Texas Classical Review

Christmas is a month behind us, but Houston Grand Opera summoned the Christmas spirit Friday night  in the form of Silent Night—Kevin Puts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama set during World War I.

The story centers on a single battlefield in France, where the enemy fighters spontaneously declare a Christmas truce in their little corner of the war. For the much-performed work’s first Houston staging, HGO has teamed up with New York’s Metropolitan Opera in this new production that moves on to the Met next season.

Director James Robinson’s staging evokes the visceral ferocity of hand-to-hand fighting as well as the gradual, halting development of bonds between combatants who put down their weapons, at lest temporarily.

While Puts’ score puts formidable demands on the singers’ range, power and stamina, HGO’s production—led by Kensho Watanabe, who has conducted Puts’ The Hours at the Met—meets them confidently.

Silent Night, set to a libretto by Mark Campbell, revolves around the battlefield ceasefire, but its story zooms in on a handful of key characters and sketches their experiences before, during and after the pivotal day. The group ranges from a German officer with a ramrod-straight demeanor to a Scottish soldier tormented by his brother’s death and a jovial Frenchman who prides himself on being his hometown’s best barber.

The score, as Puts himself says in HGO’s promotional material, has a cinematic flavor. Some of its most effective passages deal in broad, arresting strokes—such the brassy clangor of the main battle scene or, at the other extreme, the soft pillow of string tone that accompanies the soldiers’ chorus about sleep. Sometimes the orchestral part is as simple as a single, long-held note in the strings: spare but potent.

On Friday at Wortham Theater Center, tenor Miles Mykkanen unleashed clarion tones as the most intense of Silent Night‘s main characters: Nikolaus Sprink, an opera star conscripted into the German army. After killing a man in battle, Sprink agonizes about the literal blood on his hands; his condemnation of Germany’s motivations for war agitates him further.

As Sprink’s anger grew more and more heated, Mykkanen’s intensity made Sprink’s denunciations unstintingly fierce. But Mykkanen summoned gentler shadings in the scenes with Sprink’s paramour, the opera diva Anna Sørensen (and the sole female presence in the opera).

Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny—an HGO regular last seen in the fall in Puccini’s Il Trittico—returned as Lieutenant Horstmayer, the strict German officer. McKinny’s Horstmayer may have shared some of the grim resolve of his Michele in the Puccini trilogy. But he turned out to be more than a mere iron-pants commander.

At the outset, McKinny’s sturdy, resonant singing brought Horstmayer’s battlefield brusqueness to the fore.  But as the cease-fire unfolded, McKinny’s voice and demeanor changed. When Horstmayer proposed extending the truce a few hours so the soldiers could bury their dead, McKinny displayed the officer’s compassionate side with gentler and mellower singing.

After strutting and preening as Dandini in HGO’s 2024 La Cenerentola, baritone Iurii Samoilov cut an altogether different figure as Lieutenant Audebert, a Frenchman who leaves his expectant wife at home to go to war.

After the battle scene that launches the story in earnest, Audebert’s reverie in the French bunker—with his thoughts wandering between the French casualties and his wife at home—brings the opera back to human dimensions, and Samoilov put across its gravity and tenderness alike.

A little like McKinny as Horstmayer, baritone Thomas Glass captured Scottish Lieutenant Gordon’s softening from a matter-of-fact officer into a more human fellow. Glass’ relatively bright voice helped give Gordon a particular genial aura.

As the tortured Jonathan Dale, the Scottish soldier whose brother is mortally wounded right next to him, tenor Jack Swanson conveyed remorse and vengefulness by unleashing brilliant, vibrant tones. Even when Swanson didn’t sing, he made Dale a tense, menacing presence.

As Ponchel, that ebullient French barber, baritone Edward Nelson blended vitality and tenderness in his singing as well as his demeanor. Bass-baritone Brandon Cedel lent gravity and kindness to Father Palmer, the Scottish priest.

In the scene in which the three lieutenants’ superiors learn about the unauthorized détente, tenor Chad Shelton, bass Ziniu Zhao and bass-baritone Sam Dhobhany—respectively the German, French and British honchos—hurled out their curses lustily.

The presence of Sprink’s lover, Anna, added an entirely different flavor to the story and music.

In the opera’s first scene, Anna shares a faux-18^th-century duet with Sprink in a bit of opera-within-the-opera, but she ultimately—somewhat implausibly—accompanies him to the front. Her voice soars in a “Dona nobis pacem” during the religious service that closes Act 1, and she later wanders amid the bodies on the battlefield, launching into an antiwar outcry reminiscent of a bel canto aria and cabaletta.

Soprano Sylvia D’Eramo commanded the delicacy, breadth and stratospheric top to make the “Dona nobis pacem” float aloft as well as the heft and impact  to put over the antiwar outburst’s fervor. And D’Eramo lent Anna a gracious bearing that made her arrival in the battle zone—complete with a curtsy to the soldiers—all the more arresting.

As befitted the score’s cinematic leanings, Watanabe and the HGO Orchestra brought the score vividness and atmosphere, not only in the explosive scenes’ wallop but in the introspective moments’ delicacy. The men of the HGO Chorus added a compelling richness to the soldiers’ close-harmony evocation of sleep.

Still, when the orchestra was going full tilt, it sometimes threatened to drown out the solo singers or even the chorus. But that may have been a case of Puts’ dense scoring as much as negligent balancing by Watanabe.

Robinson and his team contributed a staging that drove the story forward at least as powerfully as the music.

Scenic designer Mimi Lien devised a two-tier set: Its wide-open top level served mainly to represent the battlefield, and its lower level was partitioned into the three armies’ bunkers. 

The main battle scene—presumably crafted by Robinson, fight director Luke Fedell and movement director Seán Curran—evoked mano-a-mano brutality in a stylized but powerful mixture of realistic jabs, lunges and falls alongside stop-motion.

Yet Robinson also filled the story with small, fleeting bits of stage business that helped reveal the characters’ shifting emotions. Near the opera’s close, when Lieutenant Audebert’s superior—who turned out to be his father, too—finished scolding him, the older man affectionately straightened and patted his son’s lapels.

Costume designer Catherine Zuber supplied military uniforms that made the soldiers’ nationalities easily discernible, as well as glamorous gowns for Anna. Anna even wore a stylish, feminine ensemble to the battlefield.

Putting Anna in a more masculine-looking disguise might have been more plausible. But Silent Night, even if it springs from historic anecdotes, still represents a flight of historical fantasy. Maybe it makes sense for a woman to be glamorous on a battlefield where her appearance isn’t the only wonder to behold.

Silent Night runs through February 8 at Wortham Theater Center. houstongrandopera.org