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The English Concert, an ensemble led by Harry Bicket, returned to the New York venue for its annual performance of an opera by the Baroque master, turning in one of its finest productions to date.

Conductor Harry Bicket (at the harpsichord, back to camera) and Lucy Crowe PHOTO: STEVE J. SHERMAN

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 13, 2023 at 3:54 pm ETSHARETEXT

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New York

Since 2013, an annual highlight of the Carnegie Hall season has been the luxurious Sunday afternoon featuring the period-instrument ensemble the English Concert, its artistic director and conductor Harry Bicket, and an impeccably cast and performed Handel opera. Dec. 10 brought one of their finest efforts to date: “Rodelinda,” starring soprano Lucy Croweand countertenor Iestyn Davies. Though I couldn’t help visualizing the Met’s landmark Stephen Wadsworth production, this concert performance stood firmly on its own with just music stands and a few bits of blocking.

“Rodelinda” (1725) is one of Handel’s greatest operas. There’s not a dull moment in its three hours of music, and through inventive arias, taut recitatives and an unusual level of character development it constructs a powerful argument about the endurance of marital love. Nicola Francesco Haym’s adapted libretto, drawn from historical and literary sources, humanizes a political story and centers it on the heroine. Rodelinda, a queen whose husband, Bertarido, has been driven from his throne, is in the power of Grimoaldo, the usurper, who wants to marry her. Bertarido is thought to be dead; he has allowed that error to persist so that he can secretly rescue his wife and son.

Rodelinda has eight arias, and Ms. Crowe skillfully made each one display a different facet of the heroine’s character. In just the first moments of the opening act, she lamented her (supposedly) dead husband with a lustrous, intimate tone and then rejected Grimoaldo’s marriage proposal with steely defiance. Ms. Crowe ornaments her vocal lines spectacularly, yet always with purpose. In one of the afternoon’s high points, Act 2’s “Spietati” (“Pitiless man”), Rodelinda agrees to marry Grimoaldo if he will kill her son in front of her, because she cannot be both the wife of the usurper and the mother of the true heir. It’s a dangerous gamble, and Ms. Crowe’s purposely jittery delivery in the aria’s A section and her wild ornaments in the da capo exemplified that risk for both the character and the singer.

Mr. Bicket and Iestyn Davies PHOTO: STEVE J. SHERMAN

Mr. Davies was an equally persuasive Bertarido. His softly radiant countertenor is ideal for this unhappy exile; his first aria, “Dove sei” (“Where are you”), about his longing for Rodelinda, was effortlessly delicate, with subtle crescendos and not a moment of vocal strain. His last repeat of the word “Vieni” (“Come”), sung on a gently rising spiral, was a moment of perfect beauty. Bertarido is soon to be even more unhappy—he thinks Rodelinda is unfaithful—but in his aria comparing the sounds of nature to his tears Mr. Davies never took that emotion over the top. For “Vivi, tiranno” (“Live, tyrant”), Bertarido’s heroic moment near the end, normally a clarion display, Mr. Davies made his distinctive vocal timbre work for the character—the nice guy ends up the winner.

As Grimoaldo—who starts out as a tyrant but has second thoughts—Eric Ferring captured the character’s vacillations with his freely lyric tenor and clear diction. Mezzo Christine Rice’s Eduige—who wants to marry Grimoaldo but has been rejected—brought a witty slyness to her arias plotting revenge. Brandon Cedel’s booming bass-baritone made him a perfect heavy-duty villain—Garibaldo, the consummate bad guy, advocates tyranny and cruelty and ends up dead—even if he lacked some of the vocal flexibility in ornamentation that the other singers displayed. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s more operatic countertenor as Unulfo, who is secretly loyal to Bertarido and supplies moments of calm and hope, made an interesting contrast to that of Mr. Davies, though his reliance on the music lessened his impact.

As always, the English Concert and Mr. Bicket, leading from the harpsichord, were the heart of the show. The band never let the music sag: Even in the most heart-rending laments, one could always feel the pulse underneath. Driven from the continuo section, colored with the occasional moments of flute, recorder and oboe, and subtly calibrating dynamics, this orchestra breathed with the singers. In Unulfo’s comforting “Fra tempeste” (“Amid the storms”), which has a similar lilting rhythm and accompaniment figures to the famous “Messiah” aria “O thou that tellest,” Mr. Cohen seemed to ride the billows of the orchestra. And in the Act 2 finale, “Io t’abbraccio” (“I embrace you”), the opera’s only duet—as the just-reunited Rodelinda and Bertarido are to be torn apart again—everyone onstage seemed to be singing. The voices twined and soared, a walking bass in the low strings supplied a visceral anchor, and the violins sighed above. In an afternoon of sublimity, this was a heart-stopping moment.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Just the third work in the language ever performed at the New York institution, composer Daniel Catán’s homage to magical realism proved lavish but low on drama.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 21, 2023 at 5:33 pm ET

Griffin Massey and Mattia Olivieri 

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

New York

The Mexican composer Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere on Thursday, is well-traveled; it has had several productions and been seen in numerous opera houses since its 1996 world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. There are reasons for its popularity—lush orchestration, ear-pleasing vocal lines, a romantic story—and as one of very few operas in Spanish, it’s a good choice for companies eager to attract Spanish-speaking audiences. It is the Met’s first opera by a Latin American composer and only its third Spanish-language offering (the previous ones were in 1916 and 1926). The resurrected New York City Opera imported a production from Nashville to give the opera its New York premiere in 2016. 

“Florencia” is an homage to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. The libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, once a student of Márquez, is about a famous opera singer, Florencia Grimaldi, who is traveling incognito on a boat up the Amazon River to sing in Manaus, Brazil, with the aim of finding her former lover, a butterfly hunter, who has disappeared into the jungle. Her story, and those of the two pairs of lovers who are also on the boat, is vaguely about the triumph of love over ambition—or perhaps the possibility of the co-existence of the two. It’s not clear, and there’s little dramatic tension along the way. The rippling orchestration, colored with flutes and marimbas, rolls along like the Amazon itself, though with little variety in tempo or rhythm; the vocal parts owe a great deal to Puccini. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin seemed to be enjoying the all-out romantic exuberance of the score—the orchestra was loud and vigorous rather than subtle. 

Ailyn Pérez

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

The eye-catching production by director Mary Zimmerman leaned into that Márquez-inspired fantasy and exoticism as well as the opera’s riverine and colorful musical character. Riccardo Hernández’s set—a pair of screens undulating diagonally across the stage—suggested the banks of the Amazon with the aid of S. Katy Tucker’s projections of a leafy green jungle. Costume designer Ana Kuzmanić brilliantly created the denizens of the natural world. A group of dancers in big skirts had silvery piranhas on their heads and sprouting from their hips; another cadre wore huge pink flowers and dragged more flowers behind them; two dancers gorgeously arrayed as birds—a heron and a hummingbird—spread their elaborate wings. Puppeteers operated a monkey, an iguana and a caiman. T.J. Gerckens supplied the painterly lighting, enhancing the colorful brilliance of the sky at different times of day. The riverboat itself appeared as individual elements, such as movable deck rails, a deckchair, the helm; in the storm scene at the end of Act 1, dancers in blue overran the boat and its passengers. (Alex Sanchez did the basic choreography.)

The diva Florencia made a fine showcase for Ailyn Pérez: Her soprano, rich and even throughout its range, tackled the role’s soaring, Puccini-esque flights with aplomb. She has three big arias: The opera gets right to the point with her opening salvo about her love affair with Cristóbal, the butterfly hunter, that “made my voice” and how she left him in search of fame, which didn’t satisfy her either. Like Italian, Spanish is an elegant singing language—certainly “a quagmire of anacondas” sounds better in it than in English. In this aria and the despairing one that opens Act 2, Ms. Pérez’s top notes occasionally sounded harsh, but in her concluding showpiece, as her soul seems to experience a mystical reunion with Cristóbal’s, her ecstatic vocal expression was flawless. 

Gabriella Reyes and Mario Chang

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

She was well-supported by the rest of the cast: Gabriella Reyes (Rosalba) and Mario Chang (Arcadio) were nicely matched as the young lovers who discover each other on the boat, reject love in favor of ambition, and then change their minds. Nancy Fabiola Herrera (Paula) and Michael Chioldi (Alvaro) brought a proper world-weariness to the bickering older couple, who also find each other again. The quartet in which the four played cards had a lively sparkle, a break from the meditative tempos of the rest of the piece. David Pittsinger was the philosophical Captain; Mattia Olivieri (Riolobo) ably filled the narrator’s role. He is a mysterious figure, who, during the storm scene, appeared in a splendid gold, ancient-Aztec-looking costume to implore the gods not to destroy the world.

The rest of Ms. Kuzmanić’s costumes for the humans were as fabulous as the ones for the Amazon creatures—each of the women had several outfits, including colorful early 20th-century-style dresses in sumptuous fabrics and an amusing period swimwear ensemble for Paula. In case we missed the point, butterfly wings unfolded from Florencia’s gown at the end of her final aria. As was the case with Ivo van Hove’s production of “Dead Man Walking,” which opened the season, a lavish, on-point production helped to camouflage the flaws in the work itself. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Director Robert O’Hara resurrects Anthony Davis’s 1986 work about the black civil-rights leader, in a production that gives thrilling voice to a richly jazzy score.

By Heidi Waleson 

Nov. 14, 2023 at 6:04 pm ET

Will Liverman (center) in a scene from Anthony Davis’s ‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

New York

Nearly four decades after its birth, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera. At the time of its 1986 New York City Opera world premiere across the Lincoln Center Plaza, its controversial subject and unconventional musical idiom would have been unthinkable at the conservative Met; today, it is part of a vigorous company initiative predicated on the idea that new operas attract new audiences. The times have finally caught up with “X,” even as the events that it chronicles have receded into the more distant past.

The onstage resurrection of “X” was spearheaded by Yuval Sharon, artistic director of the Detroit Opera; the revised work, in a five-company co-production, had its premiere there in May 2022. The show is grander at the Met and director Robert O’Hara’s concept, framing “X” as a mythic tale seen through an Afrofuturist lens, is clearer, though if you haven’t read an explanation of it in advance, you may still be mystified. Two dozen choristers in elaborate sci-fi/African costumes and wigs—visitors from an idealized future—now witness the proceedings, which play out as a historical re-enactment on the inset gold-framed proscenium stage. Their spaceship, suspended above, is much bigger here; some additional projections help establish the settings, which were vague in Detroit; and a larger dance ensemble clarifies scenes such as the riot in the final act. (The production team includes Clint Ramos, set; Dede Ayite, costumes; Alex Jainchill, lighting; Yee Eun Nam, projections; Mia Neal, wigs; and Rickey Tripp, choreography.)

Even more important, a much larger chorus gives the opera its intended epic, oratorio-like weight. In Mr. Davis’s richly varied score, the chorus is the community—telling the story, commenting on events, and underpinning the solo moments, which jump out of the texture. 

In the story by Christopher Davis and librettist Thulani Davis (Christoper is Anthony’s brother; Thulani is his cousin), each act covers a period (and a different name) in Malcolm’s life. In Act 1, his family is broken up after his father’s violent death; he becomes a street hustler in Boston and is arrested and jailed. In Act 2, he converts to Islam in prison; changes his “slave name” Little to X; becomes a magnetic preacher of black power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam and then falls afoul of the organization. In Act 3, he makes a pilgrimage to Mecca; has a vision of unity; takes the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz; forms his own movement; and is assassinated, age 39, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan.

Mr. Liverman

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL / MET OPERA

In Detroit, the opera was performed with a single intermission after the first scene of the second act. The Met reverted to the original three-act format, which is dramatically stronger. For example, in the concluding scene of Act 1, the chorus disappears, and we hear the adult Malcolm’s voice for the first time. He’s been arrested, and he sings an aria of bitterness and helpless anger at the black man’s lot that concludes, “You want the truth, but you don’t want to know.” Baritone Will Liverman, who snapped into the character with naked ferocity, sounded the best I’ve ever heard him. The directing was overkill—the house lights were raised and Mr. Liverman came to the edge of the stage to directly address the mostly white audience—but the fierceness of that aria resonated through the intermission. 

Raehann Bryce-Davis as Queen Mother

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

Soprano Leah Hawkins shone in her two very different arias—first as Louise, Malcolm’s mother, reliving the terror of Ku Klux Klan raids and falling apart as she worries about her missing husband; later expansively sympathetic as Betty, Malcolm’s wife, in the poetic “When a man is lost, does the sky bleed for him?” Raehann Bryce-Davis’s sumptuous mezzo brought lively energy to Ella, Malcolm’s sister, who brings him to Boston, as well as to the Queen Mother, a soapbox preacher advocating a return to African ways. Tenor Victor Ryan Robertson seemed vocally underpowered as the seductive hustler Street but came into his own as the dominating Elijah Muhammad. Michael Sumuel’s resonant bass-baritone was effective in the role of Malcolm’s brother Reginald, who introduces him to the Nation of Islam. 

Kazem Abdullah ably led the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, which kept pace with the driving energy of Episteme, the eight-member, improvising jazz ensemble embedded in it. The orchestra and chorus captured the big canvas of this complex score, limning its polyrhythms and letting the wailing sax and trumpet fly. 

A scene from ‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

“X” has some flaws. The piece loses focus after Malcolm’s journey to Mecca. The scenes of his return to America, the founding of his new organization, and the bombing of his house are chaotic and confusing; the wordless assassination at the end is muted and anticlimactic. In this production, with the visitors from the future watching Malcolm get shot, and the curtains of the inset proscenium closing on him, one gets the feeling that these events happened in the distant past and their meaning is purely historical, no different from the assassination of King Gustavo of Sweden in “Un Ballo in Maschera,” also playing in repertory at the Met. The fervor of the 1960s black power rhetoric becomes quaint artifact rather than the expression of a struggle that continues.

But this is a major score, and one that warrants exposure on a big stage. Met attendees who venture downstairs to the exhibition space on the concourse level can get a taste of the 12 contemporary works planned for the next four seasons, which include world premieres of Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo” and Huang Ruo’s “The Wedding Banquet,” and Met premieres of works that have been seen elsewhere, like John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” and Kevin Puts’s Pulitzer-winning “Silent Night.” Presentation at the Met, with all its resources and reach, will help determine which of the many new works written and produced in recent decades will get a place in the operatic repertory. But the Met will have to keep bringing back the best of them to make that happen.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

At the Dallas Opera, Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby movingly depicts the writer’s experience of being left speechless and almost entirely immobile by a stroke.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 6, 2023 at 5:33 pm ET

‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ at the Dallas Opera

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

Dallas

‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer, which had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera on Friday, would seem to have the most improbable operatic subject imaginable. It is based on the bestselling 1997 memoir by the French writer Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, at age 43, had a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome—speechless and almost totally immobile, but with his mind intact. (In 2007, Julian Schnabel adapted the memoir into a film.)

But one of opera’s superpowers is its ability to speak inner thoughts aloud, and “Diving Bell” fully embraces and explores that potential. The operatic Bauby (who was known as Jean-Do), sung by the indomitable baritone Lucas Meachem, stands, walks, and voices his thoughts for the audience, although all but one of the other characters on the stage see him only as a still, silent figure in a bed or a wheelchair. The intimacy of that relationship allows the audience to join him on his journey from imprisonment (the diving bell) to finding freedom in his imagination (the butterfly), and the discovery of what truly mattered in his life.

Mr. Scheer’s tight libretto and Mr. Talbot’s targeted, economical score (the opera runs under two hours including one intermission) waste no time on self-indulgence. Mr. Scheer cleverly underlines the imprisonment and freedom themes by introducing elements from Jean-Do’s favorite novel, “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas. One is Abbé Faria, the priest who was trying to dig his way out of his dungeon in the Château d’If but tunneled into the next cell instead; he becomes Jean-Do’s guide, as he was for the protagonist Edmond Dantès in the novel, and is the only person who can hear Jean-Do.

Lucas Meachem and Sasha Cooke

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

The nonimaginary characters trying to communicate with Jean-Do are Sylvie, the mother of his two children, whom he left for another woman, and his infirm father, both links to the brilliant and flawed man he was. He can blink one eyelid, and Sandrine, a speech therapist, teaches him to use that ability with an alphabet sequence to spell out words; Claude, his amanuensis, takes the dictation of his book. Composer and librettist carefully balance their scenes with Jean-Do’s soliloquies, moving from his terror, isolation and frustration to the climax of Act 1, when he finally spells out “merci” (“thank you”), a moment that recalls Helen Keller’s breakthrough in “The Miracle Worker,” but not in a bad way. The blinks are heard in the orchestra and seen as flashes of light, reminding us that this is the only way those other characters can understand him. In Act 2, as his book is written and his communication with the rest of the world restarts, others sometimes can speak for him. For example, as a doctor sews his right eye closed to prevent infection, the three women’s voices of Sylvie, Sandrine and Claude twine together, amplifying Jean-Do’s voice by reading his words aloud.

Mr. Talbot’s score calls for a lot of percussion, yet it is unusually lyrical: The vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel and celesta plus harp and pianos help to create the real atmosphere of the seaside hospital as well as the watery world of Jean-Do’s isolation and his struggles to come to terms with his situation and imagine himself out of it. Some scenes lighten the mood by leaning into jazz: There’s a syncopated rhythm as he remembers whipping up boeuf bourguignon for a dinner party with Sylvie; then in Act 2, to the beat of a drum kit and a plucked double bass, he imagines selecting photographs of himself in heroic situations for Elle magazine, where he was editor-in-chief. The most poignant scene is the second to last, “Au revoir,” as Jean-Do longs to have a real, spontaneous conversation once again; you feel the sadness of this vibrant, intelligent man who is now so painfully limited in his interactions with other humans.

Mr. Meachem and Richard Croft

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

Mr. Meachem’s vocal and theatrical expressiveness were such that by the end of the evening, we knew a great deal about Jean-Do. The singers were amplified, which gave the voices an odd immediacy in the 2,200-seat Winspear Opera House and exacerbated the slightly harsh edge of Sasha Cooke’s mezzo; otherwise, her Sylvie was affecting, as were sopranos Andriana Chuchman and Deanna Breiwick as, respectively, Sandrine and Claude. Ms. Chuchman also had a scene as another “Monte Cristo” character, Mercédès. Tenor Richard Croftbrought urgency to Faria; bass Kevin Burdette gave Papinou (Jean-Do’s father) a distinctive frailty; tenor Andrew Bidlack was properly pompous as the Doctor. Ava Jafari and Austin Howarth were capable in the spoken roles of Jean-Do’s children. Emmanuel Villaume was the authoritative conductor.

Director Leonard Foglia’s production toggled between Jean-Do’s inner and outer worlds. The action played out, for the most part, on a platform with a slightly raked area at the back. Above it and at its sides, a tilted ceiling and two butterfly-shaped wings made of a stippled reflective material mirrored the images projected on the rake in distorted form—at times so distorted that it was not always clear what they represented. (Elaine J. McCarthy designed the set and the projections.) Russell Champa’s lighting also delineated the borders between the imagined and real, as did David Woolard’s costumes—modern ones for the present, and 19th-century ones for the Dumas characters.

Bauby died two days after his book was published and the opera’s final scene includes his passing. Yet this conclusion is neither a downer nor a conventional “his work lives on” apotheosis, but rather the culmination of Jean-Do’s difficult journey toward acceptance and the joy in what he’s had. The other characters sing lines from his book: “A butterfly’s wings, beat by beat by beat, counting all the things you’ve ever loved, all the things you’ve ever imagined; and then beat by beat by beat, counting the seconds until it’s time to let go.” It reminded me of Mr. Talbot and Mr. Scheer’s previous collaboration, “Everest” (2015), which was also commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It, too, used music to express the complexities and joys of human resilience under the most terrible circumstances imaginable.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

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Composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist George Brant’s world premiere at the Washington National Opera follows a female fighter pilot who is reassigned to flying drones.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 31, 2023 at 5:16 pm ET

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

Washington

‘Grounded,” a two-act opera by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which had its world premiere at the Washington National Opera on Saturday, is based on a 2013 monodrama by Mr. Brant in which an Air Force fighter pilot recounts her mental and emotional disintegration after she is reassigned to flying drones. The new version had to be bigger—it was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, which will present it next season—so Mr. Brant expanded his text for the libretto, skillfully fleshing out the characters and context in the pilot’s narrative. But the transformation of the pilot—called Jess in the opera—is what matters, and with the backstory adding extra weight, especially in Act 1, the drama takes too long to catch fire. It’s a surprising lapse from Ms. Tesori, composer of such wholly gripping theater pieces as the opera “Blue” and the musicals “Fun Home,” “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Caroline, or Change.”

We first meet Jess (the intense, passionate mezzo Emily D’Angelo) standing at the apex of a triangle of fighter pilots. An ecstatic chorus and aria demonstrate their camaraderie, Jess’s triumphant success in a male world, and her joy in flying in “the Blue”; the military atmosphere is intensified with drum rolls and trumpet calls. Ensuing scenes detail the events that remove her from that fellowship: While on leave in Wyoming, she meets Eric; gets pregnant and is grounded due to regulations barring pregnant women from flying; joins Eric on his family ranch, where she marries him, gives birth to a baby girl, Sam, and spends eight years before deciding she wants to fly again. But war is now different: Jess is assigned to fly a $17 million Reaper drone from a trailer in Las Vegas. She will stare at a screen for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and go home to her family at night. As her Commander puts it, “War with all the benefits of home.”

Emily D’Angelo

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

We’re now two-thirds of the way into Act 1, and things finally get interesting. The pilot fellowship is replaced by the Sensor, a jaunty, 19-year-old ex-gamer in a sweatshirt assigned to monitor the drone’s “thousand eyes”; the disembodied, processed voices of the Kill Chain supervisors that come through Jess’s headset; and the Drone Squadron, a new male chorus that represents the increasingly disturbing echoes of her own thoughts. The bright musical evocation of the thrill of flying in “the Blue” is replaced by hisses and an ominous, repeated brass motif, in keeping with Jess’s gray screen that shows convoys crawling through a desert 8,000 miles away. The creepy Kill Chain voices tell Jess to “linger” above them; the Drone Squadron declares “Everything is witnessed” and proclaims the targets “Guilty Jeeps, guilty camels, guilty convoys, guilty sand.”

