MasterVoices, guided by Music Director Ted Sperling, continued its season-long attention to Adam Guettel’s four-chapter theatrical song cycle “Myths and Hymns” on February 24, with “Chapter Two: Work,” with additional lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh and orchestration by Don Sebesky and Jamie Lawrence.
In the opening, “Down and Up and Over and Over,” conducted and directed by Sperling, gears turned and electrical sounds clanked as the MasterVoices blithely focused on work, its repetitions, and its repetitiousness. An ethereal-sounding Anthony Roth Costanzo, counter-tenor and, here, director, gave us “Children of the Heavenly King,” to which Erik Freer contributed the minimalist visual of an eye, a nose, lips, and a sphere-full of blue sky and clouds.
The trio of soprano Ailyn Pérez, tenor Nicholas Phan, and Costanzo, backed by MasterVoices, conjured a festival, carnival, pageant, or parade, much as the ensemble does in Virgil Thomson’s “Mother of Us All,” as they limned the “crystal sea” in “At the Sounding.” In a snowy setting in Nature, in “Build a Bridge,” of stream, rocks, tunnel, and the eponymous bridge, Michael McElroy sang, soaring lightly, of striving to traverse that bridge to connect with a beloved. Adrienne Rogers’ textiles here brought to mind nets, nests, and knitting. Sperling directed and Ray Charles White was responsible for photography.
Actor John Lithgow poetically evoked “the tyrannical … king,” “Sysiphus,” and his punishment by Zeus, the grinding, never-ending task of trying to roll that rock, in vain, uphill “to the top of the peak.” Daniel Breaker, as Sysiphus, with the MasterVoices, director Anne Kauffman, and animator Manik Choksi realized the king’s grueling work.
“Life is but a Dream,” taking off from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” directed by Sperling, moved from leaves floating on the stream to soloist Shoshana Bean, before a stone fireplace, contemplating life in a gentle rock-style ballad, and back to the water. In the cheerful finale of the chapter, “Every Poodle,” animated by Tommy Nguyen and directed by Doug Fitch, faces the mean dogs that lie in wait and survives to drive away, as singers Costanzo, Pérez, and Phan, with the MasterVoices, each in their own little bubble, favor us with doo-wop, bebop-style syllables, urgently sung to a lively beat.
Find the first two chapters of “Myths and Hymns” at www.mastervoices.org or on the chorus’ YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHzzgKoznWlft02x_3S5l_Q. “Myths and Hymns” proceeds on April 14 with “Chapter Three: Love” and on May 26 with “Chapter Four: Faith.”