MUSIC by Gary Giddins (VILLAGE VOICE)
Alonzo Levister
"...Leonard Bernstein described him as "unmistakably gifted." Charles Mingus characterized him as "one of the few great creative musicians around." and Miles Davis called him "a bitch."
I learned about him a couple of weeks back when Dan Morgenstern told me of a rare performance of his work at the Donnell Library Center, under the auspicies of the After Dinner Opera Co. and Meet the Composer. Among other things, Levister writes vest pocket operas, two of which were presented in the space of an hour or so on February 25. The first was based on Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite." a burlesque about a debauched lord. George Hell, who in order to win the hand of a "sap-sucking, psalm-singing little angel." Miss Jenny Mare, is willing to forego not only his vices but his face. A Mr. Aneas fits him with a new one, but Hell's jealous mistress unmasks him only to discover that Jenny prefers some decadent funk to his "chill pure lips."
Not the least entertaining aspect of the performance was the composer's relentlessly casual and witty narration but Levister's pieces are like radio plays, trim and pointed.
"Blues in the Subway" is subtitled a Jazz Chamber Opera (the accompaniment, which consisted of piano in the first opera, was augmented by drums here), and is a gem of unfashionably resolute optimism. A couple returning home from a movie encounter a drunk in a subway car. This isn't Dutchman. The drunk, who is accompanied by his wife's cat in a traveling case, is non-malignant; the couple --- she rhapsodizes over the movie, he reads the newspaper --- are thoroughly benign. The only bad thing that could happen in this subway is if someone careened out of tune. The drunk bemoans his domestic problems and the boyfriend recites the details of Marshall Plan loans, but the girlfriend sagely concludes it's all right "As Long As There Is Love." which makes the sanguine conceit credible, even titillating.