In Act 2, we burrow deeper into Jess’s head and her growing inability to differentiate between work and home as the idea of surveillance takes over her life. A trip to the mall has her looking for cameras; she confuses her nightly drive through the Nevada desert with the vehicles she tracks on screen; her dissociated self, called Also Jess, watches her as she obsessively watches her new target, No. 2 on the war hit list, waiting for him to leave his car so she can positively identify and kill him. The voices of the Drone Squadron become more insistent, encouraging her delusions and shutting out the last vestiges of her real life. The technicolor, Copland-esque lyricism of Jess’s earlier life with her family gives way to more unstable harmonies as Ms. Tesori steadily builds the musical tension toward Jess’s climactic act and its consequences.

Morris Robinson (above) and Ms. D’Angelo, Willa Cook and Joseph Dennis PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

Ms. D’Angelo commanded the stage even as her character disintegrated. As Also Jess, the only other adult woman in the show, soprano Teresa Perrotta floated in a higher tessitura; their duet after Jess and Eric make love in Act 2 was a particularly striking moment, as were the scenes that layered Jess’s line into the various male choruses. Tenor Joseph Dennis was affecting as Eric, especially in his efforts to bring Jess back to reality, but his arias and the extended scenes of their budding relationship in Act 1 went on too long. Bass Morris Robinson brought gruff authority to the Commander; tenor Frederick Ballentine exuded enthusiasm as the Trainer who introduces the grounded pilots to the drone; baritone Kyle Miller was refreshingly irreverent as the Sensor. Willa Cook was poignant as Jess’s beloved daughter, Sam, the root of her emotional confusion between work and life. Conductor Daniela Candillari expertly rendered Ms. Tesori’s colorful orchestration, which never covered the singers and sometimes stopped altogether, and the all-male choruses ably delineated their different roles, whether they were drunken pilots in a bar, mall denizens, or the sinister Drone Squadron.

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

The production cleverly established Jess’s two worlds and their gradual melding. In Mimi Lien’s set, the military side was created by LED screens—floor, back wall and ceiling—seeming to float in midair, with Jess and Eric’s suburban house and other locations on solid ground below. Vivid LED projections by Kaitlyn Pietras and Jason H. Thompson took us from the rolling clouds and blue sky of the opening scene to images of the drone and a blown-up image of Jess’s trailer screen, depicting the gray landscape with its topographical contours, the drone’s positioning charts and numerical data, and the white explosions of the missiles she launches.

Sometimes the eye of the camera turned to the people on the stage, projecting multiple images of them in the same gray tones, suggesting the omnipresence of surveillance. Jess took the Sensor’s seat in the trailer when she drove her car through the desert and the background projections changed, but we felt her impression of the similarity of the two locations. Lighting designer Kevin Adamshelped to evoke Jess’s dislocation; Tom Broecker’s apt costumes included the flight suit that symbolizes Jess’s identity plus Eric’s rancher outfit and his gaudy red vest, the uniform of the casino blackjack dealer that he becomes. Michael Mayer was the precise director, building a clear narrative about the personal consequences of war, especially when the waging of it is outsourced to technology.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The composer’s new work, which had its premiere at Houston Grand Opera in a production by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, follows a Confederate landowner and an enslaved woman in her household as they run a Union espionage ring during the Civil War.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 25, 2023 at 5:34 pm ET

Jamie Barton and Janai Brugger

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

Houston

In 2000, Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” launched a flurry of activity in the creation and production of new American operas. It became one of the most produced 21st-century titles and made it to the Metropolitan Opera last month. On Friday, Houston Grand Opera opened its season with the world premiere—the company’s 75th—of Mr. Heggie’s most recent work, “Intelligence.” 

Like “Dead Man,” “Intelligence” is based on a true story, this one more than a century older. During the Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond landowner, ran a Union spy ring with the assistance of Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved woman in her household. Mr. Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar have blended historical record and imagination to fashion a tale centered on Mary Jane’s journey toward finding the truth of her traumatic past. The path is logical, but that narrative drive, full of heavy-handed foreshadowing, toward Mary Jane’s discovery—a slave auction and the forced separation of mother and child 20 years earlier—feels formulaic. The lengthy opera is an inert, mechanical structure, its characters and situations erected as plot points rather than an authentic, developing story with dramatic sweep.

The 80-minute first act is crammed with information: We meet Mary Jane, Elizabeth and Lucinda, a mysterious woman who seems to know a lot about Mary Jane. A pair of cardboard villains—Callie Van Lew, Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, and Travis Briggs, a Confederate Home Guard—who embark on a romance even though Callie’s husband is off fighting for The Cause are bent on uncovering the suspected spying activities. Also in the mix are Wilson, Mary Jane’s husband, who is part of the spy operation, and Henry, Jefferson Davis’s butler, who falls in love with Mary Jane. Events include a devious plan: Mary Jane goes to work in Davis’s home, the Confederate White House, where she can surreptitiously pick up information since no one suspects that she is literate. She sets the Davis house on fire as a distraction from her activities; Elizabeth, fearing discovery of the spy ring, buries the journal that contains her codes and other secrets. The 50-minute Act 2 features murder, revelation and apotheosis. 

Michael Mayes and Caitlin Lynch

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

It’s a lot of material, and Mr. Heggie’s music tends to be blandly pretty, with little to distinguish one character from another. Each gets at least one obligatory aria, but Mary Jane’s opening song, a minor-key lament that establishes her ignorance about her origins, doesn’t sound all that different from Elizabeth’s declaration, “I didn’t know I could hate like this.” The copious text abounds with expressions of rage and terror, but we never hear it in the music, and Mr. Heggie’s ensembles often go on long past the moment when they’ve made their point. 

Only the singing—Janai Brugger’s lyrical soprano (Mary Jane) contrasted with Jamie Barton’s powerful mezzo (Elizabeth)—supplied some variety of tone. The sole character with any real edge is Travis, sung with verve by baritone Michael Mayes. The scene in which he threatens and fondles Mary Jane as if he had every right to do so was the one moment in the evening that made the power dynamics of slavery visceral. Caitlin Lynch’s high soprano brought a slyness to Callie; mezzo J’Nai Bridges was a cipher as Lucinda; Nicholas Newton’s sumptuous bass-baritone gave Henry authority; and tenor Joshua Blue was poignant as Wilson, whose love for Mary Jane means he will do anything for her. Kwamé Ryan was the capable conductor.

J’Nai Bridges and Ms. Brugger, surrounded by the dancers of Urban Bush Women

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

One unusual element in the piece is its built-in dance component, featuring eight members of Urban Bush Women, ebulliently choreographed by Ms. Zollar, the company’s founder. One dancer played Mrs. Davis; the others were a continual presence, embodying the ancestral roots that support Mary Jane and Lucinda. In an early scene, they surrounded Mary Jane and helped her walk toward the danger of her undercover role in the Davis house; in Lucinda’s aria “Who am I?” about the horrors of the slave trade, they formed a single line behind her, representing the trafficked and exploited. In Act 2, as Mary Jane gleans more information about her past, their dances become more elaborate—and elaborately costumed—accompanied by African drumming from the pit. They also acted out Mary Jane’s culminating discovery. The spying tale fades away, and the opera concludes with uplift as Mary Jane, backed by the dancing ancestors, resolves to tell her own story. Like the rest of the opera, it’s logical, but pat. 

The design concept ingeniously evoked the opera’s multiple locations: Mimi Lien’s set, a multilevel, movable box with transparent sides, suggested hiding places and secrets, as did John Torres’s mysterious lighting; Wendall K. Harrington’s shadowy projections depicted the real (an oak tree, a bookshelf) as well as the remembered (sheets transformed into ship sails; daguerreotype portraits; slave auction posters; African fabric designs). The costumes, originally designed by Carlos Soto and realized by Clair Hummel (who also designed the dancers’ costumes), contrasted sober period authenticity for the living characters with vibrant colors and vivid details for the spirit dancers. Ms. Zollar’s rudimentary scene direction exposed the static quality of the libretto; her explosive choreography appeared to belong to a different show altogether.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Kate Soper’s opera, which had its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre last week, adapts a medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns; David T. Little’s work, performed by Philadelphia’s The Crossing, stems from the bygone practice of paying social outcasts to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 17, 2023 at 5:31 pm ET

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Brett Umlauf, Christiana Cole, Hirona Amamiya

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York and Philadelphia

Kate Soper’s specialty is turning old stories on their heads, and with “The Hunt,” a sort-of chamber opera that had its world premiere at Miller Theatre on Thursday, she investigates the medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns. Ms. Soper wrote her own text and adapted lyrics from sources as disparate as Hildegard of Bingen and the poet H.D. Spoken sections are modern girl talk; the poetic songs have harmonies that start out sounding medieval and then stray into dissonant and alluring realms. “The Hunt” is tighter and more focused than Ms. Soper’s sprawling “Romance of the Rose,” a medieval allegory about love done at Long Beach Opera in February; it is closer in spirit to her feisty “Here Be Sirens” (2014), about another mythical trio awaiting their prey.

The three virgins—Fleur (Brett Umlauf), Briar (Christiana Cole) and Rue (Hirona Amamiya)—are sopranos; the first two double on ukulele, and Ms. Amamiya plays the violin. They have been hired as bait to enable the King to capture a unicorn. The 90-minute show is a series of similarly constructed scenes: a perky livestream update (“Day 43!”), lunch, a bawdy riddle, a sung trio, a possible sighting of the unicorn, and a solo aria. There’s a lot of material, and it takes a bit too long for the virgins to get to the show’s turning point, the realization that capturing the unicorn means killing it for the greater glory of the patriarchy. Their response: “We are not going to deliver that creature into the hands of a bunch of blood-thirsty, sword-wielding thugs just so they can mutilate it in the name of a depraved power grab that they got out of a f—ing fairy tale.” They decide instead to “spoil the bait.” 

The comic byplay is mildly amusing, but the show is about the songs. Ms. Soper has a wonderful feel for layering women’s voices, and the trios, with their arresting harmonies, are never the same, whether the selection is a dark folk song or the culminating erotic set piece. In one delicious moment, the three, having ingested a drug meant for the unicorn, create an entire edifice out of vocal noises and lip trills. The voices shine individually in solos—Ms. Umlauf’s coloratura; Mx. Cole’s darker, more vibrato-tinged sound; Ms. Amamiya’s sensual line—and the other two sometimes back up the soloist with a wordless bass line. The instrumental accompaniment provides delicate support and counterpoint: the ukulele line is rudimentary, the violin playing more virtuosic. Supertitles would have been helpful; the poetry texts were often incomprehensible. 

Ms. Amamiya and Ian Edlund

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

“The Hunt” was efficiently and elegantly produced. The set conflated modern and medieval: Scenic designer Aoshuang Zhang’s flat rear wall seemed prison-like until its revolving panels offered glimpses of a world beyond; Camilla Tassi’s projections included both snippets of the Cluny Museum’s “Unicorn” tapestries (the inspiration for the piece) and the virgins’ livestream. The lunches, in plastic deli clamshells, arrived through a small hatch in the wall; silent men occasionally came through with brooms to sweep the trash to one side of the stage. Terese Wadden’s clever body-concealing white gowns—a parody of virginity, as seen from a male point of view—were gradually shed, along with one virgin’s wig, to reveal more modern attire and tattoos. Aided by Masha Tsimring’s dramatic lighting, stage director Ashley Tata and music director Mila Henry deftly paced the action from blind acceptance to revolt.

***

David T. Little’s “Sin-Eater,” which had its world premiere at the Annenberg Center on Saturday, also stems from an old practice—this one real: In Wales, through the mid-19th century, poor social outcasts were paid to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead by literally eating bread and beer that had been placed on the bodies. Mr. Little’s “ritual grotesquerie,” commissioned by The Crossing, Philadelphia’s renowned new-music choir, and Penn Live Arts, considers that practice in contemporary terms, through those who absorb the worst horrors of the modern world so others don’t have to. 

“Sin-Eater” was supposed to be fully staged by the Dutch director Jorinde Keesmaat and have additional performances in Amsterdam, but funding shortfalls curtailed those plans. In the more minimalist production conceived by Donald Nally, The Crossing’s artistic director and conductor, the 24 singers were arrayed at two banquet tables, their places set with bread and wine, with a string quartet (the Bergamot) positioned in front. White catering aprons were donned and doffed, napkins waved in the air, knives pounded on the table for percussive effect. The singers sometimes ventured out of their places into the foreground and lighting designer Eric Southern supplied some dramatic color changes. Yet the theatricality of Mr. Little’s music, coupled with his original and adapted text, is so intense that it hardly needed the visual cues to have a shattering impact. 

The four-part, 70-minute work grows progressively darker. Part I, “Tell Me What You Eat,” a quote from the culinary pundit Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, which concludes, “and I’ll tell you what you are,” seems almost merry at first, with the women’s voices tripping fast and light over a bouncy bass-drum riff. The menu of a 17th-century French royal feast is comical until we get to “a tiny guillotine” and the vocal lines start to fragment. A description of “humane” butchery, including a seductive line from the women, segues into a solo tenor singing Jonathan Swift’s satirical treatise on cannibalism, “A Modest Proposal.” The chilling relationship between eating and power is clear.

Part II, “The Grotesque Body,” takes the metaphor to even grimmer places: there’s a death march to a Wilfred Owen war poem; in a meditation on horror movies and the disfiguring of women’s bodies, each of the 12 women has her own vocal line, with the highest soprano finally exploding into a shriek. In Part III, “Dirty Work,” the stories become personal and harrowing: a wrenching chorale about working in a slaughterhouse; a description of being part of a firing squad, with single words spit out on top of each other like bullets; a poignant, folky account of a pandemic worker communing with the dead in a refrigerated truck; a slashing, mechanical sequence about social-media content moderators watching torture and beheadings that turns into cacophonous vocal noise. A tiny snippet of the chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is quickly buried in the din. 

One might expect Part IV, “Eucharist,” to offer consolation. It doesn’t. Nominally liturgical and evoking the Christian ritual of transubstantiation, the music grows steadily weightier as the singers take on the burdens of others, but the flowing, ominous conclusion is a text from Stephen Crane: “You say that you are holy / But there are those who see you sin.” “Tell me what you eat . . . ” returns as memory. There is no escape. 

Led by Mr. Nally, The Crossing’s uncanny ability to articulate text and weave innumerable lines into tapestries of intricate clarity, as well as throw itself into pure noise, brought the dizzying variety of Mr. Little’s settings to vibrant life. The string quartet, along with percussion played by choir members and occasional synthesizer lines, added some rhythm and color, but the voices of The Crossing built a universe all by themselves. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

With Ivo van Hove’s new staging of Jake Heggie’s opera about Sister Helen Prejean’s role as an adviser to a man condemned to die, the Met continues to embrace contemporary works. 

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 3, 2023 at 5:06 pm ET

Wendy Bryn Harmer, Rod Gilfry, Joyce DiDonato, Krysty Swann and Chauncey Packer

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND

Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 season on Sept. 26, a Met premiere that was symbolic on many levels. When the piece had its world premiere in San Francisco in 2000, new works were occasional events in American opera houses, sprinkled delicately, even apologetically, into seasons of standard repertory for fear of rebellion from traditional audiences. Yet this season, extrapolating from the sellout crowds that attended its productions of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2021 and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in 2022, the Met is banking on a whopping six contemporary works, one-third of the total number of productions, to bolster its generally flagging box office.

Things have clearly changed over 23 years. The rate of creation and production of new works at American houses has accelerated, particularly in the past decade, with plucky companies like Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Opera Philadelphia along with smaller, experimental outfits like the Prototype Festival and the Industry leading the way. In 2016, the first year that the Music Critics Association of North America gave a “Best New Opera” award, Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves” was selected from a rich field of 18 North American world premieres. 

“Dead Man Walking” also normalized the idea that opera could and should tackle contemporary subjects and stories. Earlier works like John Adams’s “Nixon in China” (1987) were once derisively called “CNN Operas.” By contrast, the success of “Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book (also a 1995 film) about her experiences as spiritual adviser to prisoners on death row, made the controversial topic of capital punishment a fit subject for the opera house. It is the most frequently produced new opera of this century, with a remarkable 75 productions, often accompanied, with Sister Helen’s participation, by symposia and panel discussions. Its many successors include works on such up-to-the-minute topics as LGBTQ issues (Laura Kaminisky’s “As One,” Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers”); police killings of black men (Jeanine Tesori’s “Blue”); and Alzheimer’s disease (Lembit Beecher’s “Sky on Swings”). In June, San Francisco Opera will present the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which deals with the fallout from a school shooting. 

Ryan McKinny

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND

Terrence McNally’s libretto traces Sister Helen’s relationship with Joseph De Rocher, a prisoner convicted of the rape and murder of a high-school-age couple, as his last appeals fail and his execution date approaches. Much of the opera takes place within the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, and the Met’s marquee production team, headed by Ivo van Hove with set and lighting design by Jan Versweyveld, created a strikingly austere environment: a blank-walled box, with a smaller cube suspended above the stage. 

No bars or shackles are visible; An D’Huys’s drab costumes blend in; and Christopher Ash’s scene-establishing projections are reserved for the outside world—a blurry but still explicit video of the crime, which is played several times, and the road that unfurls as Sister Helen makes her first long drive from New Orleans to Angola. In the prison, subtle lighting color changes and precise directing evoke the lonely horror of imprisonment and impending death that affects both principal characters. In a few of scenes, two onstage camera operators film their faces in close-up, projecting their expressions onto the upper cube and offering an additional window into their feelings. The camera also zoomed in as the lethal injection needle was inserted into De Rocher’s arm, and on the sudden widening of his eyes as the poison took effect, bookending the shock of the opening killing with a concluding one.

The production supplied some of the weight and interiority that the opera itself lacks. The libretto carries the story; Mr. Heggie’s music doesn’t create or develop characters, relying instead on a noisy, propulsive orchestra and multiple climaxes. Scenes are often too long. The insipid earworm hymn associated with Sister Helen seems at odds with her dynamic personality, as do her meandering arias; it’s hard to find De Rocher’s mix of fear and aggression in his music. When Mr. Heggie does provide a lyric tune, the moment often comes across as manipulative rather than authentic.

The top-flight cast made the most of the piece. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who first sang Sister Helen at the New York City Opera in 2002, was all coiled intensity, visibly and audibly grappling with her determination to hate the sin but love the sinner. Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, buff and tattooed, poignantly captured some of the insecurity underlying De Rocher’s macho posturing and bravado. As Sister Rose, Helen’s confidante, soprano Latonia Moore shone with Ms. DiDonato in one of the opera’s best moments, a duet about forgiveness. Susan Graham, who sang Sister Helen at the San Francisco world premiere, took on the role of Joseph’s mother, Mrs. De Rocher. Her plea for his life at the pardon hearing was acutely characterized with deliberate fumbling; even better was the final meeting of mother and son, just before his execution, when she refused to let him apologize or confess. 

Rod Gilfry, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer and Chauncey Packer were affecting as the parents of the murder victims. Raymond Aceto, Chad Shelton and Justin Austin had lively cameos as the prison’s warden, its condescending priest, and the motorcycle cop who stops Sister Helen for speeding and then lets her go. Yannick Nézet-Séguin let the orchestra loose with all its noise and bombast. 

The three other Met premieres this season are all vintage: Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” (1986) in a newly revised version, co-produced with four other companies; Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” a well-traveled Spanish-language work from 1996; and John Adams’s “El Niño” (2000), which will feature notable Met debuts by singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines, conductor Marin Alsop, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz. “Fire” and “The Hours” are being revived. The initiative will continue: A new $10 million gift from the Neubauer Family Foundation has been earmarked to subsidize 17 Met premieres from 2023-24 through 2027-28. Some will no doubt be brand new; others selected from the enormous wealth of new opera that has emerged over the past two decades. The Met has finally caught up, and is going all in. Rightly so. New work is the future of opera.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O featured a triumphant world premiere about Nellie Bly’s work exposing the conditions at a 19th-century asylum, as well as a production of Verdi’s convoluted love story; director Claus Guth and tenor Jonas Kaufmann staged a gripping performance of Schubert’s ‘Schwanengesang’ (‘Swan Song’) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Heidi Waleson 

Sept. 25, 2023 at 5:48 pm ET

Kiera Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking Festival O notched another triumph on Thursday with the world premiere of Rene Orth’s “10 Days in a Madhouse,”staged at the Wilma Theater. Using reporter Nellie Bly’s 1887 exposé of the conditions at the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) as a source, Ms. Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch trenchantly explore how female insanity has been used both as an operatic trope and as a way to label and control non-compliant women.

Ingeniously, the opera’s narrative runs backward, starting with Day 10: A haze of choral fragments embedded in an acoustic and electronic orchestral texture evokes the disordered mind of The Madwoman/Nellie (Kiera Duffy) until she cries “Let me out!” Over the next 90 minutes, we see and hear, in reverse, how she got to that point, with the music and text gradually reassembling into a recognizable story. Incomprehensible bits of text come together as “What time’s the boat?” This is the repeated plea of Lizzie (Raehann Bryce-Davis), locked up because of her grief over the death of her child, not insane but delirious from untreated typhus. Dr. Blackwell (Will Liverman) keeps asking Nellie the same series of questions; early in the opera, her vocal slides make us doubt her sanity, but as the evening progresses, and her delivery grows more confident, we see how he has been gaslighting her from the beginning. Electronic effects and beats are skillfully used throughout to unmoor the narrative from rationality. During Day 1, the “madwomen” stage a subtle acoustic rebellion, interrupting a forced hymn-singing session with “Let my people go”—by Day 10, such agency is impossible. 

Raehann Bryce-Davis and Ms. Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Director Joanna Settle and set and lighting designer Andrew Lieberman created a sinister, claustrophobic environment: The set was a wide column with a hallway through its center, the orchestra arrayed on top of it, and the characters appearing and disappearing around its shadowy edges. Faustin Linyekula’s choreography helped situate the action in the realm of the disturbed; Ásta Hostetter and Avery Reed’s drab gingham dresses for the women added to their sense of hopeless confinement. Ms. Duffy’s pure soprano, trying in vain to cut through the confusion, was a vital contrast to Ms. Bryce-Davis’s opulent, anguished mezzo; Mr. Liverman gave Dr. Blackwell a subtle, predatory edge; his leaps from baritone into falsetto and the scenes in which he waltzed with Nellie “to soothe” her were especially creepy. As the Nurse/Matron, Lauren Pearlphysically embodied the institution’s sadism; the nine-voice women’s chorus and the 12-member orchestra shone under the leadership of conductor Daniela Candillari. 

Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” has a bewildering plot—a stew of political strife and a 25-year time gap on top of the usual operatic devices of false identity, jealousy, curses and revenge—but it boils down to the love of two fierce men for a long-lost child. Opera Philadelphia’s production, which was imported from the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Belgium and opened on Friday at the Academy of Music, unfortunately emphasized the opera’s chaos and macho elements instead of its heart. Gary McCann’s set, an arrangement of concrete pillars, a glass ceiling, and monumental sculptures, had a Fascist Art Deco look, shifting the period from the 14th century to the 1930s. Fernand Ruiz’s costumes tried to have it both ways, with the men sporting Renaissance-style cloaks over their 20th-century suits and the Doge’s soldiers clad in metal armor. Laurence Dale’s static direction, along with John Bishop’s colored lighting and the aimless revolutions of the set, created uninformative stage pictures rather than illuminating the story. 

Quinn Kelsey and Ana María Martínez PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

The singers worked hard to infuse the evening with Verdian feeling. Baritone Quinn Kelsey captured the ambivalence of the titular corsair-turned-Doge, displaying both power and lyric tenderness toward his newly discovered daughter, Maria (she is known as Amelia), and even an inclination toward peace-making. As his antagonist Jacopo Fiesco, Amelia’s grandfather, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn proved a potent match for him—bearing a grudge, but honorable in his way. The evening’s best scene was a duet in the final act, when the dying Boccanegra revealed Amelia’s identity to Fiesco, and the two old men clung to each other, suddenly finding their common humanity.

The rest of the characters felt like pawns in the game. As Maria/Amelia, Ana María Martínez’s soprano was loud and metallic, without warmth; Richard Trey Smagur’s beefy tenor stressed the aggressive tendencies of Gabriele Adorno, her lover and Boccanegra’s enemy. Baritone Benjamin Taylor brought subtlety to the villainous Paolo Albiani, who betrays and poisons Boccanegra. Corrado Rovaris’s conducting was lovingly textured rather than propulsive, and the final scene, which had Amelia, Fiesco and Adorno standing motionless as the dying Boccanegra was slowly towed offstage by the ghost of his long-dead lover (Amelia’s mother) felt interminable instead of cathartic. 

***

New York

“Doppelgänger,” which opened at the Park Avenue Armory last weekend, is a gripping work of site-specific theater. Director Claus Guth, working with tenor Jonas Kaufmann, staged Schubert’s “Schwanengesang” (“Swan Song”), a collection of the composer’s final lieder, as the last meditations of a wounded soldier dying in a World War I army hospital. Set designer Michael Levinetransformed the Armory’s vast drill hall into a multi-bed ward. The military patients and their six nurses, in uniforms by Constance Hoffman, became part of the story through movement—alternately organized and chaotic—directed by Sommer Ulrickson. Mathis Nitschke created interstitial music for Helmut Deutsch, the evening’s superlative pianist, as well as a soundscape of drones, crashes and explosions that unified the 90-minute performance. 

The production of ‘Doppelgänger’ at the Park Avenue Armory PHOTO: MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Over the course of 14 songs, Mr. Kaufmann sang and acted the soldier’s inner journey toward his impending death. In the bleak “Kriegers Ahnung” (“Warrior’s Foreboding”) he seemed solitary and invisible to the nurses; as the cycle progressed, and his character sang of love, desire, alienation, and the loss of hope, the other performers became expressions of his interior world—whether menacing him, admiring him, or carrying his bier in a funeral procession. Urs Schönebaum’s expressive lighting was a crucial part of the environment: At the conclusion of “Abschied” (“Farewell”), a seemingly jaunty song of departure, a bank of floodlights blazed out from the end wall, stopping the singer in his march to the exit. Mr. Kaufmann’s eloquent singing didn’t shy away from roughness when it was warranted; even his tight high notes conveyed a man in extremis, making the pure lyricism he brought to “Ständchen” (“Serenade”) all the more touching. With Mark Grey’s sensitive sound design, one forgot about the necessary amplification, and this march to the grave felt surprisingly, and harrowingly, intimate.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Boston Lyric Opera’s production, the result of a yearslong effort to reconsider Puccini’s classic in the wake of anti-Asian violence, is thoughtful but low on passion; in New York, recitals by Julia Bullock and Lise Davidsen included obscure songs and classic repertoire alike.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 19, 2023 at 5:46 pm ET

Karen Chia-Ling Ho, center 

PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

Boston

The stereotypes inherent in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a story built around the white imperialist male fantasy of the submissive Asian woman—have become increasingly problematic in recent years, leading several opera companies to invite all-Asian creative teams to rethink this canonic work. Following the spate of anti-Asian violence in 2021, Boston Lyric Opera convened a series of conversations, “The Butterfly Process,” to examine the piece and its ambivalent legacy; a new production of the opera, unveiled last week at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, is one result.

Directed by choreographer and activist Phil Chan, this “Butterfly” is set in the U.S. during World War II. Cio-Cio-San works as a singer in an underground nightclub in San Francisco’s Chinatown; her “wedding” to Pinkerton, a naval officer, is part of a nightly stunt at the club. Between Acts I and II, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Pinkerton goes off to war, and the pregnant Butterfly is sent to an incarceration camp (as BLO refers to it) in Arizona, sharing the fate of thousands of Japanese-Americans during that time.

This thoughtful effort, aided by some changes in the text, makes certain aspects of the story more palatable for contemporary audiences. Butterfly is an adult woman with agency, not a helpless 15-year-old being sold to the highest bidder. The lines questioning her about her age are directed to Pinkerton, who says he is 21. In the love duet at the end of Act 1, Butterfly puts on a coat rather than sheds her clothes. In the camp, she longs for Pinkerton’s return not out of hopeless love but because their son is dying of tuberculosis and she has no resources to care for him. There’s no suicide; the opera is framed as the recollections of the adult Butterfly in 1983 looking back on this traumatic period of her life.

The sets by Yu Shibagaki, costumes by Sara Ryung Clement, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew ably evoke the nightclub (Butterfly’s wedding attendants are leggy showgirls) and the camp with its makeshift wooden barracks and watchtower. Some of the photographs that depict Butterfly’s history are family pictures belonging to BLO’s artistic adviser and dramaturg Nina Yoshida Nelsen; three historical dramaturgs are also credited.

But making Butterfly’s relationship with Pinkerton more transactional than romantic coexists awkwardly with Puccini’s swoony music. The opera is tightly constructed as a weepie, and if Butterfly’s heart isn’t broken by love, the tragedy doesn’t really land.

Karen Chia-Ling Ho and Dominick Chenes

 PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

As Butterfly, Karen Chia-Ling Ho carefully walked the line between knowingness and feeling, but there was little sense of passionate abandon and her “Un bel di” was sturdy rather than soaring. One of the best moments in the evening was the “Flower Duet,” in which Butterfly and Suzuki (the imposing Alice Chung) decorated the camp with handmade paper flowers in anticipation of Pinkerton’s arrival; the relationship between the two women felt the most real in the opera. The men were properly unappealing: As Pinkerton, Dominick Chenes’s tenor seemed muted; Troy Cook was an efficient Sharpless, more a tool than a sympathizer with Butterfly, as is usual; Rodell Rosel was a sleazy Goro (here the owner of the nightclub). Dancer Cassie Wang, depicting Butterfly between Acts 2 and 3, performed some ambiguous choreography by Michael Sakamoto. The theater has no pit, so the orchestra, led by David Angus, seemed unusually loud and brassy.

***

New York

Julia Bullock’s recital in the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room on Sept. 11 was typically unconventional—she is far more likely to headline a piece like Michel van der Aa’s multidisciplinary opera “Upload” than to sing “La Traviata.” Here, she made a strong case for widening the definition of the art song to include the work of Nina Simone along with Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf. Every song and interpretive choice in the program was intentional, focused on building that larger structure. Ms. Bullock, who supplies her own translations of lyrics, is never just focused on making pretty sounds. Rather, her distinctive, velvety lower register, her crystalline text articulation, and her commitment to her material make her a magnetic performer.

That command held sway as she constructed musical arcs. Two quiet, folk-tinged songs by the obscure singer-songwriter Connie Converse segued seamlessly into a Kurt Weill group: his mournful “Lost in the Stars” followed by a sparky, rhythmically free spoken-and-sung version of “Denn wie man sich bettet,” and then an intense “Wie lange noch?” full of suppressed fury. In John Cage’s “She is Asleep,” no. 2, her wordless vocalise paired with John Arida’s damped piano made a sleeper’s inner world feel vital. In a selection of songs written by black Americans, some of them women, ably arranged by Jeremy Siskind, her complex portrayals persuasively rejected the narrative of the helpless female so prevalent in traditional art songs. Her stylings of Cora “Lovie” Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues,” which turned the betrayed woman’s lament on its head, and Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” a chilling depiction of stereotypes of black women, created characters as powerful as any written by Schubert.

***

Lise Davidsen got a bigger stage for her Sept. 14 recital—the Metropolitan Opera House. The young Norwegian soprano has made a splash at the Met, starting with her 2019 debut as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and followed by a trio of Strauss roles: Ariadne, Chrysothemis, and the Marschallin. Her spectacular instrument recalls Birgit Nilsson’s—producing a blazing, metallic sound with effortless power and total control, one seemingly able to carry out the back of the auditorium and across Central Park.

Recitals are a different beast from opera, however. While Ms. Davidsen’s voice still sounded glorious and house-filling, the Grieg and Sibelius songs on the first half of the program were pretty but generic. On the second half, a quartet of Schubert hits came off better, with Ms. Davidsen capturing the dramatic pacing and scene-painting of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Erlkönig” and the serenity of “An die Musik” and “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen”—in the last, she sang softly and still filled the space. The expansive operatic potential of a Strauss group also worked to her advantage, though “Befreit” could have been more intimate. James Baillieu was the sensitive pianist.

Opera arias were also sprinkled throughout. Ms. Davidsen will sing Leonora in Verdi’s “La forza del destino” at the Met next February, but her selections from “Un ballo in maschera” and “Otello” felt undercooked. She shone, however, in Lisa’s final aria from “Queen of Spades,” and in Wagner’s grand salute “Dich, teure Halle” from “Tannhauser,” summoning the spirit of Nilsson once again.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

In its first season under director Rob Ainsley, the upstate New York opera festival counted among its offerings a riveting rendition of Handel’s ‘Rinaldo’ and a vivid staging of ‘Candide.’

By 

Heidi Waleson

Aug. 15, 2023 at 5:49 pm ET

Korin Thomas-Smith, Keely Futterer and Anthony Roth Costanzo in ‘Rinaldo’ PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN

Cooperstown, N.Y.

Starting in the 1990s, the Glimmerglass Festival pioneered baroque opera in the U.S., staging numerous titles over many summers in its ideally sized 900-seat theater. This season, in a project originally planned for 2020 but upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, the company mounted a riveting production of Handel’s “Rinaldo” with the renowned countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, this year’s Artist-in-Residence, as its star. Director Louisa Proske’s concept places this tale of Crusaders and sorcery in a children’s hospital, where a boy recovering from a brain operation imagines his way out of the total powerlessness of childhood and illness by adopting the storybook role of knight and rescuer. 

Streamlined by some score cuts and aided by the design team—Matt Saunders(set), Amith Chandrashaker (lighting), Montana Blanco (costumes), Jorge Cousineau (projections)—the production morphed elegantly between hospital room and fantasy land while remaining grounded in the universe of a child’s imagination. A large central window became both a portal and a backdrop for animations of the imagined world. Crusaders burst through it and used medical supplies to outfit the boy/Rinaldo (Mr. Costanzo) with their red-crossed uniform. As the captured maiden Almirena (Jasmine Habersham) lamented her fate (here she was a critically ill patient sharing Rinaldo’s room), her dancer double underwent a brain scan, with its CT images flashed on the window. To rescue her, Rinaldo and the Crusaders transformed the boy’s hospital bed into a boat and sailed off, violently buffeted by the winds (the aria is Rinaldo’s “Venti, turbini, prestate”). The elaborate storybook costumes of the villains—the Saracen general Argante and the sorceress Armida—contrasted smartly with the modern technology of the hospital; a trio of leaping black-clad dancers, choreographed by Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson, intensified Armida’s witchiness. 

Mr. Costanzo’s distinctive, muscular sound was arresting in Rinaldo’s calls to battle, and softened effectively in laments such as “Cara sposa”; he was convincing throughout as a child. Keely Futterer was a thrilling whirlwind as Armida, ornamenting wildly and unafraid to take high notes into shriek territory. Korin Thomas-Smith (Argante) was announced as indisposed before the show. He got through his florid opening aria, “Sibillar,” with only a few wobbles in his imposing baritone, but after intermission he walked the role while his cover, Jason Zacher, capably sang from the side of the stage. Ms. Habersham was an affecting Almirena; Kyle Sanchez Tingzon displayed a powerful countertenor as Goffredo, the Crusader king, contrasting effectively with Nicholas Kelliher’s lighter countertenor as the Sorcerer. Conductor Emily Senturia’s stylish reading was much enhanced by the work of the continuo group and some excellent solo instrumentalists. 

Magdalena Kuźma and Duke Kim in ‘Romeo and Juliet’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN

The updating of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” by director Simon Godwin was less successful. Several arcades topped by parapets, rearranged to form the various settings, could have been from any period, except for the graffiti tags that appeared in the marketplace scene; the costumes—including outfits for a circus-themed masked ball, multicolored lamé overalls, and some sharp suits—were eye-catching rather than illuminating. (Dan Soule designed the sets, Loren Shaw the costumes, Robert Wierzel the lighting.) The directing was most successful in crowd scenes, like the killings of Mercutio and Tybalt. Intimate scenes were formulaic, and Juliet’s “Je veux vivre” was upstaged by Gertrude and some friends doing surreptitious shots from a flask. 

Duke Kim was a youthful, ardent Romeo. As Juliet, Magdalena Kuźma’s bright, flexible soprano felt too large for the theater, and she was better in the passionate intensity of the potion aria than in the tenderness and heartbreak of her romantic duets with Romeo. Joseph Colaneri’s conducting—other than the magical interlude before the balcony scene—also missed that expansive tenderness. Sergio Martinez displayed an imposing bass as Friar Laurence and Lisa Marie Rogali was a pert Stephano. 

Emilie Kealani (center) in ‘La Bohème’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN

E. Loren Meeker’s production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” stuck to the original period with simple but effective sets by Kevin Depinet and attractive costumes by Erik Teague. The Café Momus scene was especially colorful, thanks to some banners, awnings, and a trio of ruffled can-can dresses; the detailed directing made the horseplay scenes in the garret seem authentic. Tenor Joshua Blue was a charmingly shy Rodolfo and Teresa Perrotta a robust Mimi. Both have large, well-controlled instruments; their conclusion of the Act 3 quartet was especially moving. Darren Lekeith Drone (Marcello), Emilie Kealani (Musetta) and conductor Nader Abbassi made solid contributions.

The cast of ‘Candide’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN

This is the first season for Rob Ainsley, Glimmerglass’s new general and artistic director. But one of the shows was a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,”originally directed by its previous leader, Francesca Zambello, in 2015. This vivid staging, which has traveled extensively, was remounted this season by its choreographer, Eric Sean Fogel. The splendid underwear-clad dance ensemble that tied the show together was a tribute to his work, and to Ms. Zambello’s decade-long project of mounting classic musicals with appropriate casting and no amplification at Glimmerglass. 

“Candide” exists in multiple versions; this one, which runs a bit long and includes some unfamiliar lyrics, emphasizes the darkly satirical nature of the source material as expressed through Bernstein’s effervescent score. Brian Vu’s light tenor made for a poignant Candide, hanging on to his optimism through episodes of war, death, flogging, betrayal, and more. Katrina Galka’s brittle coloratura soprano was perfectly suited to Cunegonde, who blithely sells herself to survive; Meredith Arwady captured the Old Lady with her booming contralto and big personality; actor Bradley Dean ably did the honors as the narrator Pangloss/Voltaire. Big-voiced standouts in smaller roles included Jonathan Patton as the pessimist Martin, Jonathan Pierce Rhodes as Candide’s friend Cacambo, and Ms. Futterer as the slave trader Vanderdendur—her high E-flat in “Bon Voyage” brought back memories of her Armida the previous night. Mr. Colaneri was the ebullient conductor. 

Brian Vu and Katrina Gulka in ‘Candide’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN

The weekend’s finale continued another of Ms. Zambello’s initiatives: the commissioning of operas designed to be performed by children and teenagers along with a few of the company’s young artists. “The Rip Van Winkles,” with music by Ben Morris and libretto by Laura Fuentes, is a witty, hour-long modern take on the Washington Irving story, dealing with a rural town (not unlike Cooperstown) in which the adults have blocked cell service to protect their children from the evils of constant connection to the internet. 

Performed in the company theater, with an attractive set by James F. Rotondo III, directed by Brenna Corner, and conducted by Kamna Gupta with piano accompaniment, the piece deftly showcased the young performers in music of appropriate difficulty for each age group. The catchiest number of the evening came from the ensemble of grandparents: Performed by the youngest children, bent over walkers, their disco-inspired theme song urged the nervous parents to remember that “You have to live a little while you’re a kid.” The audience of enthusiastic adults and children was a testament to Glimmerglass’s efforts to be not just an artistic powerhouse, but a centerpiece of its upstate community. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

In this year’s festival, Monteverdi’s myth about lost lovers in the underworld takes the stage; Debussy’s Symbolist story finds orchestral triumph; Dvořák’s fairy tale takes a Freudian turn; and more.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Aug. 8, 2023 at 5:42 pm ET

Luke Harnish, Rolando Villazón, Lauren Snouffer, Luke Elmer and Le Bu PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN

Santa Fe, N.M.

This summer, the Santa Fe Opera presented Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” with a new orchestration by Nico Muhly. “Orfeo” (1607), one of the earliest operas, is typically performed with period instruments; Mr. Muhly’s resourceful version captured the tang and transparency of those instruments with the tools of a modern opera orchestra. His selection of sonorities—such as low winds and harp for continuo; a single violin for poignant moments; celesta and piano for color—always fit the moment, supported the vocal line, and never slipped into overblown Romanticism. I missed only the harsh rasp of the regal, the period organ that accompanies the character Caronte. As led by Harry Bicket, the company’s music director and an expert in early repertoire, “Orfeo” retained its 17th-century impulse in a new guise. 

As Orfeo, Rolando Villazón was less successful. The tenor’s voice has lowered and darkened in recent years, fitting the role’s baritone tessitura, but his timbre is harsh and barky. Orfeo’s music is supposed to enchant; we got histrionics instead. Lauren Snouffer had a lovely, floating sound as La Musica, who introduces the story, and Speranza, who escorts Orfeo to the portal of the Underworld; Paula Murrihy (La Messaggera) and Blake Denson (Plutone) were also standouts. 

The thoughtful production—directed by Yuval Sharon, with a visual environment by Alex Schweder and Matthew Johnson, and lighting by Yuki Nakase Link—had an ingenious solution to the living world/underworld transition. The shepherds’ chorus cavorted on and around a green half-globe. Then the globe gradually lifted, swaths of fabric unfurled beneath it, and Orfeo sang his plea to Caronte while suspended from a harness in the gloom. The gods seemed more powerful because they were invisible; the denizens of the very dark underworld had chic lighted headdresses (Carlos J Soto did the costumes).

Huw Montague Rendall and Samantha Hankey in ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN

In the production of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Netia Jones (director; scenic, costume and projection designer), the subtext involving the toxic clash of modernity and nature didn’t read clearly enough. This Symbolist story was set in what appeared to be a dark basement, reached by a pair of spiral staircases, with a large revolving terrarium that also served as a bed. In the first half of the opera, its grass was green; in the second, it was wilted and yellow. A stream ran along the front edge of the stage; the three principal characters, mystifyingly, had doubles who acted out their scenes upstage. Arkel, Golaud and Mélisande all received oxygen when they were ill or wounded; there were projections of computer code, scientific diagrams, and plumbing pipes; even the images of water and trees were gloomy. 

Musically, however, it was a triumph. Mr. Bicket brought marked clarity to the orchestra, reflecting the characters’ unspoken emotions through sonic detail rather than indulging in a misty, nonspecific wash of sound. Zachary Nelson was splendid as the tormented Golaud, his velvety baritone turning desperate as he tried unsuccessfully to find out the truth. As Mélisande, Samantha Hankey’s rich, bright mezzo made her more human than fey; Huw Montague Rendall was arresting in Pelléas’s awakening of feeling for her. Raymond Aceto was affecting as Arkel, the king with no power; as Geneviève, Susan Graham’s mezzo has lost luster, but she looked great in the watery green silk gown that seemed to symbolize the family’s last connection to the natural world. Treble Kai Edgar was a strong Yniold. 

Ailyn Pérez in ‘Rusalka’ 

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN

David Pountney’s production of Dvořák’s fairy tale “Rusalka” also required advance information for full comprehension. But even without that, it was theatrically clearer than “Pelléas.” Set in a Viennese psychiatric hospital, circa 1900, it explored water nymph Rusalka’s yearning for a human form and soul through a Freudian lens—the violent and confusing sexual transition from childhood to adulthood. The intriguing set (Leslie Travers) went from an orderly white room of closets and drawers to the Prince’s palace, in which glass display cases housed his other female conquests. For Act 3, when everything has fallen apart for both the Prince and Rusalka, the cases were empty and chaotically tilted. Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s Victorian costumes underlined the power of the adult women who control everything: The witch Ježibaba wore a corseted black gown, and a red riding habit, complete with tall boots and a riding crop, gave the Foreign Princess a dominatrix vibe.

The singers brought out the complexity of the characters beyond their fairy-tale identities. Ailyn Pérez was a passionate Rusalka, especially forceful in Act 3, as she asks the Prince why he betrayed her. Raehann Bryce-Davis brought a big sound and almost comical vanity to Ježibaba; Robert Watson made the Prince, for all his tenorial bluster, a weak man; and as Vodník, James Creswell—who had excellent diction—could only threaten vengeance on those who hurt his daughter, as he was trapped in a wheelchair. Mary Elizabeth Williams’s harsh timbre felt right for the imperious Foreign Princess. Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya captured the score’s jaunty folk-tinged sections along with its sweep and lyricism. 

Morris Robinson and chorus in ‘The Flying Dutchman’ 

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN

For the most part, the company orchestra sounded much more polished this season than it has in recent years, with the exception of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.” Conducted by Thomas Guggeis, it was raucously loud throughout, with no expressive subtleties. The principal singers, all substantial Wagnerians boasting excellent range, breath control and volume, seemed to be trying to match the orchestra for sheer decibel level. As the Dutchman, Nicholas Brownlee sounded thrillingly savage as he launched his opening aria, “Die Frist ist um,” but it quickly became assaultive rather than exciting. Morris Robinson (Daland), Elza van den Heever (Senta) and Chad Shelton (Erik) were similarly afflicted. Only Bille Bruley (the Steersman) escaped that fate—his ballad is brief. “Dutchman” needs more than a little bel canto spirit; there was none to be had here.

