Concert review: The Gonzalez Cantata
6 September 2009, Philadelphia
Part of Philadelphia’s 2009 Live Arts Festival / Philly Fringe, The Gonzalez Cantata has taken the world by storm through an apparent triumph of viral marketing. I was fortunate enough to get tickets to the last performance in its premiere run.
The music of Gonzalez, by the young Austrialian-American composer Melissa Dunphy, evokes the tradition of 18th-century dramatic genres characterized by huge choruses, effusive arias, and speech-like recitative used to convey the plot. Dunphy’s music is a deft combination of historical reference and modern verve, animated by a musical sense humor consistently impeccable in its timing. The music is frequently ironic in its juxtaposition of classical grandeur against the inadvertent absurdity of the libretto, but what is more impressive is that Dunphy’s score creates moments of sincere and un-ironic pathos, where the political drama is transcended for an instant by the poignancy of the human condition.
Hearing Gonzalez was for me— and I imagine for many in the audience— a cathartic encounter with the traumas of the recent political past. Alberto Gonzalez, a relatively benign figure in the Bush administration’s menagerie of monsters, stands in for the collective venality of that group, and for the enduring national shame of the Bush years. What is best about Gonzalez is that it ultimately portrays its subject not as a “bad guy” to be reviled, but as the unsuspecting avatar of a systematic political catastrophe. Christ-like, Gonzalez died for the sins of the American electorate.
September 06, 2009, 4:38pm
