Music Review: Passion with Tropes
Passion story one of many voices, sources
By Peter Jacobi
H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com

May 23, 2011
Two words fixed themselves in my mind as I experienced a performance Friday evening of “Passion with Tropes,” composed by Don Freund and realized by talents of consequence and varying persuasions: ambitious and demanding.
For Freund, it was certainly an ambitious project, one he describes as a “theater work about the experience of attending an oratorio (or, more specifically, a Passion).” For those who sang/acted/danced their way through the happenings on stage of Indiana University’s Ruth N. Halls Theater, what they undertook was, again most certainly, demanding.
Were one to properly credit everyone involved, just their names and responsibilities could fill the space reserved for this review. Music director and conductor Carmen Helena Tellez explained in program notes that the “immersive and interactive performance was born out of many years of preliminary experiences by all the participating artists.”
Those artists stretched from Freund and Tellez in the Jacobs School of Music to premier lighting designer Robert Shakespeare from the department of theater and drama, along with second lighting designer Chris Wood; digital artist Margaret Dolinsky from the Hope School of Fine Arts; Susanne Schwibs, filmmaker at IU Radio and Television Services; Elizabeth Shea, director of the university’s contemporary dance program; art scholar Marianne Kielian-Gilbert; stage director Jonathan Courtemanche, a post-graduate student in theater and drama, and, of course, the necessary performers.
The uninterrupted 80-minute musical spectacle tells once again the story of the Crucifixion, what led to it and what happened thereafter. In April, music devotees had opportunities to hear other versions of the Passion, the quietly eloquent 17th century “Seven Words of Jesus Christ on the Cross,” by the German Heinrich Schutz, and the somber, chant-dominated 1982 “Passio,” by the Estonian Arvo Paert.
Freund’s approach is something else again. The title he uses, “Passion with Tropes,” offers a clue, “trope” referring, as the dictionary says, to both a “literary or rhetorical device used in other than its literal sense” and a “phrase, sentence or verse interpolated in a liturgical text to amplify or embellish.” He has devised and interpolated massively with words and music.
The non-Biblical add-ons come from such sources as philosophers Friederich Nietzsche and Soren Kirkegaard; French poets and writers including the Catholic polemicist Charles Peguy and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre; from “He Died in Detroit,” by the African-American poet Etheridge Knight, and “Slaughterhouse Five,” by Indiana’s Kurt Vonnegut. New England poet Anne Sexton and additional American poets (Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg), the German Rainer Maria Rilke, the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare, among others, are quoted or have their words set to music.
Throughout, the theme involves the human struggle to survive, the tragedy of defeat and loss, the triumph over suffering on the cross and off, the power of sacrifice and love, the gift of redemption.
Freund’s impressive music reinforces his chameleon talent to voice his musical thoughts in all sorts of styles. One heard a riveting amalgam of chant, pop songs, operatic arias, very contemporary choral effusions, and an orchestral language that crossed borders of time and fashions. Everything seemed suitable for the chosen moments and the whole.
And everything in this production was heard and seen from on stage of the Ruth N. Halls Theater. The auditorium was blocked off. Attendees sat in four sections of folding chairs, about 30 or so in each. Constantly shifting and invigorating visuals were projected from two huge screens, one covering what is normally the rear of the stage, the other hugging the curtain. In front of those screens, in aisles and at the center, performers sang and danced as they portrayed the characters of the biblical story and the tales told by the authors Freund had chosen for his libretto.
One could argue an inclusion here and there, but Freund put together a remarkably vigorous, sometimes harrowing and often deeply moving collage that his production colleagues then effectively built upon.
The large cast of performers — including an orchestral ensemble of 20, vocal soloists and members of the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and the choir from St. Charles School — gave their apparent all. One should mention two striking dancers, Joe Musiel and Laura Hunter; their brief scene of the dead Jesus draped over his mother’s lap was simply stunning. Baritones Howard Swyers and Zachary Coates and tenor Nicholas Fitzer carried out particularly important vocal obligations. Henry McDaniel handled the “Howl” scene from “King Lear,” carrying Lear’s dead daughter Cordelia, most powerfully.
The performance was repeated Saturday night.