David Alden’s ugly, updated production matched the hard-edge musicianship. Paul Steinberg’s set appeared to be built of shipping containers; the women’s chorus in the Spinning Song were working in some sort of industrial plant, dressed in protective gear (Constance Hoffman did the costumes) and moving like automatons. Other chorus scenes were chaotic in addition to being earsplitting, with sailors rolling around the stage. The Act 3 party, in which the sailors and the women try to awaken the Dutchman’s crew, was a bacchanal; strangely, everyone was facing away from the Dutchman’s barely visible ship (Maxine Braham was credited with choreography). Direction of character scenes was minimal to nonexistent. The most entertaining moments involved some zombies who periodically carted the Dutchman’s treasure on and off the stage. 

Leah Hawkins in ‘Tosca’

 PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN

Puccini’s “Tosca” was also hard to take. Designer Ashley Martin-Davis’s De Chirico-inspired sets, sensitively lighted by Allen Hahn, were fine, but his 1930s diva costumes did not flatter Leah Hawkins in the title role, and Keith Warner’s directing made Tosca a vain egotist without vulnerability and Scarpia (Reginald Smith Jr.) a leering, eye-rolling sex maniac. Joshua Guerrero’s Cavaradossi was comparatively unobjectionable; his “E lucevan le stelle” was the evening’s sole musical high point. John Fiore’s conducting—ploddingly slow in Act 1, slightly more buoyant in Acts 2 and 3—reflected the production’s overall confusion. The season runs through Aug. 26.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

At Lincoln Center, Teatro Nuovo presents two bel canto works—one, by Donizetti, featuring Christian martyrs and the other, by Federico and Luigi Ricci, a fairy godmother; upstate, a Bard SummerScape production of Camille Saint-Saëns’s historical drama captures a king’s tyranny.

By 

Heidi Waleson

July 24, 2023 at 5:52 pm ET

Ricardo José Rivera and Chelsea Lehnea

 PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO/TEATRO NUOVO

New York

There’s little opera to be had in New York City during the summer these days, so all the more reason to be grateful for Will Crutchfield’s enterprising Teatro Nuovo, which specializes in historically informed performances of bel canto works. This season brought two rarities: “Poliuto,” a tragedy by Gaetano Donizetti, and “Crispino e la Comare,” a comic romp by the now-forgotten brother duo Federico and Luigi Ricci, performed at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater last week. Both were semi-staged, with simple projections of historical set drawings for atmosphere, and the capable chorus lined up for its moments.

“Poliuto,” written in 1838 but not performed until 1848 due to censorship issues, is a terrific piece, tightly plotted in its vigorous sequence of arias, duets and ensembles. Set in Armenia in 259, Salvatore Cammarano’s libretto traces the story of the titular Roman officer and secret Christian convert (St. Polyeuktos); his wife, Paolina; and the Roman proconsul Severo, Paolina’s former beloved, whom she believed dead but who has reappeared. The action revolves around episodes of jealousy being trumped by faith, and Poliuto ultimately embraces martyrdom, joined by Paolina.

The score has the lilting rhythms and coloratura lyricism of Donizetti’s “Lucia” but also prefigures the dramatic heft of early Verdi operas. The period-instrument orchestra, positioned at audience level rather than in a pit, was authoritatively led by Jakob Lehmann—who, as was the period practice, stood in front of the ensemble and occasionally picked up his violin. Apart from some sour bassoon passages at the very beginning, the orchestra played with verve and flexibility, and Maryse Legault, the principal clarinetist, shone in a stunning solo moment that introduced the soprano.

Santiago Ballerini

 PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO/TEATRO NUOVO

The well-coached principal singers brought legato elegance and dramatic intensity to their roles. Tenor Santiago Ballerini was a splendid Poliuto, stylishly balancing his furious outbursts with his intimations of the divine, especially in his Act 2 aria. As Paolina, Chelsea Lehnea displayed a powerful, slightly wiry-sounding soprano, with pinpoint coloratura and impressive control of dynamics. Paolina was a Maria Callas role, and Ms. Lehnea appeared at times to be excessively channeling that diva’s over-the-top fervor. As Severo, Ricardo José Rivera’s stentorian baritone worked best when he was called upon to act the heavy as opposed to the disappointed lover. Hans Tashjian’s bass was oddly light for the villain, Callistene, the High Priest of Jupiter.

Comedy in opera is always harder than tragedy, and “Crispino” (1850)—about an impoverished cobbler who is turned into a doctor by a fairy godmother (La Comare)—is a series of set-piece jokes, many of them too long, rather than an integrated evening. It was vigorously led from the keyboard by Jonathan Brandani, and starred bass-baritone Mattia Venni as a hilarious Crispino, who brilliantly executed the rapid Italian patter and the subtle physical comedy of the role. As Crispino’s wife, the flirtatious Annetta, Teresa Castillo’s high-flying coloratura didn’t have quite enough variety for the length of her role—she got the biggest solo moments, including the final rondo. The potent mezzo Liz Culpepper(La Comare) and the bright tenor Toby Bradford (Contino del Fiore) made fine contributions; bass Vincent Graña (Mirabolano, a rival doctor) paired up with Mr. Venni for an exchange of patter insults that was the highlight of the evening.

***

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.

Bard’s SummerScape festival also specializes in obscure operas, and this year’s offering, “Henri VIII” by Camille Saint-Saëns, which opened on Friday, is a find. Written for the Paris Opera in 1883, it is a fascinating dissection of how a tyrant gets his way. The libretto by Léonce Détroyat and Paul-Armand Silvestre presents a fictionalized account of Henri’s divorce from Catherine d’Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn that is deliberately unromantic, and director Jean-Romain Vesperini and conductor Leon Botstein deftly traced its psychological manipulations in this acute staging. Through a series of lengthy, conversational scenes—the performance ran four hours with one 30-minute intermission—we follow the steps of each confrontation to its logical outcome. Other characters may think they have the upper hand, but Henri always wins.

Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” written for the Paris Opera 16 years earlier, is similarly grounded in royal struggles over power and religion. But it foregrounds love and flawed human relationships, while “Henri VIII” has a narrower focus. Invented elements in the opera include a secret letter proving a pre-existing romance between Anne and Don Gómez de Feria, the Spanish ambassador to England, as well as two dramatic encounters between Catherine and Anne, but their purpose is to demonstrate who’s up and who’s down.

MORE OPERA REVIEWS

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Catherine, sensitively sung by soprano Amanda Woodbury, had two poignant arias—a plea to the synod that is to decide whether Henri may divorce her, and a lament for her Spanish homeland as she nears death—which made her the one marginally sympathetic figure in the piece. Bass-baritone Alfred Walker brought a gravelly weight and intensity to Henri, making it clear that the story is all about him. Mezzo Lindsay Ammann’s occasionally harsh upper register and arresting contralto extension proved highly effective for Anne, whose ambition outweighs all other considerations. Josh Lovell’s pure tenor gave Don Gómez a veneer of innocence, and the large chorus, prepared by James Bagwell, was splendid in the synod scene of Act 3, switching from a hymnlike solemnity to a boisterous freedom anthem, backing Henri as he rids himself of his wife and the dominance of Rome in a single stroke.

Tudor costumes by Alain Blanchot grounded the production in its historical era; scenic designer Bruno de Lavenère and lighting designer Christophe Chaupinsuggested a more ambiguous and shadowy world using metallic scrims, video projections of architectural elements, and a tilted platform. One high point was the transition into the synod scene: As the introductory music unfolded, light snaked along the stone tracery of a giant rose window, as though building the setting on the spot, an apt metaphor for the opera’s theme of single-handed domination.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

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At Lincoln Center, Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s adaptation of the sci-fi novel about a teenager in a crumbling world turns an arresting book into a tedious cross between a song cycle and a harangue.

By 

Heidi Waleson

July 19, 2023 at 4:58 pm ET

Marie Tattie Aqeel and the company of ‘Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower’ PHOTO: ERIN PATRICE O’BRIEN

New York

Under the leadership of Shanta Thake since 2021, Lincoln Center has taken a radical turn away from classical programming in a bid to attract new audiences. This year, its two-month “Summer for the City” lineup includes hip-hop, Korean indie rock, and traditional Cuban dance in both indoor and outdoor venues; much of the programming is free or choose-what-you-pay. The lone remnant of summers past is the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, in its final season under that name with its longtime music director Louis Langrée. Next year, the ensemble will have a new leader, Jonathon Heyward, and an identity to be determined.

On July 13 in David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center presented the first of three performances of “Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” dubbed an opera by its creators Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon. Running two hours and 15 minutes without intermission, this sprawling, minimally staged event was a cross between a song cycle and a harangue, riffing on themes and plot points from Butler’s celebrated 1993 Afrofuturist novel. Audience members unfamiliar with the book may well have been confused about the story, because the show’s main character was Toshi Reagon—guitar in hand, positioned on a raised platform at the center of the stage, flanked by vocalists Helga Davis and Shelley Nicole—who acted as narrator, leader, backup singer and haranguer-in-chief.

Shelley Nicole, Toshi Reagon and Helga Davis

PHOTO: LAWRENCE SUMULONG

Butler’s arresting book, set in California in 2024, unfolds in a dystopian world. Climate change has led to privation, rampant violence, and an autocratic government that is in league with corporate interests. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina and her family live in Robledo, a barricaded suburb of Los Angeles. Her Baptist preacher father urges faith and patience, but Lauren, who feels the stirrings of a new religious conviction, insists that the people need to learn to live off the land and prepare to flee. When an attack on the town leaves most of the residents dead, Lauren and two other survivors join the stream of refugees heading north; they dodge threats and gradually assemble a new community around them. One of their number, Bankole, brings them to land he owns in Northern California. They establish a commune, Acorn, and Lauren develops the tenets of her religion, which she calls Earthseed, whose principal mantra is “God is change.”

The opera invoked Butler’s ideas without capturing any of their nuance or drama. Part I, which takes place in Robledo, was a string of songs that set up the disagreement between Lauren (Marie Tatti Aqeel) and her father (Jared Wayne Gladly). Lyrics were not always intelligible, and the amplified volume, aided by a five-member instrumental ensemble that lurked upstage in the darkness, was high, but the tunes were catchy, and the gospel-infused numbers for the congregation (featuring Josette Newsam as a pink-hatted church lady) were deliberately different from Lauren’s independent pop stylings and the mild rap of her rebellious brother Keith (Isaiah Stanley). The dramaturgy, however, was limited. Nothing much happened; it was not entirely clear what role each of the 11 actors was playing; and the direction by Signe Harriday and Eric Ting had the performers mill indiscriminately around a few curved benches and make the occasional foray into the theater aisles.

The company of ‘Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower’

 PHOTO: LAWRENCE SUMULONG

After about an hour of this, Ms. Reagon broke in with a speech, citing connections between Butler’s 30-year-old predictions and actual present-day woes, including climate change, police brutality, gentrification and the dominance of Amazon, for starters. She then embarked on a strophic blues tune with the refrain, “Don’t let your baby go to Olivar,” which pounded these themes for about 15 minutes, with the audience invited to join in on the chorus. (In the novel, Olivar is a town that has been taken over by a corporation and is luring frightened Californians into slavery with promises of jobs and security. Only readers of the book would know this, however.)

MORE OPERA REVIEWS

• ‘Treemonisha,’ ‘Susannah’ and ‘Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra’ Reviews: Fatal Love and Outcasts’ AriasJune 27, 2023
• ‘Dido and Aeneas’ Review: Roman Tragedy in BarcelonaJune 20, 2023
• ‘Die Zauberflöte’ Review: The Met Humanizes Mozart’s FantasyMay 22, 2023
• ‘Don Giovanni’ Review: Ivo van Hove’s Grim Mozart at the MetMay 8, 2023

Part 2 began with the attack on Robledo. There were loud noises in the darkness, people fell to the ground, and a semicircular white cloth that had been hanging above the stage fell—that was the town’s wall. Ms. Aqeel sang the most affecting number of the evening—a wailed lament for Lauren’s lost father, adding more elaborate ornamentation with each new verse. With most of the performers playing different (though still unclear) roles, the journey north had them wandering around in the darkness with flashlights (Christopher Kuhldesigned the lighting, Arnulfo Maldonado the set, Dede M. Ayite the costumes). Songs blended together and the plot, even with a bit of narration dropped in from Ms. Reagon, had even less clarity than in the first half. The conclusion came out of nowhere, and a large community chorus dashed onstage from the audience to sing a final tune referring to Lauren’s mantra, “God is Change,” and then followed it up with a song called “Sower.”

The packed house (albeit with some defectors over the course of the evening) gave “Parable” a standing ovation; the show felt like a communal exhortation, with Ms. Reagon whipping up the crowd with simplistic tropes. It certainly attracted a young, diverse audience, one that probably won’t be clamoring for tickets when Mr. Langrée conducts Mozart’s Mass in C minor on July 25 and 26. If that is Lincoln Center’s main goal, “Parable” was a success. As an artistic offering, commensurate with the mission of a nonprofit presenter, it fell short.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis reworks Scott Joplin’s creation and presents Carlisle Floyd’s classic about a community’s outsiders, while Haymarket’s production of Johann Adolph Hasse’s tragedy preserves its gender-bent precedent.

By 

Heidi Waleson

June 27, 2023 6:25 pm ET

Brandie Inez Sutton and the chorus of ‘Treemonisha’ 

PHOTO: ERIC WOOLSEY

Webster Groves, Mo.

Current interest in historical works by black composers has led to numerous contemporary performances. This spring brought two new versions of Scott Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha,” offering new context and orchestrations (the originals did not survive) for the piece, which was never performed in the composer’s lifetime. One, with additions by composer Damien Sneed and librettist Karen Chilton, concluded its run at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on Saturday.

With a new prologue and epilogue, OTSL’s production frames “Treemonisha” as Joplin’s personal story—a tribute to his young second wife, Freddie Alexander, who died of pneumonia 10 weeks after their marriage. In the new opening scenes, Joplin celebrates finishing his opera, which he hopes will establish his classical bona fides (“No more boarding houses and saloons”), as the languishing Freddie encourages him and dies. (Some creative license is taken: Freddie died in 1904; “Treemonisha” was completed in 1910.) Joplin’s grief then transports them to the opera proper, set in a Reconstruction-era rural black community, where Freddie and Joplin become Treemonisha and her close friend Remus.

The original opera’s slim plot involves conjurers trying to sell “bags of luck” to the credulous people. When Treemonisha, the only educated person in the community, stands up to them and decries superstition, they kidnap her. Remus, dressed as a scarecrow, frightens the conjurers and rescues her, whereupon the community acclaims her as their leader. The new epilogue segues to Joplin again at the piano. Ill and distraught because his classical compositions have not won him fame, he is visited by the apparition of Freddie/Treemonisha, who tells him that he is ahead of his time.

The framing sequences and Mr. Sneed’s orchestration freighted what is basically a charming period piece with a message about black aspiration that it was ill equipped to bear. The overlong prelude was full of pronouncements—“A prescient message / for the ages”—rather than human interaction, and Mr. Sneed’s music, trying to dovetail with Joplin’s, was pallid, catching fire only when it dropped in some actual Joplin tunes. His orchestration of “Treemonisha” proper was over-egged and saggy, blunting the snap and syncopations of the score. (George Manahan conducted.) Joplin may have wanted to write a grand opera, but “Treemonisha” is more of an operetta with catchy songs and brief plot segments interspersed with rousing ensemble numbers, like the ring dance “We’re Goin’ Around.”

Brandie Inez Sutton brought a slightly edgy but competent soprano to the role of Freddie/Treemonisha. Camron Gray, stepping in for an indisposed colleague as Joplin/Remus, displayed an attractive, soft-grained tenor; he was persuasive in “Wrong is Never Right,” Remus’s lecture to the conjurers, who are forgiven at Treemonisha’s insistence. Olivia Johnson, also a step-in, delivered with aplomb the aria in which Treemonisha’s mother recounts her daughter’s origins, and Markel Reed made Parson Alltalk’s call-and-response sermon a high point.

The production, with sets by Marsha Ginsberg and costumes by Dede Ayite, also tried for a modern vibe, with the realism of Joplin’s parlor and two simple cabins juxtaposed with Afrofuturist-inspired costumes for the conjurers and woodland denizens. Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s directing was rudimentary; Maleek Washington’s choreography had more bounce and verve. 

Janai Brugger and Frederick Ballentine

 PHOTO: ERIC WOOLSEY

Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah” (1955), an established American classic, got an excellent, well-cast production at OTSL, sensitively directed by noted soprano Patricia Racette. Andrew Boyce’s handsome set was built around a raked central section with church windows that occasionally glowed from below, indicating the tyranny of the church in this isolated Appalachian town; Eric Southern did the lighting. Kaye Voyce’s costumes updated the time to the present—Susannah’s short red dress at the square dance (here a line dance, choreographed by Seán Curran) drew the disapproval of the Elders’ wives—and Greg Emetaz’s projections supplied lovely backdrops of mountains, forest, and the blanket of stars for “Ain’t it a pretty night?”

Casting black singers as Susannah (Janai Brugger) and her brother, Sam (Frederick Ballentine), also subtly underscored their outsider status in the community. With her vibrant soprano, Ms. Brugger traced Susannah’s journey from an optimistic, high-spirited young girl to a woman beaten down by the cruelty of others. “The trees on the mountain,” her folk-inspired lament, was especially heart-rending. Mr. Ballentine brought out Sam’s sympathetic side in “It must make the good Lord sad” but also his dangerous qualities. William Guanbo Su, a powerful bass, captured the duality and vanity of the preacher Olin Blitch. Elissa Pfaender excelled as Mrs. McLean, Susannah’s chief tormentor, and Christian Sanders was a gawky, effective Little Bat. Gemma New was the spirited conductor. 

Chicago

Haymarket Opera specializes in 17th- and 18th-century works, produced in historically informed style. Last weekend, it offered Johann Adolph Hasse’s “Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra” (1725) in its elegant and appropriately sized new home, the 160-seat Jarvis Opera Hall at DePaul University. In this two-character serenata, originally intended for concert rather than staged performance, Marc Antony and Cleopatra consider their futures after their defeat by Octavian at the Battle of Actium. In a series of paired arias, recitatives and two duets, the lovers, led by Cleopatra, eventually realize that their only honorable course is suicide. 

An image of ‘Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra’ at Haymarket Opera

 PHOTO: ELLIOT MANDEL

The first performers of the piece were legends: the castrato Farinelli as Cleopatra and the contralto Vittoria Tesi Tramontini as Antony. Haymarket kept the gender-reversed casting, with countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim as Cleopatra and contralto Lauren Decker as Antony, and created a full staging.

Theatrically, the show worked well. Wendy Waszut-Barrett’s mistily painted baroque-style sets evoked an Egypt as seen through 18th-century eyes, and Brian Schneider’s lighting gradually darkened as Marc Antony and Cleopatra accepted their fate. Mr. Kim, costumed by Stephanie Cluggish in a stunning gold-patterned dress, with wig and makeup by Megan Pirtle, looked every inch a queen. Chase Hopkins, the director, wisely had the performers interact naturalistically, rather than with stylized 18th-century gestures, and the portrait of their relationship deepened through the evening. Three nonsinging supernumeraries—two ladies-in-waiting, who wielded peacock fans and prepared poison for all at the end, plus a Roman soldier—also enriched the stage picture.

Musically, matters were less secure. Da capo arias require variety in their repeats to keep them interesting. Mr. Kim, ornamenting his speedy lines with abandon as the fierce, determined Cleopatra, was more skilled at this, even if his voice was steely at times. Ms. Decker found less to play with in her more legato, lover’s role, and her imposing contralto needed more shaping. The 12-member orchestra of strings and continuo, led by Craig Trompeter, the company’s founder and artistic director, could have pushed them toward more varied expression.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Henry Purcell’s moving Baroque opera features William Christie with Les Arts Florissants in a production at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, directed and choreographed by Blanca Li, that is both stylish and sometimes confusing.

By Heidi Waleson

June 20, 2023 5:13 pm ET

Ana Vieira Leite, Kate Lindsey and Renato Dolcini, with a dancer in the foreground

PHOTO: PABLO LORENTE

Barcelona

Baroque opera productions headlined by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have stopped traveling to New York now that BAM and Lincoln Center are no longer bringing over these kinds of elaborate classical-music offerings from Europe, so I was glad to have the opportunity to catch Les Arts’ typically stylish staging of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu on Saturday. Mr. Christie teamed up with director and choreographer Blanca Li, plus six dancers from her company, and visual artist Evi Keller, whose work is built around “Matière-Lumière,” a fusion of matter and light. The result read like an art installation animated by music and dance, intriguing if sometimes confusing. 

The small instrumental ensemble, with Mr. Christie leading from the harpsichord, occupied one side of the stage. Ms. Keller’s abstract décor was a trio of glowing, textured metallic drops; everything was sepulchrally lighted by Pascal Laajili. “Dido” is short, so the evening got a prelude: Purcell’s ode “Celestial Music Did the Gods Inspire,” its solos and choruses eloquently sung by a nine-member vocal ensemble and enacted by the alternately sinuous and acrobatic dancers. The work, which describes the power of music while invoking figures of antiquity and mythology such as Virgil and Orpheus, is a more cheerful piece than “Dido.” It managed to make its point, despite the shadowy lighting and Laurent Mercier’s all-black costumes, which made the singers disappear into the gloom.

In Nahum Tate’s “Dido and Aeneas” libretto, based on an episode from Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Dido’s love story is brief. Aeneas, the Trojan hero, arrives in Carthage; he and the queen fall in love and have a passionate one-night stand; the gods, embodied by the malevolent Sorceress, insist he depart to found Rome; Dido, betrayed, kills herself.

Here, the three principal characters in “Dido” were part of the décor: looming statues, perhaps some remnants of antiquity. They stood on tall, rolling pedestals, so tightly wrapped in metallic foil that matched the backdrops that they could only move their arms, shoulders and heads. When they were pushed downstage to sing, their wrappings glowed. Movement was left to the chorus and the dancers, who were on stage almost continuously.

As a result, one focused intently on the vocal qualities of the singers, especially mezzo Kate Lindsey, a profoundly expressive Dido. In her first aria, “Ah! Belinda, I am pressed with torment,” every anguished line had a different vocal color. Her ferocity as she commanded Aeneas, “Away, away,” seemed to explode from her body, and in her final lament, her soft singing of the repeated line “Remember me” conveyed a woman dissolving in grief. 

