When Marble City Opera last offered Francis Poulenc’s one-act opera The Human Voice (La voix humaine) in 2017, it did so on a double bill with Menotti’s The Telephone. Just such a pairing, performed with only the necessary set and props, made theatrical sense at the time, with the success and failure of human communication via the telephone being the common factor between the two otherwise very different vehicles.
MCO has now revisited The Human Voice with the company’s Executive Artist Director Kathryn Frady returning to sing the monologue role of “Elle,” a woman struggling with a failed love and clinging to a final telephone conversation with the departing lover. This time, however, the physical setting was anything but abstract—a period room in the historical Westwood mansion on Kingston Pike in Knoxville. With the audience mere feet away from Frady surrounded by the room’s dark wood period detailing and furniture, the dramatic impact of the performance was gripping in the most marvelous lyrical sense. The non-theatrical nature of the staging arrangement embraced by director Marya Barry, a technique regularly employed by MCO in other productions, allowed the audience to be voyeurs in moments of both sympathy and empathy. Frady’s Elle draws the audience into her dilemma, gradually building a tragic duality that rises and falls as her own psychological bouts of blame show up both as honesty and self-deception.
Frady’s impressive stature as a dramatic soprano, one with significant vocal flexibility, makes roles like Elle possible for her. Desperation, futility, anger, and angst are all traits called for in the role and Frady delivered them with what seemed to be a perfect adjustment to the physical nature and size of the Westwood setting.
Although Poulenc orchestrated the 1958 work for a full orchestra with reduced dimensions, this production features accompaniment of a single keyboard, performed here by MCO music director and pianist, Brandon Coffer. Frady and Coffer worked together brilliantly, feeding off one another in terms of tempo and pacing. In fact, the piano is called upon for the one motivating cue in the work, the sound of the ever-present telephone ringing.
Marble City Opera will close out its 2024-25 season June 5 – 7 with a production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Like last season’s Il Tabarro, Pagliacci will be performed in three different locations: World’s Fair Park Amphitheater on June 5, Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore on June 6, and Bissel Park in Oak Ridge on June 7. Tickets.
