O18 Festival: Opera Philadelphia presents Lembit Beecher and Hannah Moscovitch’s ‘Sky on Swings’

The journey through Alzheimer’s disease takes center stage here. The opera follows two women and their children as they navigate their diminishing memories and sense of control. Looming shadows of full deterioration and death lurk always, slightly out of view. Beecher’s arresting score, a collection of sharp sounds and dissonant melodies, communicates the anger, frustration, and fear felt by all.

Dualities of the disease

The opera’s pointed, angular sound world avoids slipping into maudlin melodrama, but Beecher also doesn’t shy away from the beauty of the major key. (Conductor Geoffrey McDonald handles the shifts with a keen sense of detail.) This balance mirrors the temperamental nature of Alzheimer’s, which can render its patients sweet and accommodating one moment, brittle and combative the next. It’s a duality that Moscovitch further captures in her moving libretto, which presents the disease from all angles.

Martha (mezzo-soprano Marietta Simpson) mutters incessantly, cannot recognize her adult daughter, and forgets that her husband died years earlier of a heart attack. She erupts in a rage at the slightest perceived transgression. She represents the advanced stage of the disease, where hope for better days has largely flown out the window.

In contrast, we meet Danny (mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade) at the start of her journey. A researcher by trade, she shows full awareness of her predicament and a desire to make proactive decisions about her future. Elegantly costumed by Tilly Grimes, she could be any well-kept grandmother you’d see at a shopping mall, yet she sings plaintively that “in a year from now, I won’t remember my own face.”

Moscovitch offers a multifaceted view of the disease through these two women. Deep in her dementia, Martha fixates on a pleasant memory from her adolescence — an unrequited crush she had on a female friend, a beautiful girl with “lips red like fruit.” Danny transforms into this object of affection, a role she’s happy to play; she cradles Martha in her soft arms, offering comfort to a woman farther down the road she also walks. The portrait of friendship and compassion in the face of a deadly disease is poignant and affecting without being overstated.

Giving voice to Alzheimer’s

Much credit belongs to Simpson and Von Stade, who give accomplished performances as both singers and actors. Simpson manages the hair-trigger emotional swings of a woman with advanced cognitive impairments, telegraphing the shifts in temperament without overstatement. Her vocal resources have diminished somewhat, with register breaks more pronounced and noticeable, but her overall sound remains individual and resonant.

Von Stade depicts Danny’s pride and pain in meticulous detail. Her instrument — perhaps the most singularly beautiful mezzo sound of the late twentieth century — is still immediately identifiable. When unsteadiness occasionally creeps in, it feels like a stylistic choice, a nod to the erasure her character increasingly experiences.

Joanna Settle directs. Philadelphians may remember her from her brief tenure at the University of the Arts, as well as several productions at the Wilma Theater. I admit that in the past I’ve been cool to her austere, overly cerebral aesthetic, which often seems at odds with the material she chooses.

Here, though, that coolness is of a piece with the depiction of disease that’s central to the story. She draws remarkably subtle work from her leading ladies, and from soprano Sharleen Joynt and tenor Daniel Taylor, who play their children.

Continuing success

Set designer Andrew Lieberman’s starkly white set serves as a perfect canvas for a pair of minds that grow increasingly blank. The lighting (by Pat Collins) and projections (by Jorge Cousineau) complement this feeling by operating in extremes.

Beecher and Moscovitch could do more to incorporate the caregivers' perspective into the opera. Martha’s daughter, Winnie, offers a sustained aria detailing how her mother’s condition has impacted her life, which Joynt performs with dramatic subtlety and vocal grace. Even so, she remains sketchily drawn, and Taylor, as Danny’s son Ira, never gets to make a similar contribution.

Sky on Swings continues Opera Philadelphia’s admirable commitment to developing and premiering contemporary American operas, a project that’s borne sweet fruits over the past several seasons. A work that mostly delivers on its serious intentions, I expect it to become a favorite vehicle for senior singers in the coming years.