Michelle Ekizian Paints Emotional Portrait of Gorky in New Opera

In New York’s venerable Jazz arena by its Glass Wall overlooking the evening’s city lights of the merging Columbus Circle at street level below, pure magic ensued. The music track’s opening sotto voce intoned by the outreaching pop voice of a soulful singer introduced the enthralling episode. With audio levels of the hall’s surround sound system set to emulate the feeling of being amidst the echo of a mighty international cathedral — or Mt. Ararat — Ekizian’s moving symphonic setting of the bedrock Our Father hymn of the ancient Armenian Liturgy enveloped the audience with sorrow and grace aiming to rise above.

With the melismatic chant song in ancient Armenian heard as a universal wail across the transitioning twilight to night sky outside, the music set the stage for Needle to appear from its depths of darkness. As the city’s cars, shops and people from all walks of life and ethnicities glistened through the Appel Room’s Glass Wall, the stunning backdrop appeared not as a barrier wall, but as a window to the world.

Knowing of the anticipated set design for the staged production of “Gorky’s Dream Garden,” I could not help thinking of Gorky’s Glass House in Sherman, Connecticut (where his life ended in 1948 at the age of 44) as an eerie tie-in to this grand perspective.

The gripping music with the magnificent Lynn Needle held center stage. It is an attribute to Ekizian’s and Needle’s mastery that the audience felt the emotional pull without knowing of the story line and the scene’s pivotal turning point. It did not matter that the audience did not know of the opera’s gender, boundary crossing avatar “The Black Monk” hailing from Anton Chekhov and the 10^th-century Armenian Saint Gregory of Narek of Gorky’s ancestral lands cast to sing the Sorrowful Intermezzo as a Prayer for Peace. It did not matter that the presentation’s lighting did not flood the Appel Room stage in blood red light recalling the two defining opening and closing paintings for this scene which Ekizian has noted in her script to align with the themes of Genocide and loss (“Charred Beloved I,” 1946, of the David Geffen Collection and “Agony,” 1947, at MoMA). Was it planned or of profound coincidence that the performance’s blue lighting forecasted Ekizian’s script notes for the opera’s “Rainbow Dawn” Finale — posed to take place in the blue hour before sunrise? In any event, the segment was illuminating and transcendent.

The room was pin-drop quiet with all eyes and ears wide open as you felt the collective heartache and passion of an exiled heart aiming to rise above. Needle’s golden sheath gown and long garland suggested the scorching heat of the desert sand during the death marches, the genocide crawl of the faithful Armenians and the resilient leaves of the opera’s “wishing tree.” The 25-foot-long rustling garland of gilded leaves and “dream strips” in Needle’s hands was an amazing prop that spoke of reaching, tension, struggle and release. As the winter sky’s 5:30 p.m. twilight blue hour changed to the darkness of nighttime void, a growing ethereal blue lighting scheme surrounded Needle as she rose with the music. Her movements and poses seemed to be received by not just the seated audience in the Appel Room, but by the cosmos outside the Glass Wall/the Window to the World Beyond. It appeared as though the entire world was momentarily watching and listening together with compassion and hope—be it for our earth or fellow man of today and centuries past.