They have the perfect love. Acis loves Galatea, and vice versa. So do another unnamed pair of lovers, The Girl and her Beloved. 

But finding perfect love is not how the two operas OrpheusPDX is presenting this summer conclude. It’s how they start, so you know those loves won’t end well. Or at least, not in conventional happy endings. In both shows–Handel’s 1708 Acis, Galatea, & Polyphemus, which plays this weekend, and Los Angeles based composer/librettist David Hertzberg’s 2018 The Rose Elf  (August 17-18)—what starts with natural love proceeds through betrayal and murder to, ultimately, transformative redemption.

The pairing is the third annual offering from the Portland-based summer opera company created and directed by Christopher Mattaliano, best known in Oregon for his 16 years leading what was then a more traditional company, Portland Opera. For three summers now, freed from the shackles of filling too-large venues like Keller Auditorium, Mattaliano has parlayed his decades of contacts in and knowledge of the opera world to bring Oregon too-rarely performed chamber operatic gems, from both contemporary composers and early opera composers.

The result has been splendid chamber opera performances of fresh repertoire new to most listeners’ ears, evocatively designed and performed in the superb acoustic of Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. OrpheusPDX has brought intimacy, admirable artistry and excitement to Oregon’s summer classical music season, and this season’s programs promise to extend that bounty.  

The Lovers and the Monster

Handel so adored the story of the shepherd Acis and nymph Galatea, from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, that he made three different versions of it over the years, with the first two based on entirely different settings, written a decade apart in two different countries, for two different languages and boasting completely different scores — which the inveterate recycler still later raided to produce the third, as well as reusing some tunes in his other operas.

In this first version, from 1708, girl loves boy, boy loves girl, jealous sexually predatory monster (Polyphemus, a/k/a Cyclops, whose single mega-eye must have been bright green) crushes boy with rock. So far, so operatic — doomed tragic lovers! But how in the world was this opera (technically a smaller-scale, originally unstaged “serenata” for three singers and small ensemble) commissioned to celebrate a big society wedding?! 

Because (spoiler), both the original tale and Handel’s opera celebrate fidelity, and manage a happy ending, which must have relieved the newlyweds and their families. Handel’s richly melodious, sometimes stark but ultimately uplifting music helped propel the 23-year-old composer to early fame, though it’s overshadowed today by Handel’s bigger if not badder second version, not to mention mega-hits like Messiah, Water Music, and so many, many more.

Which is why it’s so great to have Orpheus PDX around to bring this rewarding music to modern stages. Mattaliano chose it to showcase the splendid voices of Portland stalwart Hannah Penn and Katherine Whyte (who excelled last year in another shepherd’s story) as the opera’s titualar lovers. Douglas Williams plays the monster. 

 Still another familiar Mattaliano collaborator, longtime Portland Opera favorite (and internationally renowned for his many years at New York City Opera) George Manahan, returns to Portland to play harpsichord and conduct a baker’s dozen ensemble, which includes lute master John Lenti, another nationally renowned star who’s well known to Portland Baroque Orchestra fans.

For the non musical aspects, Mattaliano brought back another reliable veteran, Chas Rader-Shieber, to design and direct this staging, as he did Orpheus PDX’s earlier Orfeo and prior Portland Opera productions. He’s an oft-engaged Handel specialist who’s helmed 16 productions of the great Baroque composer’s operas, which sounds impressive but still leaves a couple dozen more to complete the prolific Handel’s full operatic oeuvre. Mattaliano describes this setting as “very much an 18^th century esthetic with an elegant, sophisticated feel — a charming, whimsical way to tell the story.”

In this staging, that story revolves around the conflict between the natural and human-created worlds, but also plumbs deeper than simplistic good vs. evil themes. “Acis and Galatea exist in a pastoral world, guided by passionate love and a joyful embrace of nature,” Rader-Shieber wrote in a program note. “They eschew any attempt to see past their charming cocoon of love and find any intrusion a shame and a bother. Meanwhile, Polyphemus inhabits a scientific realm, where he struggles with an inability to express, process, or even understand his emotions. For him, nature exists to be analyzed, controlled, and stored away for future use. When these two worlds meet, sparks fly, tempers flare (in both directions!), and ultimately, tragic consequences follow. But out of the saddest of events, comes the very beginning of a new understanding.”

Nature’s Revenge

Mattaliano says he didn’t choose these two shows because of their shared themes and even plot lines, both involving love confounded by evil, natural order vs. human disruption. He just admired the music and thought them a good fit for OrpheusPDX’s forces and setting.

They’re equally macabre. Just because Andersen’s 1839 story has ‘elf’ in the title, don’t expect whimsy. After all, The Rose Elf’s much-praised 2018 premiere got nearly as much attention for how it sounded as for where it happened– appropriately, among the catacombs in a Brooklyn cemetery.

Like the Grimm brothers and other HC Andersen tales–before they were bowdlerized, sanitized and Disneyfied for commercial exploitation and reality denial–this one shudders with murder, decapitation, revenge, death from despair. Because, let’s face it, we humans are a pretty dire species, but also aware enough to acknowledge and deplore our darkness. 

Here, the lovers (played by Madeline Ross and Brendan Tuohy) are slain not by a jealous monster, but by a “wicked” brother (Zachary Lenox), whose motivations remain unclear. The elf (played by Lisa Marie Rogali, who sings the great majority of the words) first functions as a witness to these horrors, then as a participant in avenging them. 

