“The Restless Opera Company”

- The Forward

Many musicians can trace their choice of career to an act of teenage
rebellion. But Eric Stern may be one of the few whose youthful bad-
boy urges led him to opera — though, to be fair, his Vagabond Opera
ensemble is not your standard opera company. Nor is Stern your
standard opera singer.

Stern’s parents ran an anarcho-syndicalist bookshop and record store
in Philadelphia. And while music of various kinds could be heard
around the Stern household, Verdi and Puccini were not among them.
“For me, rebelling meant studying opera,” Stern told the Forward in
an interview from his home in Portland, Ore. A stint in the chorus of
the Delaware Valley Opera Company led to private voice lessons,
though Stern briefly decamped to Paris to pursue a career as a
writer. “I thought that’s where writers went,” he said.

In the end, Stern returned to the United States and began to win
minor operatic roles. He also began to explore his Jewish heritage
with the help of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a fellow Pennsylvania native
and one of the first female rabbis ordained in America. Those
spiritual investigations prompted Stern to look for Jewish
connections in music, as well, and ultimately led him to klezmer.
Stern’s grandmother had performed in the Yiddish theater, and he had
heard some Jewish music as a child; but he now began eagerly soaking
up large quantities of the stuff, delving into recordings by everyone
from traditionalists like the Klezmer Conservatory Band to
experimentalists like John Zorn.

Stern’s curiosity, and his scholarly bent — his conversation is
peppered with references to Aristotle and the Talmud — soon led him
to explore related forms of music from Eastern Europe and the Middle
East. (He’s currently studying Balkan accordion.) Throughout, Stern
has been guided by what he describes as a Talmudic approach to music:
“You immerse yourself in text and in teachings,” he said. For Stern,
that means both understanding the words he sings and learning as much
as possible about the history and culture behind the music. His
interest in Arab percussion, for example, led to several semesters’
worth of Arabic at Portland State University.

The Vagabond Opera might best be seen as the culmination of all this
intellectual and musical restlessness, or as a holding company for
all of Stern’s distantly related interests — or, better yet, as an
ensemble of like-minded musicians who are willing to tackle anything
that Stern can throw at them. The group’s first, eponymous recording
gives a pretty good indication of just what that can involve: The
program covers Aaron Lebedeff’s Yiddish classic, “Romania, Romania”;
traditional Ukrainian, Macedonian and Middle Eastern material; bits
and pieces of various operas, and several Stern originals before
coming to a close on “Otchi Chornyia.”

There’s a strong undercurrent of louche, fin-de-siècle cabaret to the
Vagabond Opera’s work, one that is fed by the ensemble’s lurching
rhythms and madcap energy, and underscored by Stern’s deranged-
ringmaster persona. To hear Robin Jackson, their Sax player intone
the introduction to “Ravella” (“Friends, have you ever had it all?
The glittering gold, the fortune, the girl? And then it was gone, in
one spin of the wheel, one drop of the cards, and one wink of an eye?
… Yes! I mean no! I mean yes! I mean no! But… why don’t you tell us
all about it in song form, using riverboat imagery and perhaps a
monkey or two?”) in the sterntorian tones of a carnival barker is to
hear a man whose love of the absurd is matched only by his complete
lack of inhibition. (The group’s proclivity for bowlers, straw hats
and suspenders only heightens the carnival/cabaret effect, as does
its occasional use of a belly dancer.) “I would hope that we’re
theater in the Attic sense,” Stern said. “At its best, I want it to
blend all of Aristotle’s elements of musicality, theatricality and
all the rest.”

And yet there remains a Jewish substratum to all of this which
emerges not only in Stern’s choice of repertoire (“Romania, Romania”;
Alexander Olshanetsky’s “Ich Hob Dikh Tsu Ful Lib”), but also in his
desire to create a sense of ritual space with each performance. Stern
credits Rabbi Marcia Praeger of Philadelphia with having explained to
him the narrative structure of the Sabbath service, and says that he
models the Opera’s performances along similar lines, pacing the
ensemble and leading audiences “without pandering.” It’s an
interesting analogy, but it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch once
you’ve actually heard the group; antics aside, they cast a powerful
spell.

Alexander Gelfand - view publication’s website