Mr. Dolcini and dancers

PHOTO: PABLO LORENTE

Ana Vieira Leite brought a gentle supportiveness to Belinda, Dido’s confidante. Bass Renato Dolcini made a regal Aeneas who managed to make his regret at deserting Dido persuasive. But the choice to have him double as the Sorceress was questionable. With just a bit less light to indicate that he was now someone else, the switch was confusing, and he didn’t capture the Sorceress’s vocal harshness and cackle. By contrast, the ensemble singers Maud Gnidzaz and Virginie Thomashad all the necessary spite and gleeful viciousness as the two Witches; Jacob Lawrence also shone as a jaunty Mariner. 

Along with the ensemble singers, the dancers flowed around the pedestals, sometimes literally evoking the emotions of the characters; at others, forming a kind of moving classical frieze, albeit in contemporary black costumes, which they changed depending on the scene. At the end of Act 1, the rejoicing dance as Dido and Aeneas got together had explicit choreography for couples in bathing suits. The more abstract movement sometimes came across as visual filler—intriguing to look at, but not indicative of anything other than looming tragedy. Some of the most striking sections had the dancers sliding prone across the floor, which was wet. The best use of this technique was in the funeral chorus at the end, as the dancers twined their bodies together to make a boat and rowed somberly across the stage, as if crossing the Styx. 

In contrast to the visual gloom of the staging, Mr. Christie and his eight players were vivacious. Felix Knecht, the excellent continuo cellist, kept the pulse with verve; the flute and oboe players, Sébastien Marq and Pier Luigi Fabretti, brought a piquant airiness to the score. At times, the different genres in the show were at odds: When the Sorceress called up demons from the underworld, the dancers, writhing in diaphanous tulle skirts, were all in, while the ensemble, singing their echoing curse, “In a deep vaulted cell,” were not nearly creepy enough. But every time Ms. Lindsey sang, even though she was almost entirely motionless, the dancers seemed irrelevant.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Simon McBurney’s production of “The Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera is an unusually nuanced yet still playful rendition of the fairy tale.

By Heidi Waleson

May 22, 2023 6:51 pm ET

Lawrence Brownlee and Erin Morley

 PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

New York

Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”) is often staged as a fun fairy tale, playing to its magical and ritual elements; the Metropolitan Opera’s colorful Julie Taymor production is a prime example. Director Simon McBurney’s interpretation, which had its Met premiere on Friday, takes a different approach. Devised in collaboration with Complicité, Mr. McBurney’s London-based theater company, the production—first presented in Amsterdam in 2012—strips away the fantasy while retaining a sense of playfulness. It creates an onstage world that includes the audience by inviting it behind the scenes and offers a nuanced, human perspective on characters who can often come across as one-dimensional. 

There’s a lot going on, and Mr. McBurney makes us work and pay attention to sort out what is happening. The house lights are still up when the overture begins; there’s almost no color in the sets and costumes. The orchestra pit is raised so that the musicians are visible and involved in the action, while a walkway between the pit and the audience allows characters to enter from the house. We see the theater effects as they are being made: On one side of the proscenium, Blake Habermann, a visual artist, chalks and erases simple figures and words that are projected on scrims; on the other, Ruth Sullivan, a Foley artist, creates amplified sound effects such as rain, thunder and clinking bottles. Twelve black-clad actors supplement the singing cast. 

All this activity is purposeful: It allows the audience to share the disorientation of Tamino, Pamina and Papageno as they wander through a strange environment, fearful and not knowing whom to trust. The central element of Michael Levine’s industrial set is a large platform that hangs by four wires from girders. It moves up and down, tilts, and swings precariously, forcing the performers, who may be on it or under it, to fight for balance amid almost perpetual instability and looming threat. Jean Kalman’s lighting emphasizes shadows while Nicky Gillibrand’s monochromatic costumes, such as the severe business suits for Sarastro and his followers, provide no reassurance. 

Thomas Oliemans (center)

 PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

The production visually unifies the disparate scenes of this strange journey; still, the overall effect is theatrical and spirited rather than grim. Actors shake pieces of paper to represent Papageno’s birds; flutist Seth Morris climbs out of the orchestra to play Tamino’s solo tune, making animals dance via Mr. Habermann’s live drawings and Finn Ross’s projections. Brief comic bits are tossed off: The fleeing Pamina and Papageno, relieved at being rescued from Monostatos by the glockenspiel solo, try frantically to shush the trumpet player who stands up to play Sarastro’s entrance music. Amid such intimate, homemade moments, a coup de théâtre has more force: For the trial by water, Tamino and Pamina are suddenly suspended, swimming, in midair. 

Nathalie Stutzmann’s crisp, authoritative conducting built a steady dramatic arc while giving the excellent singers expressive freedom to create personalities. Lawrence Brownlee’s tenor sounded slightly harsh in Tamino’s rhapsodic aria about Pamina’s portrait, but his forceful delivery ably demonstrated the character’s confusion and resolve. In his most striking moment, he stood before Sarastro’s temple (a giant projection of a row of books) with the flute in one hand and a gun in the other, asking in despair if Pamina “has been sacrificed already.” Erin Morley’s exquisitely pure soprano bloomed in Pamina’s arias and ensembles. Papageno, the comedian, invariably has the most activity of the principals, and Thomas Oliemans, dressed in tattered outdoor gear and toting a stepladder, carried it all off with gusto, aided by a warm, appealing baritone. He also wandered into the audience in search of Papagena, followed by Mr. Habermann’s video camera. 

Kathryn Lewek and Ms. Morley

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

The opera’s two principal antagonists had more depth than usual in this staging. Kathryn Lewek’s Queen of the Night was old and weak—hobbling with a cane or slumped in a wheelchair—but she deployed her coloratura as if it were her only remaining weapon, while bass Stephen Milling, an imposing presence in shoulder-length silver wig, made a complex, not very comforting Sarastro. Ashley Emersonwas a lusty Papagena; Brenton Ryan a conniving Monostatos, rather like the office sneak. Alexandria Shiner, Olivia Voteand Tamara Mumford played the Three Ladies as enthusiastic soldiers/seducers; Harold Wilson was an officious Speaker; Richard Bernstein and Errin Duane Brooks doubled effectively as the Priests and the Armed Men. The Three Boys—Deven Agge, Julian Knopf and Luka Zylik—came across as a weird combination of ancient and unborn. The Met Chorus was impressive as Sarastro’s devoted entourage. 

Everything works out in the end, and the welcoming ethos of the production is pervasive. For the finale, Sarastro and the Queen, atypically, were reconciled, and the whole cast crowded the stage apron, as if to join the orchestra and the audience. The Metropolitan is an enormous theater, and the yawning expanse of the pit usually feels like a barrier moat. On Friday, the house felt intimate, as though we were part of the show, and the new, better world that is supposedly born at the end. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The director makes his Metropolitan Opera debut with a bleak, powerful production of the 18th-century classic.

By Heidi Waleson

May 8, 2023 6:03 pm ET

Peter Mattei and Adam Plachetka

 PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

New York

This final month of the Metropolitan Opera season features two Mozart production premieres with some high-profile debuts. On Friday, director Ivo van Hove and conductor Nathalie Stutzmann bowed with the first one, a blistering “Don Giovanni.” Directors accustomed to the theater world are often stymied by the demands of opera, but Mr. Van Hove, best known in New York for Broadway productions including the recent dark, video-heavy “West Side Story,” reveled in them, and Ms. Stutzmann, a singer before she turned to conducting (she is currently the music director of the Atlanta Symphony), paced the evening for maximum dramatic effect. (She will also conduct the new “Die Zauberflöte,” directed by Simon McBurney, which opens on May 19.)

Mr. Van Hove’s penchant for grimness was in force. Set and lighting designer Jan Versweyveld built a colorless, unadorned world, the kind of place where Don Giovanni, an amoral user of others, wields his power with impunity. The multilevel set, constructed as if from architectural blocks, was all flat walls around arched windows and simple staircases; the central structure (of three) rotated so slowly between scenes that the slight change in perspective seemed to happen by magic. With its lack of specificity, the set easily served as all of the opera’s many locations, putting the focus on the characters. Modern costumes in neutral colors by An D’Huys—sharp suits for Don Giovanni, Leporello and Don Ottavio; a long black slip dress for Donna Anna; a severe, knee-length gray number for Donna Elvira—also kept the attention on action and subtext.

To that end, Mr. Van Hove’s detailed, intentional directing made the characters and their motivations and interactions leap to the fore. “Don Giovanni” can feel like a string of unconnected solo turns. Here, they formed a narrative—a group of people struggling in different, sometimes conflicting, ways against evil that hides beneath privilege and charm. At the center was Peter Mattei, a handsome, poisonous Don Giovanni, vocally resplendent and offhandedly violent, who shoots the unarmed Commendatore dead and nuzzles Zerlina’s neck with equal, careless suavity. Each scene became another adventure in the effort to stop him, fruitless until fate came calling at the end.

Alexander Tsymbalyuk (on floor), Federica Lombardi and Ben Bliss PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

Arias were more than just familiar tunes, and the effect of each on its intended recipient was explicit without upstaging the singer. There was the increasing disgust and pain of Donna Elvira (Ana María Martínez) as she was subjected to the catalog of Don Giovanni’s conquests, performed matter-of-factly by Leporello (Adam Plachetka) with a little black book for documentation. Don Ottavio (Ben Bliss), often a wimpy background figure, became a real person, straightening his fashionably skinny tie and trying to take control of the situation in his “Il mio tesoro” and then sulking as Donna Anna (Federica Lombardi) asserted herself and put off their wedding in “Non mi dir.” For Don Giovanni’s party at the end of Act 1, the onstage musicians and dancers stared at the floor, creating a creepy see-nothing atmosphere that allowed the Don to pursue and assault Zerlina (Ying Fang). (Sara Erde was the choreographer.) Quite a few characters brandished guns at strategic moments. 

Mr. Van Hove’s take on the supernatural conclusion was one of the best solutions I’ve seen to this staging challenge. There’s no statue: The murdered Commendatore (the scarily potent Alexander Tsymbalyuk), who has already appeared in the cemetery, arrives for dinner in his blood-stained shirt; the Don recoils as if electrocuted whenever the Commendatore touches him. The set pieces revolve to show blank walls, and as Giovanni resists his fate video projections (by Christopher Ash) appear. What at first look like abstract squiggles are naked bodies writhing in hell. With the Don dispatched, the final scene in which the remaining characters recite the moral of the tale—the libertine is punished—tops it. The blank walls revolve away to show the windows and staircases we saw earlier, but they are now festooned with curtains and colorful flower boxes and bathed in a warm, golden light. It is a real street, livable now that the dark energy of Don Giovanni is gone. 

A scene from ‘Don Giovanni’ 

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

The singers exuded vocal authority that matched Mr. Van Hove’s directing. Mr. Mattei’s ability to switch from a brutal castigation of Leporello to a honey-tinged serenade showed the layers of Don Giovanni’s malignancy. Mr. Plachetka’s imposing Leporello seemed cornered into complicity. (His costume and demeanor read Mafia hitman.) Ms. Lombardi’s opulent soprano, pouring out Donna Anna’s youthful distress, made a striking contrast with Ms. Martínez’s steelier timbre for Donna Elvira’s despair born of experience. Mr. Bliss’s gorgeous tenor made for an ardent and bossy Don Ottavio; he also incorporated attractive ornaments in the repeats of both his arias. Ms. Fang’s pure soprano and Alfred Walker’s brash bass-baritone and precise diction brought the embattled couple Zerlina and Masetto to life. 

The orchestra sounded unbalanced in the overture and occasionally disjointed later in the evening, but overall, Ms. Stutzmann led a propulsive, dynamically shaded performance. Her crisp tempi allowed no indulgence and Jonathan C. Kelly’s tangy fortepiano accompaniments lent buoyancy to the recitatives; as a result, Mr. Van Hove’s dark interpretation of the piece never felt heavy-handed. Mozart called “Don Giovanni” a dramma giocoso, a hybrid 18th-century form that mixes serious and comic styles, in this case with satirical intent. Ms. Stutzmann ensured that the “giocoso” element bubbled through the musical performance, creating an intriguing, multifaceted portrait of a sexual predator on the loose, and demonstrating how easily he avoids paying the price for his crimes for so long. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Heartbeat Opera gives ‘Macbeth’ a spare, putatively feminist reinterpretation and stages ‘Tosca’ as a production put on in a fundamentalist theocracy

By Heidi Waleson

April 18, 2023 6:02 pm ET

Lisa Algozzini Photo: Russ Rowland

Heartbeat Opera, which specializes in rethinking classic titles for contemporary audiences, opened its first fully staged new productions in 3 1/2 years at the Baruch Performing Arts Center last week. The company has undergone changes. Its two founding artistic directors, Ethan Heard and Louisa Proske, left last year for posts at, respectively, Signature Theatre in Virginia and Oper Halle, Germany, and Heartbeat is now helmed by its musician co-founders, Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg. 

Back in spring 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic had shut down in-person presentations and opera companies were scrambling to find alternatives, Heartbeat previewed bits of “Lady M,” its adaptation of Verdi’s “Macbeth” by Mr. Ashworth and Mr. Heard, on Zoom. Mr. Schlosberg’s weirdly creepy six-musician arrangement and a homemade video component made for a tantalizing tidbit. But staged in its fully realized, 90-minute form, now directed by Emma Jaster instead of Mr. Heard, “Lady M” is perplexing. 

Isaiah Musik-Ayala Photo: Russ Rowland

The adaptation has only three principal characters—Macbeth, Lady M and Banquo—plus three Sisters, who represent the witches, the chorus and everyone else. There are scene rearrangements and cuts, plus interpolations of spoken English text from the Shakespeare play. The most significant revision comes at the end: Macbeth’s final aria and his death are eliminated. Instead, we get Lady M’s sleepwalking scene, followed by the repositioned “Patria oppressa!” normally sung earlier by the chorus of Macbeth’s tormented subjects but here by the three Sisters and—Lady M. It is the only real clue to the renaming of the opera. Are we supposed to gather that she is sorry and is joining with those she has oppressed to make amends? What happened to her husband, the tyrant? Not clear.

The director’s note suggests that this is a feminist reinterpretation, but the rest of the staging fails to illuminate that concept. It is basically modern dress (costumes by Beth Goldenberg), with a single rectangular block serving as a bed, a table, and (perhaps) a coffin; the most interesting element is the lighted halo that serves as a crown (scenic design by Afsoon Pajoufar). A backdrop of hanging strips makes Camilla Tassi’s projections hard to see. Ms. Jaster’s direction is inscrutable—one choice was to have Lady M spend the sleepwalking scene Windexing the table (now glass topped, with Macbeth underneath it). Having the three Sisters (Samarie Alicea, Taylor-Alexis Dupont and Sishel Claverie) serve as the chorus as well as the witches, with no costume changes, was also confusing.

Sishel Claverie, Taylor-Alexis Dupont and Samarie Alicea Photo: Russ Rowland

Mr. Schlosberg’s arrangement—violin, clarinet, trombone, percussion, guitar and electronics, which he led from the piano—didn’t help matters. Amplified and raucous in a live setting, it relentlessly called attention to the ugliness of the story. The bass clarinet and the trombone, which are inherently comical instruments, sometimes even undermined the seriousness of the plot; and the poor violin was unable to tip the atmosphere toward lyricism. Still, the manic activity of the band, with much instrument-switching going on, was livelier than what was seen onstage.ies on the business of life.PreviewSubscribe

The singers made the noise level in this small theater even harder to bear. Lisa Algozzini has the dramatic soprano capacity for Lady M, but she offered no subtleties of expression, and Kenneth Stavert shouted his way through Macbeth. Bass-baritone Isaiah Musik-Ayala displayed a welcome warmth of timbre as Banquo, but his role is small. Ms. Alicea, who had lost her voice and was unable to sing, acted while Victoria Lawal sang some of her music from the orchestra, adding to the general weirdness. 

Christopher Nazarian, Masih Rahmati, Reza Mirjalili, Chad Kranak and Joe Lodato Photo: Russ Rowland

Heartbeat’s “Tosca” was more coherent, though one had to read the program note in advance to understand director Shadi G.’s concept: A theater group in a fundamentalist theocracy is putting on the Puccini opera. It becomes a protest as the performers gradually flout the state’s morality rules governing the performance, which include mandated hair coverings for women as well as prohibitions against men and women touching, or a woman killing a religious authority onstage. 

The production is clever. Two undercover policemen watch from the shadows and occasionally shout at the performers or hustle them offstage. Their menace is subtle but palpable—the torture scenes take on new relevance— and by Act 3 they have become part of the execution squad, leaving us to wonder if the “actor playing Cavaradossi,” as he is listed in the program, is actually shot dead at the end. With each act, the costumes (by Mika Eubanks) acquire more modern elements, and the Act 3 rooftop overlooks downtown Tehran (the scenic design is by Reid Thompson). The performers, changing the set after Act 1, sing a Farsi poem set to the Chilean protest tune known in English as “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”; later, it is repeated as a solo in lieu of the shepherd’s song at the beginning of Act 3, accompanied by a kamancheh, an Iranian bowed string instrument. Tosca’s final act of defiance is to leap atop a graffiti-scrawled wall and tear off her headscarf. Significantly, she doesn’t jump. 

Mr. Schlosberg’s orchestral arrangement—three cellos, bass, flute, horn, trumpet and piano—conducted by Mr. Ashworth, sounded a bit scrappy, but it got the job done. Trimmed to 100 minutes, the score is moderately cut, most notably eliminating Cavaradossi’s “Recondita armonia” and the chorus parts—other than a pre-recorded, men-only ensemble that thundered the “Te Deum” at the conclusion of Scarpia’s “Va, Tosca!” Anush Avetisyan was a fiery Tosca, Chad Kranak an ardent Cavaradossi, and Gustavo Feulien an ominous Scarpia, though less disturbing than the “real” secret police. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The composer’s second opera at the New York institution is a visceral, jazz-influenced work about the closeted bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, who killed his opponent in a 1962 fight.

Ryan Speedo Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

April 12, 2023 5:55 pm ET

New York

After its huge success with the New York premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2021, the Metropolitan Opera moved quickly to get Mr. Blanchard’s first opera, “Champion,” on the schedule; it opened on Monday. “Champion,” which had its premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013, is tighter and less abstract than “Fire”; it is a propulsive and percussive score firmly rooted in the composer’s jazz idiom. The production has been expanded to fill the Met’s much larger stage, and the orchestra, under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, supplies some lush effects, but it’s the rhythm quartet, led by drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, that drives the evening.

“Champion” is based on the true story of Emile Griffith, a champion boxer in the 1960s from the Virgin Islands and a closeted bisexual. In a 1962 title bout in New York, he killed his opponent, Benny Paret, who had taunted him at the weigh-in with homophobic slurs. Michael Cristofer’s libretto deftly outlines and deepens the tale: The elderly Emile (Eric Owens), who suffers from dementia and is still haunted by both the killing and guilt about his sexual identity, conjures up the turbulent odyssey of his younger self (Ryan Speedo Green). Structural fragmentation and repetition in the piece poignantly reflect Emile’s dementia—the clipped, often rhyming, text, insistently set; the flashes of clarity; the punctuation by the boxing announcer and the bell; and Emile’s frequently repeated line: “In my head, it happens fast. / Something good / Turns into something that don’t last.” 

Mr. Blanchard’s music gives the story’s episodes a visceral intensity. A Caribbean carnival call-and-response chorus, accompanied only by drums, dispatches Emile from his island home to make his fortune in New York; an ensemble of overlapping voices urges Emile to “stay in the game” during the Paret fight. Sometimes the vocal parts are more rhythmic than melodic, as when Emile’s ambitious mother, Emelda (Latonia Moore), narrates his transformation from gentle hat-maker to prizefighter in a speedy, rap-like extravaganza, “Tarzan knows which tree to climb.” 

Latonia Moore

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

When he does write melodies, Mr. Blanchard’s style is unpredictable. The line of Young Emile’s musing aria, “What makes a man a man,” is questioning and inconclusive, appropriate for his unresolved question of whether love makes a man strong or weak. The skillful dramaturgy alternates these types of scenes. In Act 2, a fast-paced sequence has reporters badgering Emile with the same banal questions—how does it feel to win the fight? To be the champ? To kill a man?—after each win. Then the chaos retreats, and Howie Albert (Paul Groves), Emile’s manager, expansively explains that “the truth don’t fit in a three-inch column.” 

Mr. Green (center), Paul Groves (purple jacket) and Ms. Moore (right)

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

James Robinson and Allen Moyer, who directed and designed the original production in St. Louis, have effectively scaled up the show for the Met with a large boxing ring and a big chorus. Montana Levi Blanco’s eye-catching costumes encompass St. Thomas carnival stilt-walkers, New York drag queens and flashy 1960s nightclub denizens; Greg Emetaz’s scene-setting projections and videos establish the crowd of Madison Square Garden fight fans and Emile’s Long Island apartment complex; Donald Holder’s sensitive lighting limns the difference between splashy public moments and solo musings. Camille A. Brown, who created the show-stopping step dance for “Fire,” supplies compact cameos here, like a group of boxers warming up and sparring at a gym. The fatal fight itself was staged with heart-stopping verve.

Mr. Green and Mr. Owens, in splendid voice, made a powerful team; one could discern the deep-seated insecurity both in the vibrant excitement of the younger Emile and in the pathos of the older one. The roots of that insecurity are disturbingly explained by a child Emile (Ethan Joseph), who appears in a still more distant flashback, forced by his strap-wielding, fundamentalist cousin Blanche (Krysty Swann) to hold cinder blocks above his head in order to drive out the devil. As Emelda, Ms. Moore was game, if not entirely secure, in her rhythmic numbers in Act 1; she sounded more comfortable in her dreamily lyrical Act 2 aria, accompanied only by plucked string bass, about her sad past. 

Eric Owens and Mr. Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Mr. Groves brought humanity to Howie, especially in the scene where Emile’s early dementia becomes apparent. Stephanie Blythe had an all-too-brief bluesy cameo as Kathy Hagen, the foul-mouthed proprietor of the gay bar where Young Emile goes looking for company and solace. A distinctive moment for Brittany Renee, as Emile’s wife, is an imploring duet with Emelda, begging Young Emile to come home as he goes to Kathy’s bar for the last time (he is assaulted by gay-bashing thugs outside). Other notables in the cast included Chauncey Packer as the kind Luis, Emile’s adopted son and caretaker; and Eric Greene, playing both Benny Paret, who haunts Emile, and Paret’s son, who helps Emile find peace at the end of the opera. 

