Newport Classic have already brought out two earlier one-acters by Rorem (10/95) and now his only full-length opera, Miss Julie, based on Strindberg and premiered in 1965, adds considerably to the picture of his operatic output. Miss Julie took a long time to settle down at the planning stage and has been much revised since then.
Rorem admits that he is a song composer, never “comfortable with the opera medium, much less a buff”. Miss Julie is an anguished story about a count’s daughter who rejects her fiance and then insists on being seduced by her father’s valet during the servants’ Midsummer’s Eve revels. The play was attacked as immoral when it was published in 1888 and in the next year was not successful in the theatre in Denmark. Rorem delivers most of the opera in a kind of parlando which is too bland to reflect the growing infatuation of Act 1 but gets nearer to the nastiness and tortured remorse of Act 2, where Miss Julie and her lover plan futile expedients to escape. Nothing works and in the end Miss Julie kills herself: it all proceeds in slow motion, as in the play itself, but without access to the Strindbergian hysteria en route.
However, there are plenty of well-focused moments when the music is allowed to expand – the innocent duet between the boy and girl in Act 1 (track 9); Julie’s aria on returning with stolen money in Act 2 (track 6); a confusion ensemble (track 7); and the drama is finally engaged when feelings turns to desperation between Miss Julie, the valet and his fiancee, the cook Christine. Recorded live, this remains a good conservatoire production with some fine solo voices, that at last allows this corner of the American operatic repertoire to be explored.'