The Passenger: no pleasure cruise

Aboard an ocean liner bound for Brazil: Liese thinks she recognizes a woman who was her prisoner when she was an SS overseer at Auschwitz. This is the premise for Mieczyslaw Weinberg's 1968 opera, The Passenger. What follows is a memory play with flashbacks to the Polish prisoner, Marta, and her days at the concentration camp.

A raised platform with white railings around a large central smokestack is the promenade deck of the ship, while below is the sooty rail yard of the death camp. Set pieces, such as the women's barracks and officers' mess, ride in on these rails. Even the lighting towers roll in and out, with helmeted soldiers operating search lights on top.

Opera companies in Bregenz, Warsaw, London and Madrid have shared this set. The current tenant is Houston Grand Opera, who brought their 2014 production to New York City's Park Avenue Armory. The Armory is a cavernous military assembly hall that takes up an entire city block. The set was at the far end on floor level with the orchestra in open view offstage left. Offstage right was a dark void. Temporary stadium seating for a thousand occupied the center of the hall, but there was still a sense of vastness. From the entrance you had to cross twenty yards of open space to reach the scaffolding stairs to the back rows.

The original libretto was in Polish, Russian, German, French, Yiddish ... all of the languages that were thrown together at the concentration camp. This Houston production was sung in English with supertitles for immediate communication with the audience. The music was modern but equally accessible. The score calls for full orchestra with celesta and an extended complement of mallet instruments; there is even an electric combo for the ship's lounge. But the evening was not just an onslaught of large-scale noise. The dissonances were balanced by a light hand: Weinberg had an instinct when to let the story be quiet. A chorus of female prisoners is accompanied by cellos and xylophone; a Russian folk song by solo clarinet; several arias are a cappella. To my ear the score has a similar soundscape to Benjamin Britten's operas.

The story unfolded in an unflinching manner, picking at the edges of an unhealed wound. It showed the worst and the best of humanity, but avoided mawkishness. Act One finished to silence for several beats before the first tentative handclaps. The Act Two response was more immediate, but there was a palpable ambiguity in the applause for the SS officers. The soloists of the female prisoners brought a swell of relief. The loudest and easiest applause was for conductor Patrick Summers and his Houston musicians.