As was the case with “Fire,” the capacity opening-night crowd seemed unusually young, diverse and enthusiastic. The Met, noting how well pieces like “Fire” and “The Hours” did at the box office, has declared its intention to devote a substantial percentage of its season to contemporary works, starting with 2023-24. With original voices like Mr. Blanchard’s to draw from, that should be no hardship for its audience. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City 
Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Appeared in the April 13, 2023, print edition as ‘A Composer’s One-Two Punch’.

A performance comprising three works by artists including Anna Deavere Smith and John Luther Adams received a technically spectacular production at Lyric Opera of Chicago; at Chicago Opera Theater, an opera about the brilliant British mathematician proved a labored telling of a tragic story.

Gordon Hawkins as Preacher Man, Issachah Savage as Curtis Toler, and Jeff Parker as Arne Duncan

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

By Heidi Waleson

March 27, 2023 5:29 pm ET

Chicago

For the world premiere of “Proximity,” a suite of three new American operas, which opened Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago boldly enlisted a group of creators who were almost all new to opera and the visionary director Yuval Sharon, known for his unconventional approach to the form, who was charged with wrangling their work onto the stage. Each piece tackles a hot-button contemporary subject. “The Walkers” by Daniel Bernard Roumain and Anna Deavere Smith explores gun violence; “Four Portraits” by Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke looks at loneliness exacerbated by technology; “Night” by John Luther Adamsand John Haines is about climate change. 

To emphasize the operas’ interrelationships, Mr. Sharon alternated scenes of the first two pieces throughout the evening and concluded the first act with the single scene of “Night.” The juxtaposition of different musical languages was surprisingly smooth—conductor Kazem Abdullah had a lot to do with that—but it was the polished, high-tech production, designed by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras, that unified the operas and kept the piece afloat as a theatrical evening even as its component parts varied in their effectiveness. 

As she does in her plays, Ms. Smith fashioned her libretto from interviews, often used verbatim. For “The Walkers,” she started with Chicago CRED, an organization that works with young people to reduce gun violence: Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, one of its founders, and Curtis Toler, a former gang leader who is part of its team, are characters in the opera. She deftly weaves their words and feelings into a fictional story of gang confrontation, while Mr. Roumain’s music, with its hip-hop rhythms and a trap set in the orchestra, vividly evokes the powder keg created by groups of posturing teenagers feeding on historical animosities and easy access to weapons. In this unsentimental, up-to-the-minute urban scenario, the liveliest posse leader is Chief’s Daughter #1 (Kearstin Piper Brown), fierce in a long pink wig and bright, skin-tight attire (Carlos J. Soto did the costumes), who gets wrongly accused by a rival group of shooting a child. 

Zoie Reams as Sibyl

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

Other standout performers included Issachah Savage as Toler—his aria wondering if his methods are really working was especially poignant; Norman Garrett as Bilal, a gang member newly released from prison; Ron Dukes as Chief’s Son #1; and young members of Uniting Voices Chicago. The most powerful performance came in the final scene, with Whitney Morrison as Yasmine Miller, a real person, recounting the killing of her toddler son, Sincere, shot through their car window as they were driving to a laundromat. Mr. Roumain’s setting of her colloquial speech is operatic but without artifice; the repeated words “he didn’t, he didn’t . . . make it” become the mantra that any mother might hear over and over in her memory.

“Four Portraits” is more abstract, depicting a couple—A (countertenor John Holiday) and B (baritone Lucia Lucas)—divided by technology. Ms. Shaw writes most persuasively for chorus, and here eight singers created a haunting cacophony of overlapping words, most of which were incomprehensible without the supertitles. In the best scene, “The Train,” they are B’s fellow passengers on public transportation, separate yet sometimes mysteriously coalescing into an ensemble. Mr. Holiday’s distinctive timbre was often drowned out in the chaos; Ms. Lucas’s voice sounded harsh in her Scene 3 aria about loneliness, as she drives a car accompanied only by a GPS (Corinne Wallace-Crane, processed to sound like multiple voices). The principals’ ill-fitting gray costumes did them no favors.

The company of ‘Proximity’

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

“Night” was just obscure. Both the opaque text, in which a Sibyl sees the end of the world, and Mr. Adams’s music, for a soloist (Katherine DeYoung) and chorus, built on a repeating downward pattern, were oracular rather than gripping. 

The ingenious production rescued “Night” and helped weld the other two pieces together. The arced, quarter pipe-shaped set was illuminated from within by a changing panoply of brilliantly conceived LED images, ranging from Google Earth views of Chicago to streaks of colored light that resolved into landscapes, and, for “Night,” a glittering starscape. Along with this visual opulence, its tempos expertly calibrated to match the music, we got occasional closeups of singers, and the larger-than-life view of Ms. Morrison’s face made Yasmine Miller’s bleak anguish personal. 

***

On the same weekend, at the Harris Theater, Chicago Opera Theater presented the world premiere of “The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing” by Justine F. Chen and David Simpatico, the tale of the brilliant mathematician who broke the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War II, was prosecuted, convicted and subjected to chemical castration under Britain’s draconian anti-homosexual laws in 1952, and died, by suicide, at the age of 41 in 1954. It’s a tragic subject, but labored storytelling and pedestrian vocal writing make the opera’s dramaturgy sag, particularly in the interminable final scene, which insists, unpersuasively, that Turing has performed some kind of mathematical soul transmigration. 

The most interesting musical moments include what the creators term “chat clouds”—transition episodes in which chorus members recite random words, some of which eventually rise to the aural surface. The Bletchley Park scene features a lively ensemble, with Turing as a kind of lounge singer backed up by a music-hall sextet of cryptographers working to break the code.

The opera was solidly cast and produced, although the hard-working baritone Jonathan Michie could not quite make us feel for Turing and his insistence on being himself, no matter the cost. Tenor Joseph Leppek was lyrical as Turing’s great love, Christopher, who died at age 18; Taylor Raven’s sonorous mezzo and Teresa Castillo’s high soprano supplied some vocal contrast as Joan Clarke (Turing’s cryptographer colleague who is game for a marriage of convenience) and Sara, his mother. Lidiya Yankovskaya ably led the chamber orchestra. Benjamin Olsen’s clever design placed the chorus in an aerie above the playing area, masked by a scrim that provided a projection surface for the “chat cloud” words; below, director Peter Rothstein marshaled his cast amid changing set elements like Turing’s code-breaking machine, his bed, and his poison-littered kitchen table. Nora Marlow Smith’s costumes evoked the period; Paul Whitaker’s lighting enhanced the story’s ominous mood. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

At the Seattle Opera, filmmaker Roya Sadat directs a timely but trite adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, with music by Sheila Silver and a libretto by Stephen Kitsakos.

Maureen McKay and Karin Mushegain

PHOTO: SUNNY MARTINI

By Heidi Waleson

March 6, 2023 5:27 pm ET

Seattle

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,” by composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitsakos, which had its world premiere at the Seattle Opera recently, turned out to be more timely than its creators anticipated. Set in modern Afghanistan and based on the 2007 novel by Khaled Hosseini, the opera unfolds against the backdrop of several tumultuous decades of Afghan history, beginning in 1974, five years before the Soviet invasion, and ending in July 2001 with the country firmly in the grip of the Taliban. The story is about two women brutally subjected to Afghanistan’s patriarchal religious tradition, but both the book and the opera were written during the two decades of U.S. military presence in the country, when women were allowed to be educated and hold jobs. As the opera’s first production meetings were under way in 2021, however, the Taliban reasserted control, making the work’s themes immediate rather than historical. 

Mr. Kitsakos’s text deals efficiently with the complicated tale. Act 1 introduces Mariam, the illegitimate, uneducated daughter of a wealthy businessman, who at age 15 is forced to marry Rasheed, a much-older shoemaker, after her mother dies by suicide. Unable to bear the child her husband wants, she becomes his abused drudge, obliged to wear a burqa outside the house though many other women do not. 

In Act 2, many years later, she crosses paths with Laila, the 14-year-old daughter of her neighbor Hakim, a teacher. Laila, modern and educated, is romantically involved with Tariq, another teenager. It is 1992, and Kabul is now under constant bombardment by warring factions. Tariq and his family flee, and when Laila’s house is destroyed and her parents killed by a bomb, she is rescued by Rasheed, who sees her as another potential mother for his much-desired son. Secretly pregnant and persuaded that Tariq is dead, she agrees to marry Rasheed, despite Mariam’s fury. But when she gives birth to a girl, and becomes a new target for Rasheed, the two women develop a mother-daughter bond. In 1996, with the Taliban in control, their escape attempt is thwarted. Five years later, when Rasheed murderously attacks Laila, Mariam kills him with a shovel; instead of running, she stays behind and confesses to the crime so that Laila and her children can flee with Tariq, who is not dead after all. 

With so much time, plot, and the separate trajectories of the two central protagonists to cover, the opera’s dramaturgy starts to sag over its two 80-minute acts and the all-important emotional bonding of the two women, arriving late in the game, is more told than felt. There are plenty of arias, especially for the lonely, unhappy Mariam, and some lively ensembles—one for the three spiteful wives of Mariam’s father, another for women gossiping in the marketplace—but the music, though tuneful and vocally adept, is illustrative rather than gripping. 

Ms. Silver, who studied Hindustani music intensively in India, says that sections of the score are rooted in the scalar patterns of individual ragas; a nonspecialist ear can hear some of that influence in the vocal parts, particularly the occasional passages of repeated alternating notes. The inspiration is more obvious in the orchestration, with its drone underlays and the addition of some traditional instruments: The bansuri, a bamboo flute with a hauntingly breathy sound, sometimes paired with the celesta here, offers a distinctive color in mournful sections; tablas (hand drums) supply vigorous energy. 

Roya Sadat, the director, is an Afghan filmmaker best known for her 2017 feature “A Letter to the President,” which depicts a woman who kills her abusive husband in self-defense. Her adroit staging, with sets by Misha Kachman, costumes by Deborah Trout, and lighting by Jen Schriever, reflects some of the complexity of Afghan society and its changes over the years, including Western, cosmopolitan attire coexisting with headscarves and burqas in an outdoor marketplace. Dress is no predictor of liberalism, however: Both Rasheed and Mariam’s father wear business suits at her hasty wedding. The sets are on a turntable, allowing for easy alternation between Hakim’s house, with its bookshelves and sofa, and Rasheed’s more traditional interior, with its floor pillows. Cutouts of the mountains surrounding Kabul hang above, and the lighting stresses the city’s earth tones. 

Mezzo Karin Mushegain brought a grounded expressivity to Mariam; Maureen McKay’s soprano supplied a brighter timbre for Laila, though the vocal part occasionally verged into shrieky terrain. John Moore’s honey-tinged baritone slipped easily into appropriate roughness for the brutal Rasheed; tenor Rafael Moras was a passionate Tariq. Standouts among the supporting singers included Tess Altiveros, doubling as Mariam’s mother and a market woman; Ashraf Sewailamas a sympathetic Hakim; and Andrew Potter, whose distinctive height and booming bass made him instantly notable as a mullah, a soldier and Sharif, who deceives Laila about Tariq’s death. Viswa Subbaramanwas the astute conductor. 

The timing of this world premiere has certainly called attention to current conditions in Afghanistan, particularly as they relate to women and girls, yet the piece itself finally feels artificial and old fashioned, with all the complexities inherent in the region stripped away. Mariam gets her apotheosis—bathed in brilliant white light, she sings an aria rejoicing in her sacrifice as she awaits her execution—but she’s a throwback to the traditional tragic opera heroine who has to die. I was struck by the contrast with Ms. Sadat’s film, in which a professional woman’s effort to stand up to the entrenched web of patriarchal interests ends in her execution—in a way, the killing of her husband is just an excuse to punish her. The film is a serious examination of what it means for a woman in Afghanistan to actually be seen; the opera is basically a sentimental love story that doesn’t push the art form to its limits. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

In director François Girard’s production of the operatic fairy tale, powerful turns from Piotr Beczała and Christine Goerke compete with a series of questionable design choices.

A scene from Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/METROPOLITAN OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

New York

The Metropolitan Opera returned from its monthlong hiatus on Sunday afternoon with Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” last seen at the house 17 years ago. Director François Girard conceived this new production as a sequel to his revelatory 2013 “Parsifal”—the connection being that Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son—but while there were visual links, it lacked the consistent vision and devastating impact of the earlier show. Instead, Tim Yip’s sets and costumes rendered the opera dark, claustrophobic and occasionally cheesy.

Based on medieval sources, “Lohengrin” is a fairy tale and a morality play. The virtuous Elsa has been falsely accused by Telramund and his wife, Ortrud, of murdering Elsa’s young brother, the heir to the Duchy of Brabant. King Heinrich orders a trial by combat, and a mysterious knight arrives to fight for Elsa and marry her. She agrees to his condition—she must never ask his name. But after the knight’s victory, the malevolent Ortrud successfully sows doubts, pushing Elsa to ask the forbidden question. His identity as a knight of the Holy Grail revealed, Lohengrin must depart, though the supposedly murdered brother is magically restored.

Other production choices are similarly questionable. Lohengrin first appears at the lip of the oval, with the chorus in the dark below him. It’s a dramatic pose, but dressed in the white shirt and black pants that the Grail knights wore in “Parsifal,” he looks like a bistro waiter. Designer David Finn bathes both Lohengrin and Elsa in blazing white light, which at least provides a contrast with the otherwise sepulchral illumination. For Act 2, we see the cave as if from above—the root-twined ground is now a vertical wall, with the cave behind it—and all the action takes place outside it. Again, the initial image is arresting, but the cave interior is soon blacked out, and the wall is placed so far forward that the stage becomes uncomfortably cramped once the enormous chorus files in. The dispiritingly gloomy bridal chamber of Act 3 is two downstage rock walls; a small vertical opening between them offers only a glimpse of dancing starry galaxies behind. (Peter Flaherty’s projections are one of the show’s better visual elements.) Eight female dancers, awkwardly choreographed by Serge Bennathan, accompany Elsa.

As Lohengrin, Piotr Beczała does not have Heldentenor ping and power, but his delivery was dramatic, eloquent and, most of all, humane—one felt his pity for Elsa in Act 3. As Elsa, Tamara Wilson’s ample soprano alternated effectively between innocent spaciness, steely resolve, and moments of radiance, such as her expressions of absolute trust in her rescuer. The biggest, plushest voice onstage belonged to Christine Goerke, who turned Ortrud’s poisonous manipulations into the opera’s main event. Evgeny Nikitin(Telramund) was vocally colorless; Günther Groissböck (King Heinrich) sounded harsh and edgy; baritone Brian Mulligan brought a fluent ease to the Herald. The chorus often lacked cohesion, a serious flaw in this chorus-heavy opera; perhaps they were too focused on their complex color-switching. Four onstage trumpeters added flourish, while in the pit Yannick Nézet-Séguin was a sensitive accompanist—no drowning out of the singers—and effective orchestral sculptor. The ethereal pianissimos were a special pleasure.

Mr. Girard’s minimalist directing for the most part left the storytelling to the set and the music. He did, however, have Ms. Goerke skulk around the stage during Act 1 and, during the prelude to Act 3, perform some extra sorcery to make sure that Elsa would get the job done. Perhaps this was a way to mitigate the opera’s essentially sexist premise (Elsa’s weakness wrecks everything), and it certainly set up the bridal-chamber scene, which Ms. Wilson played like a zombie propelled by outside forces. However, neither the political motivations nor the Christian vs. pagan themes of the opera coalesced into a coherent narrative, and the treatment of the human story remained cursory at best, with only Mr. Beczała’s compassion and Ms. Goerke’s venom shining through the gloom.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

Composer and librettist Kate Soper’s inventive, uneven adaptation of a 13th-century French poem at Long Beach Opera explores the messiness of romantic love.

Laurel Irene and Lucas Steele

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 21, 2023 6:11 pm ET

San Pedro, Calif.

‘Le Roman de la Rose,” a 13th-century, 21,000-line poem written in Old French, is an allegorical anatomization of love, with forays into numerous other fields, including astronomy and predestination. The composer Kate Soper has cherry-picked elements from this exhaustive compendium, added new ones, and adapted the tale into her eccentric but basically operatic “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its world premiere by the Long Beach Opera at the Warner Grand Theatre on Saturday. Though wildly imaginative and studded with ingenious musical effects, “Rose” doesn’t jell into a coherent evening. 

The opera’s text is wide-ranging, including snippets of the original French version (mostly from the God of Love); Ms. Soper’s modern interpretations of the poem’s themes; and rose-centered verses by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and others. Spoken dialogue is often used for zingers, such as Lady Reason’s “There is no such thing as ‘sad music’!” or the Lover’s bewildered “Wait . . . does that mean I want to have sex with a plant?” With nearly 2 1/2 hours of music and dialogue, the piece feels long and repetitive, overly reliant on words, particularly spoken ones, to make its points.

Bernardo Bermudez, Phillip Bullock, Tiffany Townsend and Tivoli Treloar (front)

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

This is ironic, given Ms. Soper’s fertile musical imagination and wit. The combatants have distinctive musical identities: The God of Love often veers into his falsetto range, and there is reverb on his singing (everyone is miked); while Lady Reason, prone to scientific jargon, is accompanied by a vocoder, which creates a robotic underlay for her voice. Shame spouts obscenities in a dizzyingly jagged vocal line against loud and chaotic distortions and instrumentals. The techniques aren’t gimmicky, and Ms. Soper can turn them into comic moments and alluring sequences, such as Lady Reason’s diatribe about how music and love are “twin sicknesses” and her list of alternatives to romantic love, a catchy tune backed by marimba and saxophone. 

Historical forms, such as madrigals, offer the audience a taste of familiarity, though never for long. Ballad duets sung by the Dreamer and the Lover—a sweet one to a text from Shakespeare (“O Mistress Mine”) and a more intense paean taken from Tennyson—are rudely interrupted by Lady Reason and Shame, respectively. Idleness (Tiffany Townsend) and Pleasure (Bernardo Bermudez), the God of Love’s henchmen, duet on a delectable torch song, which is both sincere and a sendup. The orchestral accompaniment, a nine-person ensemble ably led by Christopher Rountree, is also pointed, judiciously allotting string solos, harp riffs, heavy guitar licks, and the Rose Theme itself, an insistent ostinato. 

Anna Schubert and Tivoli Treloar

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

The capable singers were game for the opera’s extended techniques; a standout was Ms. Schubert, who made Lady Reason’s robotic insistence affecting as well as comic, especially in Act 2, when she dresses up—and then strips down—to seduce the Lover into the camp of rationality. Mr. Steele made an appealing narrator, but his voice lacked the warmth that the opera singers could summon, so a lament like “A rose once blown must die,” which concludes Act 1, lost some poignancy. 

The set, designed by Prairie T. Trivuth, suggested minimal resources—white walls, a few plants, and doorframes hung with colored streamers could only hint at a dream pleasure garden. The rose itself, marooned on a platform in the middle of the audience, remained stubbornly out of reach until the Lover secured it in Act 2 and then dismembered its paper petals. Molly Irelan’s costumes relied heavily on bright colors and shimmery lamé; Pablo Santiago’s lighting was unsubtle, going from flat to lurid pink or orange in an instant. Director James Darrahworked hard to shape the opera into a narrative arc, but the form resisted his efforts. For all its invention, “Rose” came across as an exercise in cleverness. 

Ms. Soper ventures regularly into these waters. Her witty vaudeville chamber piece, “Here Be Sirens,” for female trio and tortured piano, produced in New York in 2014, similarly plumbed old texts and mythologies, but was tighter and more effective. Her new chamber opera, “The Hunt,” in which three virgins, passing time in a meadow, await the appearance of a unicorn, will have its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre in October. But exhilarating as it is to channel archaic lore into modern dress, the operatic form itself demands theatrical consistency that goes beyond adroit amusement. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

This year’s edition of the adventurous showcase includes an intimate double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and a dazzling, uncategorizable work by Gelsey Bell that spans geologic time

A scene from ‘Morning//Mourning’

PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 10, 2023 7:18 pm ET

With the 10th anniversary season of the Prototype Festival under way, it’s hard to imagine artistic life without this annual January showcase for adventurous opera/music theater. Launched in 2013, this collaboration between Beth Morrison Projects and HERE has given a wide range of young composers a New York stage on which to experiment with subjects and forms. Over the years, Prototype has birthed two Pulitzer winners (Du Yun’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid’s “p r i s m”), welcomed unusual European fare like the choral “Toxic Psalms” and the savage “4:48 Psychosis,” and presented breakthrough works like David T. Little’s “Dog Days,” David Lang’s “anatomy theater,” Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves” and Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers.” Forced into the digital sphere by the pandemic in 2021, Prototype came up with the ingenious multicomposer work “Modulation”; and although the live 2022 festival was canceled at the last minute due to a resurgence of the virus, the producers got Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” and Huang Ruo’s “Book of Mountains and Seas,” both gems, onstage.

This year, one of Prototype’s discoveries is the Irish composer Emma O’Halloran, whose double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead” had its world premiere on Saturday at the Abrons Arts Center. Ms. O’Halloran’s distinctive musical style meshes acoustic and electronic sound in a way that makes it hard to separate one from the other. The effect—brutal and gentle by turns—suited her subject matter, two short plays by her uncle Mark O’Halloran that explore the inner lives of some damaged, frustrated people. 

Naomi Louisa O’Connell as the title character in ‘Mary Motorhead’PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

Mary Motorhead (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) is serving an 18-year prison sentence for murdering her husband; in “Trade,” the Older Man (Marc Kudisch) and the Younger Man (Kyle Bielfield), both of whom are in heterosexual relationships, meet for paid sex. All are Irish working class, and one gathers from their halting speech that they are unused to articulating their feelings. Yet Ms. O’Halloran’s vocal settings, and especially her orchestral accompaniments, help push those feelings to the surface in all their awkwardness. It’s 21st-century verismo, using psychological revelations instead of physical violence as dramatic catalysts. 

“Mary Motorhead,” a 30-minute monologue, is the slighter piece, and Ms. O’Connell, with her rich mezzo, seemed a bit too polished for the tough young woman whose desperate need for connection is expressed as anger: She explains that she stabbed her husband in the head “to see if he’s in there.” Unlike Italian verismo, the musical setting doesn’t afford the listener distance from the stark rawness of emotions and deeds. Rather, the rock ’n’ roll thrust of the electronics pushes the story’s sense of brutal inevitability. 

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“Trade,” twice as long, delves deeper into the inner lives of the two men, their feelings about being both fathers and sons, and for each other. In their slow, uncomfortable process of self-explanation, fueled by many cans of “shite” beer, Ms. O’Halloran’s music fills in the blanks, finding both the brittle aggressiveness of the Younger Man, who discovered at age 14 that he could make easy money having sex with “auld fellers,” and the tentative but luminous tenderness that the Older Man feels for him. Skillfully directed by Tom Creed, Mr. Bielfield’s haunting tenor created an enormously poignant character, his monosyllabic profanity just a cover for his terror, while Mr. Kudisch’s slow burn gradually revealed a superficially macho man longing to be understood. 

