As with any work, everyone will bring his or her trunkful of associations to this set of données. Mine include the many plays and movies, especially abundant in the immediate pre- and postwar decades, in which a selected set of characters is held in isolated circumstances, as mundane as bad weather at a bus stop or as exotic as the imposition of a supernatural force, to disclose their True Natures or to await A Reckoning (Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None) ; the plays of T.S. Eliot, with their undertone of religious or mythical entities intruding on social gatherings; Albee’s A Delicate Balance, with its neighboring couple who “were scared,” but can’t say of what; iconic works of Existential derivation in the upper-case, philosophic sense (Sartre’s No Exit; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Endgame), most of which have some Absurdist element; the many films, chiefly European, in which the rot and emptiness of the life of the haute bourgoisie are dissected for our approval, and in which there is often an unexplainable occurrence like the disappearance of the woman in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, etc., etc. And, of course, the real-life experience of being trapped at a gathering one longs to leave but cannot, because of the force majeure of polite social custom. I can’t recall many operatic variations of this predicament—Janácek’s House of the Dead, I suppose (a literal imprisonment), or, a little closer to the present case, Argento’s Postcard from Morocco. They have their qualities, but they have not won many hearts. I have a few thoughts about this material. But first, some preliminary reactions to Adès’ music. Once it got going (the opening sequence, with the arrival of the guests and the flight of the servants, who are Onto Something, is not prepossessing), I liked much of it. It has an imaginative reach, a coloristic span, a theatrical splashiness beyond that of other recently heard operas, and unlike Powder Her Face or Written on Skin, is of big-house viability. It even recognizes, at least periodically, that in opera musical structures do not develop for their own sakes, however ingeniously, but in the service of dramatic episodes. I have not heard any of Adès’ non-operatic music, but may do so now—I can easily imagine enjoying a suite, anchored by the powerful Act I interlude and the score’s final pages with chorus, drawn from the opera.

As to the operatic suitability of this music, though, I have three reservations. They go in domino-effect order. The first, related to and partly the cause of the problems of comprehension, is Adès’ predilection for sending voices into upper-middle tessitura, or even to their upper range extremes, not with carefully set-up sustained tones for musicovocal effect, but for stretches of word-heavy declamation. That, in turn, seems an aspect of what I’d call his digital ear, a palette in which high, bright, sharp colors and a narrowing span predominates. It’s not that he never writes for low instruments or voices, or in quieter, contemplative mode. But warmth, depth, and homogeneity of texture seldom bring any sense of grounding or—oddly, for this sort of tale—of menace from below. It did not help that in this generally capable and committed cast, none of the principal women’s voices had sufficient low-range presence to take advantage of the rare moments of settlement.