Twin Cities chorus, dance troupe take on Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera

An interviewer had suggested to Gertrude Stein that audiences couldn't understand "Four Saints in Three Acts," the obtuse and poetic opera Stein had written with composer Virgil Thomson.

Stein was notorious for writing sentences that depended on the sound of words or severely edited emotions. Taken on the terms of conventional vocabulary, lines such as "Pigeons on the grass, alas" might indeed challenge the listener's comprehension.

Stein was having none of it.

"Of course [audiences] understand, or they would not listen to it," Stein said in an audio clip preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "You mean by understanding that you can talk about it in the way you have a habit of talking — putting it in other words. But I mean by understanding, enjoyment. If you enjoy it, you understand it."

Whether audiences through the years have understood the words Stein assembled, they have enjoyed the opera since its 1934 premiere in Hartford, Conn. That is due in large part to the music of Thomson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who was himself an iconoclast, with music often dotted with quotations of Americana and Christian hymnody, in the same vein as Charles Ives.

Minnesota audiences get a rare chance to see how well they take to the opera in performances this weekend mounted by the Twin Cities choral ensemble VocalEssence and the dance troupe Black Label Movement at the Cowles Center in Minneapolis.

"One of the reasons [choreographer] Carl Flink and I decided we didn't want to use supertitles was to let the words wash over people," said VocalEssence artistic director Philip Brunelle. "Gertrude said words have meaning beyond their dictionary meaning — she loved alliteration — and this piece is filled with stuff like that."

Enter Flink and his troupe, Black Label Movement.

Flink has been exploring the intersections recently between musical theater and contemporary dance. He choreographed "Sweeney Todd" and "Spring Awakening" for Theater Latté Da, for example — both pieces that depend on strong storytelling.

"Four Saints" is far from linear storytelling and closer to the poetic aesthetic of contemporary dance.

"The space between the words is as important as the words" themselves, Flink said.

The choreographer looked for a skeletal structure in the story and the relationships between the saints (there are many more than four named in the libretto) and searched for a great meaning — such as, maybe this opera is about the juxtaposition of the earthly and the immortal.

Brunelle is bringing 30 voices from VocalEssence and an orchestra of 23 pieces — matching the original composition of the premiere.

It's important to note that after the Hartford performance, the production played 60 shows on Broadway, which was extraordinary for such an adventurous piece.

"It would have been considered avant-garde in 1934," Brunelle said. "Two years ago when we started thinking about it again, I felt one of the things that's important for our singers to have is a repertoire that is diverse and makes people wonder."

It will do that. No question.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299