Akhnaten
By Lee Sandlin
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To be fair, Akhnaten is in some ways more extreme than the average Glass product. For one thing, the mood is a little odder. Usually when he sets out to create atmosphere the results are interchangeable: his score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, which is about Tibet, sounds exactly like his score for Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which is about Texas. But the setting of Akhnaten is ancient Egypt–which turns out to sound like Mars. It’s kind of an impressive effect. The icy, droning, cyclical repetition of his rudimentary themes creates a palpable feeling of ancient ritual; this is an Egypt wholly defined by inscrutable traditions, the meaning of which can only be guessed at by dim and misleading analogy.
It might not matter if you could get the hang of what’s going on with our hero. But Akhnaten is a blank moving through a void. We get a few scattered clues as to what he might be thinking, but it’s impossible to add them up to a whole. In the first act he makes a great show of being haughty and regal–he expels the priests with a hand imperiously pointed to the exit, like a villainous landlord in a Charlie Chaplin movie. But when the priests start their revolt in the second act, he’s shown shrugging off the news and cuddling up blissfully with his children, in a tableau as tender as a fabric-softener commercial. Is that the kind of behavior we want in a pharaoh? I’m not sure. I can’t rest easy about his personal life either. Even after close study of the program I wasn’t rock solid on who was his wife and who his mother, since he treated both characters exactly alike. Clearly he has some heavy-duty unresolved issues with women–maybe instead of a revolt, the priests should have gone with a special prosecutor.
Zimmerman fills the stage with swirls of gorgeous color and acrobatic movement. People and props behave as though they’re under a sorcerer’s spell: an enormous gauzy curtain hangs over the stage during the overture, mysteriously rippling and billowing in time to the music, and in the last act an immense hourglass runs out of sand at the supernaturally exact instant the orchestra falls silent. The sheer ingenuity of the imagery washes out the residual plot. Sometimes you’d swear that what’s at issue is a clash of fashion statements–compared to Akhnaten’s white and pastel, the stark black and gold of the priests’ robes is just too painfully last dynasty. And then there’s the objet d’art that’s supposed to represent our hero’s one-God theory: I think it’s supposed to resemble a cross between the ark of the covenant and a scale model of the Parthenon, but it just looks like a Mesopotamian end table.