Marc Kudisch and Kyle Bielfield in ‘Trade’

PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

Jim Findlay’s simple sets—a wall with a central door that never opens for “Mary,” a faceless room with only a bed and chair for “Trade”—acted as canvases for Christopher Kuhl’s lighting: a violent spotlight for “Mary”; giant shadows and pastel colors in “Trade.” Montana Levi Blanco did the evocative costumes, though one wondered why Mary got to wear goth gear in prison. In the pit, NOVUS NY, conducted by Elaine Kelly, created a vivacious sound world. 

“Morning//Mourning,” which had its premiere on Friday at HERE, exemplifies what makes Prototype essential: It’s a home for the uncategorizable. This alluring work by the polymath artist Gelsey Bell—she wrote the music and the libretto, served as music director, and created the arrangements in association with her four singer/player fellow performers—is a 90-minute meditation on what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from Earth. Part scientific exposition, part imaginative flight of fancy, “Morning//Mourning” plays with time, flipping our knowledge of geologic eras into the future, beginning with tiny spans—“Within the first hours”—and ending with vast ones, “At 42 million years.” 

The musical flow sweeps the listener into those stretches of time, whether it’s a haunting, five-voice canon about bristlecone pines on a windy ridge (5,000 years); a joyous explosion of bells, xylophone and harp as new life forms begin their journey at 241,000 years; or a sweet, accordion-accompanied reminiscence about odd things that humans did. Sonorities can be unexpected. Ms. Bell and her fellow performers—Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto—play a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, and vocalize in speech, syllabic noises, ululations, choral settings, and the occasional operatic flight. The text, set clearly and evocatively, has plenty of wit: Listeners can track the evolution of a new intelligent species, the Blooklungs, from their origin as octopuses making their way onto land into beings capable of traveling into outer space and living there. 

The message is serious, but not tragic. One late section is titled “Nothing Lasts Forever,” and at 1.6 billion years the last bacteria on Earth die. The wordless “Mourning,” which begins the piece, is a short-term affair; “Morning,” which ends it, suggests the infinite possibilities of galactic time and space. 

Simply and powerfully staged by Tara Ahmadinejad, with scenic design by Afsoon Pajoufar and lighting by Masha Tsimring in a semicircular space, the five storytellers move among the sculpted stations that hold their instruments. Marbles, symbolizing years, are added to a bowl at the center; in one long section, played in an almost complete blackout, the performers face upstage, watching lanterns behind a scrim blink on and off. The piece could be trimmed slightly, but overall, its clarity accentuates its emotional impact.

A scene from ‘Undine’

PHOTO: UNDINE TEAM

The same cannot be said for “Undine,” a 30-minute animated opera film, with music by Stefanie Janssen, Michaël Brijs and Richard van Kruysdijk and directed by Sjaron Minailo, available as a stream for free. It’s the story of a mermaid addicted to plastic who interferes with the lives of three humans, but the piece is bewildering unless you read the synopsis first, and even then. Ms. Janssen’s high vocals are intriguing, as is the visual depiction of the multi-tentacled mermaid, but the anti-plastic message went over my head. Still, that’s the beauty of Prototype—it takes opera experimentation seriously, even if not every experiment is a success.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

Appeared in the January 11, 2023, print 

Umberto Giordano’s 1898 verismo work has a creaky plot but an engaging score, beautifully delivered by soprano Sonya Yoncheva in a handsome new production at the Metropolitan Opera

Sonya Yoncheva

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 4, 2023 5:26 pm ET

Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora” (1898) proved to be perfect New Year’s Eve fare at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. It’s relatively short; the creaky plot is melodrama rather than tragedy; there’s a party scene; and it’s a splendid verismo showcase for the right soprano—in this case, Sonya Yoncheva. David McVicar’s handsome new production offered plenty of eye candy and kept the entertainment level high without cheesy overreach. With the early (6:30 p.m.) curtain, the crowd could head out at 9 for their own festive dinners and Champagne toasts after the heroine expired. 

Arturo Colautti’s libretto is based on a play by Victorien Sardou, who also provided the source material for Puccini’s “Tosca.” “Fedora” makes less sense. The title character is a Russian princess. In Act 1, which takes place in St. Petersburg, her fiancé, Vladimir, is murdered, supposedly by Nihilists (a violent political group of the period), and she swears to avenge him. In Act 2, at a grand party in Paris, she seduces the accused killer, Count Loris Ipanoff, into a confession. While Loris is off getting proof of justifiable homicide, Fedora dispatches a letter to St. Petersburg condemning him. Loris returns with a different letter (the opera has quite a few) that proves that Vladimir was having an affair with Loris’s wife and was marrying Fedora for her money. Shocked at these revelations, Fedora transfers her affections to Loris. Alas, that letter to St. Petersburg will return to haunt the lovers in Act 3, in which they have decamped to Switzerland. Things don’t end well. 

Ms. Yoncheva, elegantly swathed in sumptuous period gowns by Brigitte 
Reiffenstuel, managed to make Fedora’s questionable choices persuasive. In Act I, she was every inch the imperious aristocrat, her imposing soprano declaring rapturous adoration of a man who, it is clear, she barely knows. (We’ve already heard his servants briskly discussing his unsavory habits.) The seduction scene of Act 2 was perfectly manipulative, and her headlong tumble into passion, vigorously and idiomatically paced by conductor Marco Armiliato, made for a complete—and exciting—reversal. In Act 3, her voice turned lush and imploring as she begged for forgiveness, a convincing prelude to her inevitable suicide. 

As Loris, tenor Piotr Beczała had less to do—he doesn’t even appear until Act 2. His delivery was more stentorian than lyrical, which was particularly noticeable in the opera’s brief hit tune, “Amor ti vieta,” but he made a fine dramatic foil for Ms. Yoncheva. There were numerous other engaging musical moments as well, since Giordano and Colautti laced the melodrama with fun and novelty. The Act 2 party took off with a merry waltz; later, the French diplomat Giovanni De Siriex (Lucas Meachem) and Fedora’s flirtatious cousin Olga (Rosa Feola) traded teasing arias—he describes Russian women as tough Cossacks; she declares that French men are as ephemeral and headache-inducing as Veuve Clicquot Champagne. Both singers imbued their spotlight moments with élan. 

The party also features a Chopin-esque piano solo (performed by Bryan Wagorn, resplendent in a long blond wig, as Olga’s current paramour), which cleverly accompanies the Fedora-Loris seduction. Other notable soloists were Jeongcheol Cha, as Vladimir’s coachman Cirillo, offering halting, poignant testimony about the shooting, and Luka Zylik, as a peasant boy, who sang a hauntingly dissonant folk tune, accompanied by concertina, making a striking contrast to the volcanic emotional explosions of Act 3. 

Mr. McVicar skillfully balanced playfulness and histrionics. Charles Edwards’s detailed set designs combined grandeur with sleight-of-hand: Elements of each act’s set remained in the subsequent ones, reminders that the past is never gone. The ghost of Vladimir also haunted the production, both in his portrait, hanging on a wall at stage left, and in person. That physical ghost made for an effective staging of the dreamy Act 2 Intermezzo, giving Fedora and Vladimir—whom we never see together alive—a mimed love scene; Fedora’s subsequent switch to Loris was thus all the more startling. 

Adam Silverman’s atmospheric lighting emphasized the different tones of the acts: The gloomy, heavy reds of Vladimir’s sitting room in Russia; the breezy white curtains in Paris; the bleached-out mountain in Switzerland that faded into blackness for the denouement. Ms. Reiffenstuel’s costumes were always perfectly apt to the moment, be it somber or silly, from the coachman’s huge fur coat and hat to Olga’s blue silk lounging pajamas and the bloomers in which she sets off on a bicycling adventure. 

“Fedora” was last staged at the Met in the 1996-97 season as a vehicle for soprano Mirella Freni. It is symbolic of another age of opera production and attendance, when an unfamiliar title, featuring many of the favorite musical and dramatic hallmarks of better-known turn-of-the-century Italian operas, could be slotted into the subscription season and please the audience. Today, this production, even with its splendid cast and staging, seems like something of a dinosaur.

The Met recently announced that it will increase the percentage of contemporary titles in future seasons, since new works like “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have actually been outselling warhorses. Novelty matters, particularly now that the company depends heavily on single-ticket sales—subscriptions have dropped to less than half of what they were two decades ago. The Met’s brand has always been grand traditional operatic entertainment, performed for an audience that returned every year to see many of the same spectacles or related ones, and willingly paid premium prices. With that business model under heavy pressure, a pure diversion like this “Fedora”—if revived when it is no longer New Year’s Eve and with a less starry cast—might well show its C-list cracks. And in a repertory house that needs a lot of titles—23 this season—it’s hard to predict what might take its place. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

• OPERA REVIEW

Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato in ‘The Hours’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 29, 2022 at 1:05 pm

New York

‘The Hours,” by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, which had its world-premiere staged production at the Metropolitan Opera last Tuesday, is clever in concept. Its sources—the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham and the 2002 all-star film by Stephen Daldry—supply juicy roles for three women playing characters experiencing traumas in three separate eras, related through Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway.” The structure of opera permits techniques of simultaneity and overlap that exist in no other medium. From a marketing standpoint, the creation of “The Hours” was driven by soprano Renée Fleming, once the Met’s most beloved diva, whose 2017 “Der Rosenkavalier” at the house supposedly marked her retirement from staged opera. On Tuesday, she returned in the role of Clarissa Vaughan, custom tailored for her voice. 

But “The Hours,” though skillfully constructed and imaginatively staged by Phelim McDermott, proved agreeable rather than transcendent. Mr. Pierce’s libretto, a model of clarity with touches of poetry, deftly weaves the three stories together. In 1923, Virginia Woolf (mezzo Joyce DiDonato), marooned in Richmond, a suburb of London, is trying to write “Mrs. Dalloway.” Clarissa Vaughan (Ms. Fleming), a late-20th-century version of Mrs. Dalloway, is preparing a party for Richard, her beloved friend and long-ago lover, a poet who is dying of AIDS. In 1949, Laura Brown (soprano Kelli O’Hara), a housewife in Los Angeles, is reading “Mrs. Dalloway” and contemplating suicide. The parallels resonate: Both Virginia and Laura appear to be clinically depressed, and they simultaneously hallucinate Virginia’s 1941 suicide. Clarissa, a blithe spirit who believes she can will ugly realities away, turns out to be no match for Richard’s despair. As Virginia keeps saying, as she plots out her novel, “Someone will die at the end of the day.” 

The opera’s most persuasive sections probe the three characters’ inner lives rather than their actions. A dreamlike chorus helps, amplifying and echoing their deepest thoughts, the words they can’t say to others, while the wordless countertenor of the Man Under the Arch (John Holiday), a mysterious intermittent presence, lures them toward death. The richest inner life belongs to Virginia, and Ms. DiDonato is a magnetic presence, seizing our attention with her struggle to create and to keep her demons at bay. Her music is spare and twining, seeming to follow her thoughts in whatever directions they lead. We experience her conflicted feelings about her husband, Leonard, who is both her support and her jailer; her yearnings for the busy streets of London become grist for her novel.

This eloquent dreaminess carries over to the character of Laura, sung with piercing anguish by Ms. O’Hara; the transitional moments when Virginia and Laura sing together are some of the most striking in the piece. Laura is introduced with a big-band sound that goes with her bright kitchen and her cheery husband (think Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti”). It dissipates quickly as we realize that Laura would rather be reading “Mrs. Dalloway.” When she tries to interact with her husband, Dan (whose birthday it is), and her young son, the chorus surrounds her in a kind of fog.

The meditative internality doesn’t work for Clarissa, however. Her lyrical vocal line with its short, deliberate phrases and delicate orchestration suits Ms. Fleming’s instrument, but makes the character shallow; its Coplandesque accompaniment insists on her oblivious innocence. Scenes involving her often fall flat. Her interactions with Richard (Kyle Ketelsen, surprisingly robust for a dying man) are talky; an extended flashback to their youth, which included a brief romantic triangle with Richard’s ex-lover Louis (William Burden), has no punch. 

Ms. Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

Most of the opera’s action scenes revolve around Clarissa, and their lack of musical momentum reveals the opera’s principal flaw: It has well-crafted episodes and deft, imaginative transitions, but the story arc, particularly in Act 2, is carried by the libretto rather than the music. When Mr. Puts tries for dramatic impact, as at the end of Act 1, when all three women decide to act on their feelings, and later, following Richard’s suicide, the music is just noisy. The opera’s finale, a delicate trio for the three women, is a clear nod to the end of “Der Rosenkavalier,” but has none of its predecessor’s mix of anguish, resignation and serene bliss that tells you everything has changed. 

The orchestra, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, did its best with the lushly pretty score. The strong supporting singers included Denyce Graves, lively as Clarissa’s partner, Sally, and Eve Gigliotti as Virginia’s faithful servant, Nelly. Sylvia D’Eramo had a poignant moment as Laura’s neighbor Kitty; Kathleen Kim’s adroit coloratura cameo as the florist Barbara read like an opera in-joke. The men—Sean Panikkar as Leonard Woolf, Brandon Cedel as Dan Brown, Tony Stevenson as Clarissa’s friend Walter—ably served as foils for the women. 

Mr. McDermott’s production eloquently capitalized on the opera’s dreaminess and overlap of worlds, its strongest elements. Set and costume designer Tom Pye created simple rooms for each of the principal characters—Virginia’s study, Laura’s kitchen—that rolled on and off stage, but the characters also ventured outside their own spaces and into each other’s. Bruno Poet’s lighting and Finn Ross’s projections limned the differences between eras, and between interior and exterior existences. Annie-B Parson’s choreography turned dancers into extensions of the characters and the set—draped over furniture in Richard’s apartment, holding books against the wall of Virginia’s study, carrying pillows and pills into the hotel room where Laura contemplates suicide. Ms. Fleming looked dazzling in a tailored white skirt suit; Ms. O’Hara carried off the housewife’s bathrobe and perky nipped-waisted floral frock. Virginia’s drab makeup and shapeless, rust-colored 1920s dress could have been deadly, but Ms. DiDonato’s commanding life force overcame them both.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

A magical world premiere at San Diego Opera imagines Frida Kahlo reuniting with her husband, Diego Rivera, from beyond the grave; composer Ethel Smyth’s 1906 work, in a fusty revival at Houston Grand Opera, depicts English villagers who plunder shipwrecks and kill the survivors.

Guadalupe Paz and Alfredo Daza

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 1, 2022 4:16 pm ET

San Diego.

Opera is an ideal medium for fusing magic and reality, and “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), which had its world premiere at the San Diego Opera on Saturday, does just that with sensitivity and charm. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz have created a twist on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, this time in Spanish, set on the Mexican holiday El Día de los Muertos, and featuring Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the two great Mexican painters whose tempestuous romantic partnership ended only with Frida’s death in 1954. Or didn’t end: The opera opens in 1957 with Diego begging Frida to return, a possibility on this day in November when the border between worlds is opened, and the souls of the departed can rejoin their loved ones for 24 hours.

There’s no Halloween terror or mourning gloom to the piece. Like the holiday, it is about love, remembering and forgiveness. And comedy: Catrina, Keeper of the Dead, who controls the passage between worlds, is funny. As in the traditional Orpheus story, art is the passport across the border. Frida, who remembers only the physical and emotional pain of her life—she was profoundly injured in a tram accident and her two marriages to Diego were laced with infidelity—doesn’t want to go but changes her mind at the prospect of being able to paint once more. Yet Mr. Cruz’s poignant libretto keeps us in the realm of dreams rather than nightmares. Even the moment that Frida feels pain again—when, disobeying Catrina’s command to keep her distance, she embraces Diego—is brief.

Ms. Frank’s alluring music also shuttles eloquently between the worlds. After the somber opening scene as Diego and others visit shrines to their dead, the textures in the underworld, led by the cackling Catrina, are brighter and livelier. The chorus of departed souls teases Frida, turning the words “sin ti” (without you) into polyphonic playfulness. When Diego and Frida reunite in the world of the living, the rhythms dance and so does Frida. Instrumental choices are potent: The celesta and piccolo phrase that accompanies Frida’s impassioned first aria about her life of pain suggests haunting, distant memories. Tellingly, that orchestral color returns in the final scene, as Frida accompanies the dying Diego on his own journey to the underworld. Like the libretto, the music evokes a magical atmosphere of dreams.

Mezzo Guadalupe Paz was a passionate Frida; as Diego, baritone Alfredo Daza was touching as a man nearing his end. As Catrina, soprano Maria Katzarava was impressive in the melismas and cackles of the evening’s most arresting vocal music. Countertenor Key’mon W. Murrah was affecting as Leonardo, a departed soul who returns to the world of the living for the thrill of being an actor again—he plays Greta Garbo for a devoted fan. Roberto Kalb’s conducting had both clarity and richness.

The striking production was central to the opera’s impact. Set designer Jorge Ballina and lighting designer Victor Zapatero conjured up an enchanting, artistic Mexico: The opening scene was staged on a tiered Día de los Muertos altar, banked with marigolds and candles that flew upward to hover over the underworld. Later, one of Rivera’s murals came to life inside a giant picture frame, and Frida and Diego visited Frida’s house, Casa Azul, furnished with cutout elements from her paintings—a bed, a shelf, a garden. Eloise Kazan’s costumes enhanced the effect. In the underworld, they matched the orange hues of the holiday marigolds in a variety of historical styles—there was even an armored soldier. When the dead visited the living, they changed into a wider array of colors, and Frida donned her familiar Tehuana-inspired dress and flower crown. Catrina’s skeleton-festooned regalia reflected depictions of pre-Columbian gods. Against this background of riotous color and detail, Lorena Maza’s minimal direction made the scenes into tableaux, static rather than active. The production goes to the San Francisco Opera, a co-commissioner, with a mostly different cast, in June 2023.

***

Sasha Cooke and Norman Reinhardt PHOTO: MICHAEL BISHOP

Houston

Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” (1906) has benefited from the current effort to exhume forgotten works by BIPOC and women composers. Glyndebourne staged it last summer, and Houston Grand Opera opened a new production of it on Friday. In an earlier outing, at the Bard Festival in 2015, the opera came across as ferocious; here, it just seemed old-fashioned. 

The story is promising: The villagers in an isolated 18th-century Cornwall community plunder ships that founder on their rocky coast and kill the survivors, justifying their actions as ordained by God. An unknown traitor is threatening their livelihood by lighting a warning beacon on the clifftop. The libretto, by Smyth’s lover Henry Brewster, deftly lays out the character conflicts: Thirza, the pastor Pascoe’s young wife, is an outsider who despises the wreckers’ work and is having a secret affair with Mark, a fisherman. Avis, Mark’s ex-girlfriend, hates Thirza and leads the hunt to pin the beacon-lighting on Pascoe to punish her; Pascoe, venerated by the community, is having strange visions. 

But Smyth’s music has too many stylistic references: It aspires to Wagnerian sweep and there are hints of Debussy, particularly in a “La Mer”-like interlude before Act 3. The vigorous choral writing—both hymn-singing and mob frenzy—is static, and many of the arias are tuneful but shapeless. Sasha Cooke made the most of Thirza’s music with her luxuriant mezzo and impassioned delivery; soprano Mané Galoyan was also terrific, bringing a spiteful energy and high, flirty ease to Avis’s music, which sounds like it could be from “Carmen.” Despite his big baritone, Reginald Smith Jr.’s Pascoe was a cipher, and his mutton-chop facial hair was distracting. Tenor Norman Reinhardtsounded constrained as Mark. Of the supporting singers, mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce stood out in a brief appearance as Jack, the teenager with a crush on Avis. 

Conductor Patrick Summers didn’t find either the frenzy or the brooding menace that can make the score work. Louisa Muller’s pedestrian directing and the literalness of Christopher Oram’s sets—the giant cross, the stone houses—along with Marcus Doshi’s lighting had the same problem. The show felt obvious and antiquated, right down to the lovers chained in a cave with the tide coming in (a nod to “Aida”). The libretto, originally in French, is usually performed in Smyth’s own English translation; in Houston, the company used an English version by Amanda Holden, which removes the archaic language and strives for a more contemporary flavor, but to little avail. Compared to Benjamin Britten’s brilliant “Peter Grimes,” an opera—now playing with a superb cast at the Metropolitan Opera—about an outsider in an insular coastal community, “The Wreckers” is a historical curiosity rather than a buried treasure.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The opera, which premiered at Penn State, depicts the fierce conflict between urban planner Robert Moses and journalist Jane Jacobs.

Rinde Eckert as Robert Moses (right), with Tomas Cruz

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

By Heidi Waleson

Length (6 minutes)Queue

State College, Pa.

It’s odd that “A Marvelous Order,” an opera depicting the epic Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs battle over the fate of New York City and the future of urbanism, had its world premiere last Thursday not in New York, but at Penn State University during Homecoming Week. New York is getting a starry version of the tale—David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” imported from London with Ralph Fiennes as Moses, opening this week at the Shed for a sold-out run—but the opera deserves a hometown hearing, and wider circulation, for its thoughtful depiction of the conflict and its unusually imaginative, multimedia form. 

Moses, the unelected king of New York public works, who spent four decades building bridges and highways to funnel cars into, out of and through New York City, met his match in Jane Jacobs, a journalist and the author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961). The opera zeroes in on two battles: Moses’s 1953 effort to build a four-lane highway—a continuation of Fifth Avenue—through Washington Square Park and, several years later, his Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have allowed cars to proceed unimpeded from New Jersey to Long Island. Moses lost both those battles when Jacobs rallied neighborhood and political support on behalf of the people who lived in the paths of those proposed juggernauts. 

The opera, a collaboration of composer Judd Greenstein, librettist Tracy K. Smith and director/animation creator Joshua Frankel, unfolds in 11 sharp vignettes that explore the conflict on multiple levels. Mr. Greenstein’s minimalist music can evoke the elegant chaos of daily life in Jacobs’s Greenwich Village in the opening section, “The Ballet of the Streets,” with the voices of the ensemble members flowing over and around each other, as well as the lockstep meters of a meeting in Moses’s office. Ms. Smith’s libretto is spare, letting repeated single words (“Obstacle!”) tell the story, rather than insisting on a detailed narrative, and her poetic turns of phrase fit beautifully. Mr. Frankel’s stunning animations, moving in rhythm with the music, are an equal storytelling element. Some are abstract—the polygon patterns that mirror the crazy-quilt blocks of the Village; others—like the line drawings of walking figures or the blood-red ribbon that steamrolls over Washington Square Park—are explicit. 

