Santa Fe Opera thinks different with The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

Housed in a strikingly modern, mostly outdoor facility, nestled literally in the desert outside New Mexico’s centuries-old capital city, this innovative enterprise has been, for decades, an incubator for emerging as well as established operatic talent.

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Igor Stravinsky turned up for its first season in 1957 to attend a production of his only full-length operatic work, The Rake’s Progress. And as recently as two years ago, every seat was sold for its entire run before the curtain went up on the premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain.

Even so, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs represented a particular challenge, a first opera by an American composer who (like Higdon) is known largely for his instrumental music, based on the life of a recently deceased (2011) global superstar.

Although Mason Bates and his librettist Mark Campbell insisted that they were not about to produce a documentary — theirs is an interpretation of the life and character of Jobs, without the co-operation of their subject’s family or of his company — neither can it be called a work of fiction.

The story begins in the garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos, Calif., when Paul Jobs presents his son with a work bench for his 10th birthday.

Thereafter, the libretto moves forward and back through time, visiting pivotal moments in the grown-up boy’s career, all within Vita Tzykun’s unit set, whose walls expand and contract to provide projection surfaces for changing locales.

The libretto is hardly hagiography. The Steve Jobs we meet appears driven, self-centred and only almost likeable when he finally faces his own mortality. In the title role, baritone Edward Parks may not even sound Jobs-like (the real person apparently spoke in a rather high-pitched tenor), but his characterization, complete with an Issey Miyake black turtleneck and Levi’s 510 jeans, is certainly credible.

Those who know the actual Jobs story, whether by reading Walter Isaacson’s monumental biography or through the various other attempts to pin the butterfly, will recognize the cast of characters, from the girlfriend and child he abandoned to the best friend and partner (Steve Wozniak) he cruelly offended, all of whom are portrayed sympathetically under Kevin Newbury’s direction.

But of course, what matters most in an opera is its music and the music of Bates has turned out to be a clever amalgam of the live and the electronic (“whirring electronica,” in the composer’s own words), with Bates himself sitting at a console in the pit next to conductor Michael Christie.

This takes us back to the days of Haydn and Mozart, when composers routinely participated in performances of their own operas, yet it is no mere nostalgic stunt. Bates has sought to give his characters not identifying leitmotifs, in the Wagnerian manner, but individual “sound worlds,” using samples of what he calls “Mac gear.” To characterize Job’s spiritual adviser, a Buddhist monk, he even incorporates Tibetan prayer bowls and Chinese gongs.

The music is accessible and sufficiently transparent in its scoring that the words come through with surprising clarity (something that did not happen in the score for Cold Mountain). A major opera? Perhaps not but surely an effective one, with the power to bring an entire audience to its feet. An extra performance has already been added to its run.

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is running this season in repertory with four other, more traditional works: Handel’s Alcina, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. I attended performances of two of them.

Lucia di Lammermoor offered in the American soprano Brenda Rae one of the finest vocal actresses I have yet witnessed in the opera’s famous mad scene. And The Golden Cockerel sported a set by Gary McCann marvellously evocative of the constructivist designs to come out of post-Revolutionary Russia.

Reasons enough for a trip into the New Mexico desert? You bet.