Photo By Ken Howard

Nixon in China

As directed by Cincinnati Opera first-timer Kevin Newbury and conducted by Kristjan Jarvi, also first-timing at Music Hall, John Adams' Nixon in China (1987) emerges almost as much a theater piece or a concert as it is an opera. Actually, it's an artful blend of words and music -- with a dollop of good old fashioned show business bouncing along in the background. It's about as unlikely a topic for an opera as the eminent domain wars in Norwood.

And it works.

It's 1972. Vietnam is winding down to heartbreak and despair. World communism is on the march but faltering over increasing friction between China and the Soviet Union. Watergate lurks in President Richard M. Nixon's near future; character traits that will lead him to disaster have not yet made headlines. Centrist-internationalist Nixon seeks to gain ground in the Cold War and elects to annoy Moscow by cozying up to Beijing.

Despite the ideological chasm that separates the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- and despite U.S. opposition to allowing the PRC a seat at the United Nations-- Nixon loads wife Pat and foreign affairs guru Henry Kissinger onto the jet plane Spirit of '76 and gallops off to spend five days exploring, if not actually easing, tensions among himself and Premiere Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong.

Those five days are the subject of the singing.

It's doubtful that Alice Goodman's often elliptical, always introspective libretto could be effectively performed as a spoken play, though the initial socio-politico-philosophical set-to among the antagonists in Act One might make an interesting experiment in spoken theater, as might the five intersecting soliloquies -- Chou, Mao, Madame Mao, Nixon, Pat Nixon -- that make up most of Act Three.

It's the final night of the visit. Deeply fatigued by the rigors of diplomacy and the clash of cultures, the five have retired to private quarters and prepare for bed. They mull ideas and impressions in fitful half-sentences and seek solace in recollection of quite different long agos. Goodman's sentences are richly poetic, frequently passionate. Unlike the piffle that passes for drama in much 19th century opera, her words stand as a nearly equal partner to Adams' score.

It's further doubtful that the CSO could successfully perform Adams' orchestral score -- minus singers -- as a concert piece. But it's more likely with this score than with a traditional opera, the point being that in Nixon the orchestra is an integral participant, not the accompanist to whatever the singers get up to. Nor is the score a series of bravura set pieces separated by stretches of tinkling. Adams uses the orchestra as the play's narrator, a character rather like the Stage Manager in Our Town, someone who is always there, guiding, connecting, interpreting, telling the story as the singers live it.

Adams is sometimes described as a minimalist composer. Hearing the full stretch of Nixon -- here leaping, there pulsing, here thin and acid, there sonorous -- is to belie that notion, at least in this instance. It's too intricate, too detailed to qualify as minimalist. No, it isn't lyrical, though it has its melodies, even hummable ones such as a slow moment for Mao in Act Three. To repeat, the score is a character in the drama. Which leads to further applause for the storytelling capabilities of Kristjan Jarvi, this younger brother of CSO Maestro Paavo Jarvi. What a brilliant, crisp, clarified performance he marshaled from ever able forces.

Then there are the singers -- to come to them rather later than is typical in a report on an opera. Robert Orth is a veteran in the role of Dick Nixon. With reason. His portrayal is full-featured, adopting Nixon's public gestures with neither mockery nor malice -- as was Adams' intent with the role, according to press reports at the time of San Francisco Opera's world premiere in 1987. Thomas Hammons (Loveland native, CCM grad) was the original Henry Kissinger in that '87 production and has sung him often since. He finds richness in the music as he survives thankless caricaturing.

Mark T. Panuccio, who will return next season at Edgar in Lucie de Lammermoor, has the vocal power and precision for Mao, but he's decades too young. His aging makeup has a plastered-in-place look, and the physical mannerisms he uses to display agedness verges into buffoonery -- less so in Act Three than in Act One. The leader of the Long March was no buffoon, nor, I suspect, did Adams and Goodman intend him to be played so.

Chen-Ye Yuan, the cast's only native of China, lends a sense of acerbic wisdom in the role of Zhou Enlai, always there just on the periphery of the jousting, always observing and keenly commenting. Maureen O'Flynn captures both the determination of Pat Nixon to function as a public figure in the public forum and the reluctance of the woman inside who'd really rather think about her children.

Then there's Georgia Jarman -- Flora in Cincinnati Opera's 1998 Traviata -- who explodes into the middle of Act Two as Madame Mao and doesn't slip out of mind for the balance of the evening. O'Flynn's long scene at the beginning of Act Two and Jarman's spectacular song about her husband's Little Red Book at the end of the act are the evening's vocal highlights.

Rarely has Cincinnati Opera managed a visual effect as stunning as the airport arrival of the Nixons. Blood red set (Allen Moyer). An army of choristers. Subtle lighting (Thomas Hase). Powerful orchestral sound. Then a dozen large-screen, period console TV sets slowly descend from the flies above the stage, their screens filled with images of cloudy sky into which Spirit of '76 appears as a blood red exit ramp rolls on from stage right -- and the visitors appear.

Those TV sets remain on stage for much of the action. And right that is. Nixon's presidency came near the beginning of the media age, when television was giving new meaning to the phrase "public figure." It is an elegantly staged (Newbury) and thoroughly well-blended marriage of videography (Wendall Harrington) and live action. The huge flickering screens, filled with youthful images of the real Mao, Nixon and the others play poignant, even painful counterpoint to the older characters.

No, it's not perfect. But, so much of this Nixon in China is so good -- particularly the revelatory performance of Adams' score. Grade: A-