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OPERA: 'SATYAGRAHA,' TALE OF GHANDI, IN BROOKLYN

OPERA: 'SATYAGRAHA,' TALE OF GHANDI, IN BROOKLYN
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November 9, 1981, Section C, Page 14Buy Reprints
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''SATYAGRAHA,'' the opera by Philip Glass that had its New York City premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday evening, ought to be considered for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. Has there ever been an opera that went so far on so few musical ideas? If music without frills is your ideal, ''Satyagraha'' is your opera. Mr. Glass has purposely cut down his options in this work, like a man who has decided to see whether he can wallpaper a room with one hand tied behind his back.

Theatrically, the opera sometimes manages to overcome the paucity of its musical ideas and the oddity of a text by Mr. Glass and Constance De Jong that is sung in what we are assured is Sanskrit. Robert Israel's sets and costumes, Richard Riddell's lighting and Hans Nieuwenhuis's staging cope imaginatively with the problems presented by a score whose chief aim seems to be to induce the drugged, trancelike state that lies beyond boredom.

Douglas Perry, as a chubby and youthful Mohandas K. Gandhi, chants his monotonous patterns accurately. Furthermore, he actually injects a note or two of wry charm into the cardboard character of the Indian leader, who is presented in mythic form as a kind of modern Krishna rather than as the appealingly complex human being that his biographers have brought to life for us. Many others in the cast, especially Claudia Cummings as his secretary, carry out their assignments well, and the Artpark Opera Chorus deals ably with the score's mechanically generated hiccups and syncopations.

However, in three acts that do not so much dramatize as meditate on episodes in the life of Gandhi, virtually the only devices employed by Mr. Glass are the arpeggio, the broken chord and the scale, repeated incessantly. In fact, while ''Satyagraha'' does not bring us much closer to Gandhi's complicated personality or to his far-from-simple political ideals, it certainly must be considered the apotheosis of the arpeggio: the score conjures up nothing so much as a music-school practice building in which students have been condemned to work at scales and Alberti-bass figures. The phaseshifting that results from overlapping patterns provides the work with tinges of musical interest, but the rewards are fleeting. The listener could have had nothing but admiration, however, for the Brooklyn Philharmonia players who kept count of their endlessly repeated figures, and for Christopher Keene, the conductor, who focused his and their attention on the score's slow-motion progress.

''Satyagraha,'' which had its premiere in Rotterdam last year and was heard last summer at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y., is a lineal descendant of Satie's ''Socrate.'' Both works tell in austere terms the story of a famous culture hero. However, the Satie is a thicket of technical complexity by comparison with Mr. Glass's score, which carries Minimalism to what one must fear is a musical dead end.

At first glance, ''Satyagraha'' might seem to be a radical response to the rigidities of Serialism, but in its own way, it is as rigid and mechanical as anything concocted by Boulez or Stockhausen. There is no reason why Mr. Glass's entire score could not have been composed and performed by computers, so unyielding are its pulsations and so tied to formula are its metric overlays. An electric organ in the orchestration enhanced the overall synthetized effect.

The elementary musical devices out of which ''Satyagraha'' is made have been exploited at times by all composers. Almost at random one can mention the opening pages of ''Das Rheingold,'' the Pilgrim's March in ''Tannhauser,'' the animal imitations in Janacek's piano music, the gamelan sounds of Lou Harrison. Orff's ''Carmina Burana'' hammers away at a few simplicities at great length, too, and so does such an experiment in imitation Orientalism as Terry Riley's ''In C.'' But Mr. Glass, unlike most other composers, goes back to the beginnings of music and stays there: he has built an entire esthetic, you might say, on a musical beginner's practice material. Czerny and Hanon, you have been immortalized at last. The Program SATYAGRAHA, an opera in Sanskrit in three acts by Philip Glass. Vocal text by Constance De Jong, adapted from the Bhagavad-Gita. Christopher Keene, music director and conductor. Sets and costumes by Robert Israel. Lighting by Richard Riddell. Staged by Hans Nieuwenhuis, after the Netherlands Opera production. With the Brooklyn Philharmonia and Artpark Opera Chorus. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Miss Schlesen ........................Claudia Cummings Mrs. Naidoo ...............................Iris Hiskey Kasturbai ...............................Linda Nichols Gandhi ..................................Douglas Perry Mr. Kallenbach .............................Bruce Hall Parsi Rustomji ..........................Donald Miller Mrs. Alexander ............................Rhonda Liss Lord Krishna .............................David Anchel Prince Arjuna ............................Terry Bowers Count Leo Tolstoy ........................Perry Singer Rabindranath Tagore .....................Justo Sanchez Martin Luther King Jr. ...................John Grayson

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 14 of the National edition with the headline: OPERA: 'SATYAGRAHA,' TALE OF GHANDI, IN BROOKLYN. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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