Opera Orlando presents ambitious performance of Philip Glass’ and Robert Moran’s ‘The Juniper Tree’

“Exquisite corpse” is the name of a game in which artists take turns creating parts of a whole, and it’s also the technique composers Philip Glass and Robert Moran used in their collaboration on the writing of the opera The Juniper Tree.

Their scenes are stitched together into an, indeed, exquisite corpse based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale and, man oh man, do the Grimms live up to their name with this grim tale. The Juniper Tree includes classic tropes like poisoned apples, magic birds, wicked stepmothers and children “red as blood, white as snow” but also includes a feast that tends more toward the Greek tragedy.

That bird, though, is a perfect vehicle for Glass’ repetitive fluting vocal arpeggios and brass punches (echoes of Akhnaten, composed two years before), while Moran’s equally modern but less immediately identifiable style, influenced by his study of 12-tone composition and Indian classical music, gives the stepmother’s infamous “jealousy aria” a richer complexity.

Speaking of collaboration, the groups involved with Opera Orlando’s Juniper Tree are a murderer’s row of local greatness: Alterity Chamber Orchestra, Phantasmagoria and MicheLee Puppets all contribute to the sound, look and feel.

7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Pugh Theater, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, operaorlando.org.

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This article appears in May 1-7, 2024.