The Pasatieri opera, seen in semi-workshop circumstances but ready for public consumption in performances Saturday and Sunday, is a two-singer piece written for veteran divas Catherine Malfitano and Lauren Flanigan, and initially it seems to be a typically elegiac chamber piece about aging, forgotten females reliving the past. But the past keeps morphing into questionable realities. They're waiting for others to show up and seem curiously confined without exit (the Jean-Paul Sartre allusion intended). What finally unfolds is almost unthinkably sinister.
I won't ruin the plot because the piece, being developed by American Opera Projects, has legs. Its two recognized, high-personality singers with the stage virtually to themselves and portable, minimal set requirements and accompaniment (Saturday's matinee used piano) make the piece an immensely appealing pendant to the fully staged productions in this festival cast, otherwise populated by emerging artists.
Pasatieri doesn't seize the steering wheel; his score acts as a dramatic frame and support for the plot and strong singers at hand. Sometimes, his word settings consist only of conversational inflections with a bit of rhythmic impetus from the piano. There are beautiful arioso moments as the women rhapsodize about their lives before their current confined circumstances. Some tightening is in order in the first half, although as they stand, the score and the cunning libretto by Malfitano's daughter Daphne fully engage the singers' considerable resources. Though Malfitano has trouble scaling her Salome-sized voice down to the piece's claustrophobic world, Flanigan achieves vocal and theatrical specificity that makes the ambiguous plot more enveloping.
