Robert Paterson – Three Way: A Trio of One-Act Operas
Nashville Opera; Dean Williamson
American Modern Recordings AMR1048 (americanmodernrecordings.com)
In this 2CD set’s booklet, librettist David Cote writes that “Three Way is a sex-positive comic opera” that “holds the mirror up to all sexualities – gay, straight, BDSM, bi, trans… without moralizing or treacly reverence.”
Premiered by Nashville Opera in January 2017, Three Way comprises three one-act episodes, each featuring very sexually explicit language and situations. In The Companion, tech repairman Dax opts out of a proffered three-way fling with Maya and her android sex-partner Joe, but gets Maya for himself when Joe jilts her for a female android. Safe Word finds dominatrix Mistress Salome in a surprise role reversal with the Client, a nameless married “alpha-boss.” In Masquerade, four couples, including a pair of “pansexual postgender partners,” attend a swingers party, complete with a visual and aural “shadow orgy” in which “bodies rise and fall” in “a group experience that achieves several climaxes.”
All this highly sexed material leaves much of Robert Paterson’s tonal, sauntering score serving mainly as easy-listening “incidental music.” The eight soloists are uniformly fine as they sing Paterson’s vocal lines, often redolent of Broadway musicals.
However, I, for one, found nothing to laugh about in this supposed “comic opera,” fraught as it is with the pathos of its characters’ erotic yearnings, fantasies and anxieties. But whether comic or poignant, all that sex sure holds one’s attention!