And again, OrpheusPDX’s director frames the story as part of a conflict between natural and human desires. “Hertzberg’s update of the original tale contrasts nature’s intoxicating sensuousness with humanity’s irrational passions,” writes stage director Jerry Mouawad in his program note. 

Justly renowned for his decades of magical evocations (e.g. the  ever-popular Frogz and its many variants) at Portland’s Imago Theatre, which he founded and co-directs, Mouawad has created compelling designs and movements for similarly spooky shows for Mattaliano before, including Portland Opera’s  dazzling 2017 double bill of David Lang chamber operas (which also included another grim HC Andersen fairy tale, The Little Match Girl) and 2019’s stark, chilling setting of Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony. He’s one of Oregon’s most visionary, accomplished, popular and irrepressibly off-center artistic leaders.

To Mattaliano, The Rose Elf’s supernatural story was “a perfect fit for the wildly creative, imaginative world of Jerry and Imago,” he says. Mouawad, who’s also co-set designer, sets the action as a kind of shadow play (as Hertzberg calls it) “in a fantastical landscaped garden with an enormous rose, big enough that a human being looks like a tiny elf within it,” Mattaliano says. Bits of the story are projected in shadow puppetry on an upstage screen. 

That mythical atmosphere echoes Hertzberg’s vision. “My love for opera begins with its incandescent power to illuminate the language of myth,” the composer/librettist wrote in the liner notes to Elf’s 2018 CD recording. And his score captures that concept, but in a modern musical language. 

“To impress the gravity of these [mythical] tales in their own times, music can help bridge the old and new-world qualities inherent in this task,” writes conductor Deanna Pham (who’s entering her third year as the Oregon Symphony’s associate conductor) in her program note. “One cannot help but hear the oaken undertones of a classic tale twisted into our modern ears.”

Still in his mid-thirties, Hertzberg’s received rapturous reviews for both Rose Elf and its larger-scale predecessor, The Wake World, the production that first caught Mattaliano’s attention. In Elf, I hear some of the shadowy atmosphere of other mythical/fairy tale operas such as Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande or Portland native Lou Harrison’s Rapunzel, but with greater late-Romantic era dramatic amplitude, especially toward the climax, and a darkness suited to the story. 

However much it draws on past influences, Hertzberg’s is undeniably a 21st century score, “shimmering and sparkling, energetic and wildly colorful and communicative,” Mattaliano raves. “At a time when so many composers are so careful, playing by the rules and writing on a small scale, it’s so refreshing to hear a score bursting at the seams with color and lyricism. He’s not being careful or censoring — he’s really out there with it. It sounds like a symphony orchestra at times,” even though only nine instruments play. 

Hertzberg, who’ll be in Portland for this third production of The Rose Elf and some Northwest touring, is working with America’s most innovative opera company, his hometown LA’s The Industry, on a new production.

Summer Essential

Oregon is lucky to score an original new production of such an important new opera, as well as a rarely seen “Baroque gem,” as Manahan calls Acis. Both attest to the value OrpheusPDX has brought to Oregon’s summer stages during its three-year (and counting) run. And all the fledgling company’s productions pulse with the evident excitement Mattaliano, who’s just moved back to Portland with his family after four years in New Orleans, brings to this second act of an illustrious career. Though his work with Portland Opera involved bigger stages and productions, it was necessarily constrained, as with most large opera companies, which are forced to periodically reprogram the same perennial fave top ten operas in order to sell enough tickets to fill those capacious halls, like Keller Auditorium. 

“What’s been frustrating to me as a producer [with large companies] is that you have a season of four or five operas, and never get around to finding worthy new works that are equally as communicative and satisfying [as the standards],” Mattaliano explains. 

The stakes are too high to permit much venturing beyond the standard rep. It’s why so many opera producers and directors wind up stagnating, repeating themselves so often throughout their careers.

Not Mattaliano. Now, with OrpheusPDX’s more intimate scale, he’s getting a chance to explore new areas he couldn’t under the old model, which is also now threatened by the fraught new economic realities of producing the most expensive form of performing arts in the post-pandemic era. And it sounds a lot better than Keller productions too.

“When I created the company, I wanted to make sure we got Lincoln Hall,” Mattaliano remembers. “You can’t beat those acoustics. Let’s create a programming model that will complement, not compete with, my former company. Let’s explore early opera and living composers, skipping those 200 years of classics. No one loves those more than I do, but I also love the intimacy of Lincoln Hall. Our programming model has been a very good fit for the theater.” 

Of course, that model also requires a lot more scouting in relatively unfamiliar territory to find compelling, rarely seen works from both before and after the classic period — which is part of the fun for Mattaliano. “The challenge of finding these bookend operas every summer is incredibly enjoyable and satisfying,” he says. 

That renewed late-career enthusiasm and liberation infuses OrpheusPDX’s shows, which have a vibrancy and intimacy you can’t always find with traditional productions, yet with artistic standards as high as any. Not to mention a valuable young artist training program. That’s why Orpheus has now joined Chamber Music Northwest, the Oregon Bach Festival, and a few other smaller festivals as essential Oregon summer musical experiences. 

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OrpheusPDX presents:

Acis, Galatea, & Polyphemus by George Frederick Handel

Saturday, August 3, 7:30 pm and Sunday, August 4, 3 pm.

Sung in Italian with English surtitles. Tickets.

The Rose Elf by David Hertzberg

Saturday, August 17, 7:30 pm and Sunday, August 18, 3 pm.

Sung in English with English surtitles. Tickets.