By Helen Cronin

Apparently the balalaika can only be found in hell, and the viola just doesn’t exist in the afterlife. Or at least that’s what Louis Andriessen seems to think. Thursday April 15th was the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall of the concert version of his opera La Commedia, which was based on portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as a polyglot collection of other texts. The opera was presented in five sections (as opposed to Dante’s original three), three of which were set in hell, including a long episode narrated by a female Dante. The opera itself was fairly plotless, following the basic contours of Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven but mostly consisting of vignettes sung by individual characters.

The work was performed by the orchestra-like Asko-Schoenberg Ensemble, in conjunction with the talented Synergy Vocals and Brooklyn Youth chorus. Claron McFadden played a luminescent Beatrice while Cristina Zavalloni played an impassioned, seemingly possessed Dante that was accented by stalking around the stage and exaggerated dancing to the music. Jeroen Williams made for a creepy Devil in the third section and a bizarre fast talker in the fourth, while Marcel Beekman sang a lovely aria as Casella from the last box of the first tier.

The piece itself was rather like a Jackson Pollock painting; blotches of jazz here, streaks of dense cluster chords over there, a Broadway finale down at the end. The piece was not a refined intellectual exercise, but rather a hundred sprawling minutes of comedic gestures, sarcasm, dense cluster chords that seemed to lambast the audience, and a collage of the jetsam and flotsam of the classical music world. The work was entertaining, but in the end much of it was not very affecting. There was one brilliantly creepy moment during Lucifer’s aria when he sang (in Dutch) of the new world he was going to create and a gentle pastoral theme played behind him, but it was soon lost in the overwhelming tide of noisy diminished chords that characterized hell. It would have been far more interesting if he had picked up the irony and shock of the moment of Lucifer’s aria.