He begins by describing an eventful day at the accounting firm where Marnie works. The choir sings a multitude of overlapping phrases ("A bill for our services", "I love your nails of this color") that had an intriguing manic feel. First we hear Marnie (mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard) voice sweet jokes when she is introduced by her unofficial boss, Mr. Strutt (clarion tenor Anthony Dean Griffey), to a reliable client, Mark Rutland (the vigorous, sweet baritone Christopher Maltman). During this time, the orchestra teems with fragments of nerve lines, piercing sounds with notes that mingle in noisy dissonances, chording chords over thrilling rhythmic figures, and lines disturbing and huge bass, sometimes strangely disconnected.

The best scenes of "Marnie" occur when Mr. Muhly, in synchronization with Mr. Wright, takes creative risks. Rather than providing Marnie with a sort of revealing weapon, the opera gives her transitional "links", as Mr. Muhly calls them, disoriented passages in soliloquy where, in broken pieces of choppy lines and jumping, it expresses bitter and confused ruminations. . "What will I be?" She sings after stealing the safe at the accounting office and decided that she had to leave with a new identity. In a later bond, after Mark imposed a kiss on her, she vomited disgust for her "drooling lips," her "flickering tongue," in fragments of sentences on a heart-rending orchestra.

In the most inspired touch of the work, Marnie is driven at key moments by four blonde women dressed in unicoloured office uniforms, called Shadow Marnies, which surround her, providing harmonic backgrounds and sometimes melodic counterpoints. Mr. Muhly, who grew up singing in church choirs, infuses into these ephemeral scenes notes of ancient sacred music and writings subjugated in the orchestra.

And the shadows were crucial for another fascinating scene in the psychoanalyst's office. Earlier in the opera, after Mark had caught her flying safely, Marnie agreed to marry him, seeing no way out. But frustrated that she recoils before his touch, he makes a bargain: if Marnie sees an analyst, he will place a horse that she owns, the only thing she likes in life, in a stable. for her. In this scene, on a charged and moving piece of music, the Shadow Marnies take turns on the couch of the analyst, which proved a powerful metaphor: all the people do not reveal multiple personalities in the office of a therapist?