Opera Philadelphia’s festival opener, ‘The Raven,’ packs a punch

Sometimes at Opera Philadelphia’s annual opera festival, it’s best to just submit. Opening night, for me meant being led from my seat in the Miller Theater by a shirtless man to a remote corner of the theater for a lightning-round lesson in Poe’s The Raven, probably best described as something between Dead Poet’s Society and Let’s Make a Deal.

The enigmatically titled festival is back — this year as Festival O22 — after a two-year, live-performance COVID hiatus. No social distancing here. For this year’s opening opera, the audience was scrunched shoulder-to-shoulder on the Miller stage with the action boxed in the middle: the local premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s intense and beautifully operatic theater piece, The Raven.

Immersive theater is nothing new for Opera Philadelphia. At the Barnes a few seasons back, listeners were glided around in their seats, pushed by human movers, to experience opera from the inside.

The introvert had nowhere to hide Wednesday. In the pre-opera portion of The Raven (though audience members could opt out of being participants), theaudience was broken into groups for separate experiences around the inside of the Miller.

Our shirtless guide, actor Makoto Hirano, told us the idea was to free Poe’s The Raven from the page and release the 18-stanza poem “into the air.” In a kind of musical mystical tour, he led an interactive analysis of one stanza from the poem. Percussion instruments were handed out and the poem was read, with audience members instructed to strike a note when a particular word was said.

If this was meant as Poetry 101 in structure and interpretation, the 18 or so audience members in my group were way ahead of their teacher, throwing out words like alliteration and symbolism when Hirano asked them to name the elements that make up a poem.

The Miller Theater (the former Merriam) is looking shabby these days, with peeling paint, crude plaster patches, poor lighting, and uneven floors (accidentally Poe-like?). Down on stage though, the 180 or so listeners sat captivated by the strength of the opera itself.

Hosokawa calls his piece from 2012 a “melodrama;” the work is scored by a small ensemble of a dozen instrumentalists and a single singer, Kristen Choi. And yet it packs a punch. Part of that comes from proximity, from being a few feet from Choi, who recites the poem, partly spoken but mostly sung, in character. She unravels, Elektra-like, right there in what feels like the palm of our hand.

The chamber ensemble, led by conductor Eiki Isomura, sketched an eerie mood, often centering on a single, insistent pitch (“evermore?”), scratchy string effects, and that most foreboding of all orchestral sounds: quiet, sustained low flutes, played with enormous presence by flutist Brendan Dooley.

But most of all, the success of this piece hinges on mezzo-soprano Choi, who sang with stunning vocal power and emotional specificity, as she acted out the narration in dancerly tension with the ghostly raven, performed silently by Muyu Ruba. The piece and this new production — by director Aria Umezawa and Philadelphia’s Obvious Agency — echoed supernatural aspects of Japanese Noh theater. Poe’s creepiness translates to just about any culture. Debussy, too, left an unfinished operatic adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher.

Does this Opera Philadelphia evening need the participatory pre-show show? It was an entry point for some. But Poe’s poem is well-known, and for some of us, just the music and Choi’s performance would have been plenty.

Toshio Hosokawa’s The Raven is repeated Sept. 24, Sept. 29, and Oct. 1 at 7 p.m. the Miller Theater, 250 S. Broad St. Tickets are $50. www.operaphila.org, 215-732-8400.