Dock Street Theatre, Charleston
June 7, 2018

While classical music still finds room for plenty of commissions, one of a creator’s knottier problems is securing that often elusive second performance. A credit to Charleston’s enterprising Spoleto Festival then for taking up Australian composer Liza Lim’s challenging Tree of Codes two years after its well-received Cologne premiere. And not just a new production – George Street’s Zero Restaurant has even designed a craft cocktail: Mixologists take note, the Two Worlds in Thyme blends rum, thyme-infused Aperol, lemon and oleo saccarum (that’s a syrup of citrus peel and sugar) with an egg-white foam. Delicious!

Elliot Madore and Marisol Montalvo in Tree of Codes at Spoleto Festival © William Struhs

Knotty and delicious are two words that could equally be applied to Lim’s opera. Tree of Codes takes as its basis Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name, but Bruno Schulz, Goethe and Foucault also form important source material. Foer’s text is an artwork masquerading as a book. Taking a copy of Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, the American author literally excised the vast majority of the Polish writer’s original words in order to carve out a...