Opera Philadelphia’s unsettling ‘We Need to Talk’ captures the conflicted strangeness of who we are now

We can all get a bit strange amid lockdown confinement, and Opera Philadelphia’s newest digital commission captures a languid cerebral toxicity that we may understand all too well, even if the particulars remain enigmatic.

The 10-minute We Need to Talk, which premieres on Friday on operaphila.tv, has a collage-like score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and words by celebrated poet Anne Carson, a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, that appear to be a dialogue but are, in fact, an inner commentary within a single psyche.

Soprano Ariadne Greif wanders through a stark warehouse space singing on camera, in counterpoint to spoken commentary from an unseen other (Carson herself), who answers back (sometimes) in a flat, distant voice seemingly from another time.

“I tame you,” says one voice. “No you don’t,” answers the other.

The piece creates a highly specific, disturbingly complete world unto itself, aided by entrancing visuals directed by Maureen Towey and shot by Four/Ten Media in the cool, stark, alienated manner familiar to those who saw Four/Ten’s music video Liminal Highway shot inside the S.S. United States ocean liner. Whether it’s a world you want to visit is another question.

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Unlikely juxtapositions abound. Shaw’s score is a series of episodes, including a tenor voice seemingly recorded in the 1920s, as well as an electronic rhythm track that becomes increasingly menacing as the vocal line become more soaring, though with a jarring blue note here and there. Background choirs remind you of Shaw’s roots as a choral singer. Out-of-left-field movie-music clichés pop in here and there.

Clearly, Shaw is still in a highly-experimental period where you’re never sure what her next piece is going to deliver. The Anne Carson words drift in and out of literal meaning: “You had your portrait painted on a butcher’s block … you were meat but recently living.”

The visual setting focuses mainly on the vocally-assured, visually-magnetic Greif, whose blood-red lips feel particularly sardonic as she moves slowly, dressed in plain pajamas, through the colorless, whitish-gray warehouse setting, past objects such as a chandelier lying on its side.

Camera work is sometimes fluid and circular, other times percussive with quick cuts that suggest blinking, as if to make sure you’re seeing what you see, in a surreal world where you’re never at all sure what is there.

Spilled water runs backward recalling Jean Cocteau’s film The Testament of Orpheus. The other cinematic influence is the tortured imagery of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

It’s all so meticulously conceived and crafted that We Have to Talk could indeed gain a niche following for years to come. Personally, I’ll stick to Cocteau. I’ve had too much psychotherapy to be part of this.

We Need to Talk premieres April 16 on the Opera Philadelphia Channel, available with a season pass, as a seven-day rental for $10, or as part of the $25 Digital Commissions Bundle with three other music videos. Information: operaphila.tv