In 2007, a year into his stretch as Los Angeles Opera’s music director, James Conlon presented a staging of Benjamin Britten’s miracle-play-opera, Noah’s Flood (Noye’s Fludde) at the then newly finished Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, located diagonally across from the Music Center.
By popular demand, the production has become a tradition repeated in 2009, 2011, 2013 (as part of the Britten centenary celebration), 2015, 2017, and 2024. Friday and Saturday, May 8 and 9, Noah and his on-board menagerie set sail again — a fitting bookend to Conlon’s company-defining career. He will assume the post of Conductor Laureate at the end of the current season.
First performed in 1958 as part of the Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten and his partner Peter Pears founded (along with Eric Crozier), the one-act opera is based on the 15th-century Chester mystery play drawn from the Book of Genesis. To the Old Testament account, with a goal of creating community and vocal might, Britten added three roof-raising hymns to be sung by a church congregation.
Britten stipulated that the opera not be performed in a traditional opera house, but rather in a community space, ideally a church. Productions were to combine professional singers and musicians with young, adolescent, and adult amateurs.
The Saturday afternoon performance, within the cathedral’s vast nave, with sunlight streaming down from the clerestory, and the production’s wild kingdom of child performers prancing down the aisles was so charming that even the most confirmed curmudgeon could not resist a smile.
Outwardly, Noah’s Flood appears to be a children’s pageant. But Britten’s music is far from simplistic. One moment the score pounds like the wrath of God; the next it’s a carnival of the animals, a soaring dove, or the spirit-raising hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.”
The soloist parts, ensembles, and rousing choruses are complex harmonically and rhythmically. The orchestration abounds in Britten’s signature colors accentuated by an exotic array of instruments, including a carillon created from suspended coffee mugs.
Saturday, baritone Hyungjin Son was robust of voice and dutifully obedient to the echoing Voice of God (Jamieson Price). Peabody Southwell sang brilliantly as the shrewish Mrs. Noah. The Sems, the Hams, and the Jaffetts were sung by Dezo Tiesiera and Serene Lopez Davis; Ka-on Kim and Jessica Wang; Joshua Prober and Lily Windom.
Returning for the eighth time to oversee the complicated direction the production requires was Eli Villanueva. The menagerie of child performers, dancers, and puppeteers was skillfully choreographed by Sarah Frazier. The flexible set that transforms into the ark, the billowing flood of azure fabric, the fabulous pair of long-necked giraffes, and the gracefully soaring silk birds were conceived by Carolina Angulo, and costumes were by Paula Higgins.
There is a strange irony in creating a fuzzy-cute children’s opera about a flood that destroys most animal life on earth because humans just won’t behave. But the performance of this rarely seen masterpiece was inventive and well sung and put a smile on everyone’s face