Megan Schubert as Jane Jacobs, with Blythe Gaissert and Kamala Sankaram

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

Amplification made the libretto intelligible—some text sections were projected as part of the animation design, but there were no supertitles, and for the most part, none were needed. (Greg Allen did the sound design.) Megan Schubert’s vivid high soprano colored Jacobs’s obsessiveness and obstinate determination; tenor Rinde Eckert’s distinctive stage persona and the jittery, anxious quality of his music made for a fascinating Moses, who shouts everyone down. The piece humanized them both: When Moses has a meltdown over being beaten by “a bunch of mothers,” his aria suggests a man who got conflicting messages about life and manhood from his own mother. And in the final scene, when the two have an imaginary, perhaps posthumous, encounter, Jacobs sings wearily, “I thought I had a voice. . . . Was it nothing more than a faint stirring? A dog barking and barking and barking, making nothing but a far-off wordless wind?”

The many varied ensembles—a polyphonic streetscape, a protest chant— made for a consistently energetic atmosphere, and the seven supporting singers, all playing multiple roles, were excellent. Kamala Sankaram had a hilarious moment as a Villager personally offended by the Washington Square plan, repeating the words “just sick!”; Christopher Herbert was a splendidly self-important Moses mouthpiece at a public hearing; Tomás Cruz’s falsetto gave a poignant edge to a Villager’s testimony about the importance of Washington Square Park in his life. Blythe Gaissert brought a rich mezzo to the Displaced Woman, though the purpose of her character was unclear; Melisa Bonetti, Kelvin Chan and Tesia Kwarteng made strong contributions. In the pit, the NOW Ensemble (piano, guitar, clarinet, double bass, flute), conducted by David Bloom, supplied distinctive individual timbres combined with rhythmic precision and dynamic forward motion. 

The animations were the main visual event. They were projected on a rear screen and on the simple movable cubes and columns that made up most of David Ogle’s set design, coordinating well with Robert Bloom’s lighting. Patrick McCollum’s movement direction and choreography synchronized the human characters with the images.

The opera strives for a nuanced view. It avoids any sense of triumphalism over Jacobs’s victories. “Jones Beach (1927),” which opens Act II, is about how some of Moses’s efforts to create amenities—access to the sea, public parks, swimming pools—for New Yorkers were applauded and appreciated at the time. It was only later that the basic incompatibility of urban life with lots of cars, along with the racist connotations of “urban renewal,” became clear. For a contemporary context, the celebrations of the opening of the newly renovated Geffen Hall included a paean to San Juan Hill, the racially diverse neighborhood that Moses tore down to build Lincoln Center. 

The larger problem has not been solved. The struggle between a top-down planning strategy and one that embraces how people actually live, along with the question of who gets to make the decisions about how change happens, remains a pertinent concern today, and not just in New York City. Still, one couldn’t help feeling relieved when the huge red shapes, representing dehumanizing housing-project buildings, that hovered over Manhattan in Mr. Frankel’s animation, ready to replace blocks of vibrant existing neighborhoods, suddenly dissolved into bits and floated away, like butterflies.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Davóne Tines collaborates with Jennifer Koh at BAM in a performance that delves into both artists’ life stories, and with Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory commemorating the 50th anniversary of Morton Feldman’s tribute to Rothko Chapel.

Davóne Tines and Jennifer Koh in ‘Everything Rises’ at BAM

PHOTO: ELLEN QBERTPLAYA/BAM

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 18, 2022 5:17 pm

Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Everything Rises,” a 70 minute-long work presented at BAM Fisher recently, tackles complex issues in an extremely personal way. Opera singer Davóne Tines, who is black, and violinist Jennifer Koh, who is Korean-American, both highly successful performers of Western classical music, bonded over their feelings of estrangement from its historically white culture. Efforts to diversify notwithstanding, that whiteness remains dominant—in the repertoire, the performers, the presenting institutions, and, perhaps most critically, the audience that buys the tickets. To survive within it, Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh feel pressure to mask their true selves, or “code-switch.” In “Everything Rises,” they shed the masks while still embracing the music that they love.

The piece has an all-BIPOC creative team—Ken Ueno, music and libretto; Kee-Yoon Nahm, narrative structure and dramaturgy; Alexander Gedeon, director; Hana S. Kim, projection and set designer; Carolina Ortiz Herrera, lighting designer; Lena Sands, costume designer—and much of the text is adapted from interviews with the two performers about their feelings and experiences. The tightly structured and thoughtfully produced show begins with an archival video: the 17-year-old Ms. Koh in her triumphant 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition concerto performance, embodying the stereotype of the over-achieving young Asian musician. Then Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh enter. They seem trussed in their formal concert wear, and Mr. Tines, in the lowest, gravelly depths of his voice, accompanied only by a recorded drone, addresses the “dear white people” for whom “I’m just a thing / a Ming vase, a Picasso / you bought and sold me,” as well as his self-hatred for wanting that “money, access, fame.” This disturbingly frank and naked moment is followed by Ms. Koh’s violin solo, which scratches and shrieks her inner anguish behind the mask.

The rest of “Everything Rises” explores the two artists’ family histories, deftly alternating live performance and recorded audio recollections from Alma Lee Gibbs Tines (Mr. Tines’s grandmother) and Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh (Ms. Koh’s mother), who also appear on silent video. The matriarchs speak with the toughness of survivors—one a descendant of enslaved people, recounting stories of lynchings and violence; the other a Korean War refugee and solitary young immigrant to the U.S., driven to succeed through assimilation. Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh, having changed into elegant matching long black skirts, riff seamlessly on these narratives. In “Fluttering Heart,” for example, Mr. Tines transforms Soonja’s words into a meditative lullaby about loneliness—she laughs, but he sings the painful subtext, and then Ms. Koh plays it.

Trees—“the tree of humanity”—are a pervasive symbol. Broken branches in the video, an arched piece of driftwood carried by Mr. Tines, even Ms. Koh’s wooden violin—reaching their apogee in the penultimate song, the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit.” Mr. Tines sings that harrowing depiction of lynched bodies in a new version, with its text and melody rearranged and stretched, as Ms. Koh plays while lying flat on her back on the floor, against a background of abstract but ominous video images. The final song, “Better Angels,” offers a positive answer to the earlier question, “To whom does the music belong?”—suggesting it as “a language in which you and I are the same.”

The most moving aspect of the piece is the potent musical connection of these two superb performers: It gives them the strength to express their buried histories and traumas, using their artistic virtuosity, for an audience that is accustomed to seeing them in a different guise. Both are practiced at breaking new ground within the classical world: Ms. Koh is spearheading The New American Concerto, a commissioning project; Mr. Tines will perform his “Recital No. 1: Mass,” a program that weaves movements of a Latin Mass by Caroline Shaw together with music by Bach, Julius Eastman and others, at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 3, in Baltimore on Nov. 6 and in Philadelphia on Nov. 30. Mr. Tines will also be artist-in-residence at BAM in 2023. Yet the explicitly personal nature of “Everything Rises” demands that we see them unmasked and welcome their full experience as part of the canon.

***

New York 

Davóne Tines played a central role in another unconventional music event earlier this month: “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at the Park Avenue Armory. The piece, by Tyshawn Sorey, was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Inspired by Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” (1971), it is an eloquently spare work, with questioning fragments of melody left hanging in the air, the spaces between them as important as the notes themselves, inviting the listener to find their own meaning.

The Armory version, staged by Peter Sellars, was given a grander and gaudier vibe than the octagon of black Rothko canvases could possibly provide. On a raised platform, eight giant images of abstract paintings by Julie Mehretu encircled the audience; Mr. Sorey and the instrumental ensemble (Kim Kashkashian, viola; Sarah Rothenberg, piano/celesta; Steven Schick, percussion) were placed at the center. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, singing wordless syllables, was barely visible, and when Mr. Tines, who sat in the audience for the beginning of the work, stood and sang his booming first notes, the people just in front of him were clearly startled. Mark Urselli’s sound design made this all seem perfectly natural.

Mr. Tines’s fragments were from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and Mr. Sellars had him journey slowly around the space, first to the musicians, then up and around the platform. The paintings seemed alive, their smudged backgrounds and flicked lines of color transformed over time by James F. Ingalls’s protean lighting. Each painting had a human animator as well: a dancer performing flexn choreography by Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray. Their contortions could be distracting—the dancer with seemingly double-jointed shoulders was hard to watch. But as Mr. Tines made his way back to the musicians and hummed the end of his melody along with the viola, the meditative, lost-in-the-darkness atmosphere of the piece seemed to resolve into a welcome homecoming.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

This season brings genre-pushing variety, from the premiere of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’ to Rossini’s rarely seen ‘Otello.’ 

Timur and the Dime Museum perform live with the film of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 4, 2022 5:47 pm ET

Philadelphia

After two years of pandemic-imposed hiatus, Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking festival returned this fall with some new twists. The festival has always looked to the future, and the medium of opera on film has exploded recently as producers searched for alternatives to live performance. Festival O22’s marquee event was thus the premiere of David T. Little’s opera film “Black Lodge.” O22 also presented “Opera on Film,” 12 screenings encompassing several dozen wildly different takes on the intersection of those two mediums.

“Black Lodge” demands some advance work: Last November, I saw a preview screening cold and was baffled. This time, I was prepared for the piece’s literary, filmic and theatrical inspirations in the work of the surrealists William S. Burroughs, David Lynch, and Antonin Artaud. Mr. Little’s score, Anne Waldman’s libretto and director Michael Joseph McQuilken’s screenplay depict a man trapped in the Bardo—here a nightmarish space between death and rebirth—endlessly reliving the worst thing he has ever done. That event is based on Burrough’s accidental 1951 killing of his wife, whom, in one version, he shot while drunk as part of a William Tell stunt.

With context, you can appreciate the project’s artistry. Timur Bekbosunov, frontman of the glam rock band Timur and the Dime Museum, is an operatic tenor with a remarkably protean instrument—in “Black Lodge,” he sounds alternately like a baroque countertenor, a baritone, a rocker and a crooner. The piece is scored for string quartet, rock band and electronics; Timur, his band, and the Opera Philadelphia String Quartet performed it live at the Philadelphia Film Center, which was exciting, if extremely loud. (Ear plugs were provided.)

“Black Lodge” is a dark, unredemptive vision. It ends basically where it begins, in a large industrial space with Timur (the Man) in a swinging chair next to a 1950s-era TV with his face on it. In between, he undergoes shock treatment, gets covered in clay, and visits both a forest with a string quartet and a desert with a thrashing rock band. A dancer (Jennifer Harrison Newman) portrays, among others, a sinisterly masked medical technician, a bartender who splits in two, and the victim of the killing in a suburban living room. 

Projected titles were essential to understanding Ms. Waldman’s gnomic text; they were, alas, small and hard to follow at the same time as the fast-moving images. Yet this time, I could feel the human anguish under the noise and horror. The climactic killing scene was interrupted by a howling interlude in the desert: As the screen was splashed with comic book-style gun explosions and blood, and the music recalled the infernal electronic drone at the end of Mr. Little’s “Dog Days,” the text that rose to the surface was, hopelessly, “The answer is no.” A recording will be released next spring; the film streams on the Opera Philadelphia Channel beginning Oct. 21.

“Black Lodge,” which was developed and produced by Beth MorrisonProjects, was reimagined as a film due to the pandemic, and seems made for the medium. Of the three Opera on Film screenings I saw, Arizona Opera’s “The Copper Queen,” which had a traditional operatic structure and score (by Clint Borzoni) and was shot entirely on one set, was the most conventional. Still, director Crystal Manich used the immediacy of film closeup to showcase soprano Vanessa Becerra in an impressive performance as Julia, the passionate ghost of a mining town whore. I was intrigued by “After/Glow,” directed by Ryan McKinny, which imposed a more complicated narrative—a ménage à trois with a tragic ending—on Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe.” The film was layered with additional poetry by Marc Bamuthi Joseph; the Schumann was sung and played by the splendid countertenor John Holiday. Director E. Elias Merhige’s “Polia & Blastema” was a cipher, more film than opera with its sci-fi visuals, a pair of clay-encrusted women, and soprano ululations in the background. 

Kristen Choi with dancer Muyu Ruba in ‘The Raven’

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

Festival O22 also brought back live theater. “The Raven” (2012) Toshio Hosokawa’s monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players, probes deeply into the terror and loss of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem through a jagged, atonal setting that stretches the scansion out of its familiar rhythm. Directed by Aria Umezawa, featuring mezzo Kristen Choi, and conducted by Eiki Isomura, it was ingeniously mounted at the Miller Theater with the audience surrounding the action on bleachers, runway-style, on the stage. Overhead, scenic designer Jennifer Hiyama’s hanging sculpture looked like an undulating drift of white paper that had been chewed by termites; discarded manuscript papers and photographs were strewn on the floor.

Ms. Choi embraced the piece’s wide range of pitch and dynamics, shifting from whispers and Sprechstimme to full-throated song (the first time on the word “Lenore,” the name of speaker’s dead love). She was equally intense in her movement, interacting with a dancer (Muyu Ruba) wearing a bird mask and a black robe with giant sleeves. Ariel Wang designed the Japanese-influenced costumes, hair and make-up. 

In a pre-show opener by the theater collective Obvious Agency, half a dozen performers, in white costumes draped with red cords, all claimed to be “Lenore” and engaged the audience in groups. It was not illuminating. These Lenores also turned up midway through the main part of the show, stripped off the dancer’s robe and mask, and revealed that she was also Lenore.

Tenor Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

O22’s most traditional offering was Rossini’s “Otello” (1816), a diva showcase, though not exactly the expected one. Unlike Verdi’s version, the plot unfolds entirely in Venice (here called Adria) and the hatred/jealousy angle is spread more widely, incorporating Elmiro (Desdemona’s father) and Rodrigo, Elmiro’s preferred candidate for her hand, as well as Otello and Iago. Other than Elmiro (bass-baritone Christian Pursell), they are all tenors, and Rodrigo (Lawrence Brownlee) has the flashiest music. Mr. Brownlee had the notes and the agility for the role, but his delivery throughout felt effortful—impressive, but not comfortable.

His colleagues were less exposed, with more recitative and ensemble writing than stand-alone arias. Khanyiso Gwenxane’s softer-edged tenor made for an ardent, expressive Otello, though the Rodrigo-Otello antagonism felt less potent than it could have. Alek Shrader was a nicely toxic Iago; Mr. Pursell a properly stiff Elmiro. 

The star of the show was mezzo Daniela Mack, who gave a rich-voiced, poignant performance as the unfortunate Desdemona, fought over by men and heard by none of them. Only her confidante, Emilia (an affecting Sun-Ly Pierce), pays any attention to her. The murder scene, which has Otello chasing Desdemona around the room and insisting that she’s unfaithful, was regrettably more comic than tragic. Although conductor Corrado Rovaris tended toward grand gestures rather than transparency, the deft Rossinian construction of the opera’s trios, quartets and the like made the piece worth hearing. 

The production, from Belgium, had traffic-cop direction by Emilio Sagi. The post-World War I design, with a single set by Daniel Bianco, costumes by Gabriela Salaverri and lighting by Eduardo Bravo, placed the action in the vestibule of a stately home with a dispiritingly gray color scheme. Numerous liveried servants kept moving the furniture around during Act 1; by Act 2, the furniture was, curiously, draped in dust sheets. The show could have used some of the visual energy of “Black Lodge.”

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The Metropolitan Opera is mounting this diva vehicle (in Italian) for the first time in a new David McVicar starring Sondra Radvanovsky.

Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Sept. 28, 2022 5:11 pm

Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” (1797) is a diva vehicle, which should have made it a perfect choice for the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday. Originally written in French with spoken dialogue and subsequently translated into Italian with recitatives, it was embraced by Maria Callas, the consummate diva, in 1953. The Met is mounting it (in Italian) for the first time to showcase soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who has the vocal goods and stage presence for the role of the revenge-crazed sorceress. However, the opera itself, even in this eye-catching new production directed and designed by David McVicar, is a creaky thing. Midway through Act 2, during Giasone and Medea’s heated exchange about their children, I started wondering idly if a good divorce lawyer could have solved their problem. That’s not the desired reaction; rather, one should be transfixed by Medea and the extreme exaggeration of her character. She wants Giasone back. If she can’t have him, there will be hell to pay.

Medea

The Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York 
$32.50-$302.50, 212-362-600, closes Oct. 28 

As you may recall from Greek myth, Medea helped Giasone (Jason in the original) acquire the Golden Fleece, murdering several of her own family members in the process. Giasone has now abandoned her, taking their two sons, and is planning to marry Glauce, daughter of Creonte, King of Corinth. At the start of the opera, wedding preparations are in progress and Glauce is understandably concerned that Medea will turn up and cause trouble. She does. When we first see her, she’s lurking in a tattered black dress, with smeared eye makeup and snaky hair, outside the palace, a hulking fortress-like wall whose bronze patinaed doors slide open to reveal life going on without her. To ensure that we get the full view, Mr. McVicar made the rear interior wall a giant, tilted mirror that reflects the stage picture, disorientingly, from above and in reverse. 

Once Medea finally arrives—there’s half an hour of introductory material—it’s all about her. Ms. Radvanovsky started off well, demonstrating Medea’s cunning: her slow, incisive vocal delivery and movement were deliberate contrasts with the hysteria provoked by her appearance in all the other characters. Even her pleading with Giasone (a forthright, self-important Matthew Polenzani) had a duplicitous edge, and when she dropped her pretense to call on hell to punish him, her tone narrowed tellingly. However, the metallic character of Ms. Radvanovsky’s potent, disciplined soprano became monochromatic after a while, so by the middle of Act 2—and certainly Act 3, when Medea is in full cry—there wasn’t enough variety in it to sustain interest, let alone sympathy. Even her vacillations about whether to kill the children in order to punish her perfidious husband were not very convincing. She’s nuts, and we know where this is going.

That was a problem since the opera’s drama is all internal. Cherubini and his librettist—François-Benoît Hoffman; Italian translation by Carlo Zangarini—supplied only flimsy antagonists and background action. Glauce (delicately sung by Janai Brugger) basically disappeared after her opening scene and aria. Creonte (a bluff Michele Pertusi) and Giasone made brief, unsuccessful attempts to bully, corral and patronize Medea; chorus scenes like the plodding wedding march and the lengthy act preludes had little musical profile despite the efforts of conductor Carlo Rizzi. Only mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova as Neris, Medea’s confidante, stood out with her lyrical lament “Solo un pianto,” gorgeously accompanied by a solo bassoon. The aria is about how Neris feels Medea’s grief and for a moment, we had a visceral sense of where all the fury began. 

Janai Brugger and Michele Pertusi

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

Yet even during Neris’s aria, Mr. McVicar made sure that the fury was still present: During its final section, Medea opened a trunk and examined the poisoned robe and diadem that she will give to Glauce as a wedding gift. There were many such directorial touches. Giasone’s crew, the Argonauts, were dressed as pirates and did a jaunty dance as they presented Creonte with the Golden Fleece and a chest full of treasure. This outlaw garb, like Medea’s, differentiated them from the Corinth courtiers, who were elegantly dressed in French neoclassical style. (Doey Lüthi designed the costumes; Jo Meredith the movement; Paule Constable the lighting). 

The tilted mirror’s best function was to visually amplify certain staging elements at different moments. The image of the banquet table stuffed with glowing candelabra in Act 1, and the bride’s enormous veil, covering much of the floor in Act 2 were combined to grisly effect in Act 3, when Glauce, in her poisoned robe, writhed in mortal agony on her belly atop the blood-stained tablecloth. The murder of the children, thankfully, took place offstage. The final mirrored image of Medea lying with her sons in a ring of fire (the projections were designed by S. Katy Tucker) was oddly serene, since her final words to Giasone are basically, “See you in hell!” It seemed like a last-ditch plea for sympathy, like the lovers’ suicide tableau in the movie of “Sophie’s Choice.” Something closer to the original 1797 staging, in which Medea flew off in a fiery chariot, would probably have been more suited to this performance. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the U.S. premiere of a new staging of the classic Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick/Joseph Stein musical, as well as a traditional production of Verdi’s tale of three high-born men in the 16th century competing to marry one woman. 

Steven Skybell as Tevye

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 20, 2022 4:40 pm ET

Chicago

Making standard repertory feel new and immediate is the eternal challenge of the opera house; now Lyric Opera of Chicago has accomplished that with an unexpected work: “Fiddler on the Roof.” The story and tunes of the 1964 Joseph Stein (book)/Jerry Bock(music)/Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) musical—Tevye the milkman, his marriageable daughters, the shtetl, “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset”—are as baked into American culture as the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But this gripping production by Barrie Kosky, the Australian-born director who spent 10 years as head of the Komische Oper Berlin, gives the show an edgy, anxious darkness. It’s still set in 1905, in Anatevka, a poor, tightly knit Jewish community not far from Kyiv in imperial Russia, yet one can’t miss the contemporary relevance in a world teeming with refugees. The production had its premiere in Berlin in 2017; who would have known that five years later, present-day Ukrainians—albeit mostly non-Jews this time—would be fleeing their homes once again.

Instability and poverty are signaled by Rufus Didwiszus’s Act 1 set, a towering construction of old wardrobes that rotates on a turntable in front of a fuzzy photographic backdrop of bare trees, and Klaus Bruns’s costumes, all in drab shades of brown and gray. Wardrobes are used for comic effect—characters crawl through their doors to enter and leave the stage; Tevye and his wife, Golde, sleep in one. Yet the village built from them is makeshift. In Act 2, the construction is gone and snow is falling. Tevye’s family fragments and the community members, heading into exile, stack a few remaining bits of furniture in a pile and leave it behind to be pilfered by the locals.

The company of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

PHOTO: LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

In this production, the strength of the community is its people, powerfully depicted in the many big chorus numbers. For “Tradition,” villagers flood the stage, waving their arms with manic intensity; in “To Life,” 12 male dancers are stunningly choreographed by Otto Pichler (original) and Silvano Marraffa (revival) with an almost brutal physicality. Comedy also gets its big moment: Tevye’s nightmare, which he invents to get out of his agreement to marry Tzeitel, his eldest daughter, to the butcher Lazar Wolf, is hilariously packed with skull-headed dancing demons.

The lighting (by Diego Leetz; re-created for the Chicago by Marco Philipp) also plays a vital role: In the wedding of Tzeitel and Motel, so easy to stage as an outpouring of sentimental kitsch, the bride and groom stand isolated in light, as if in an old photograph, while the shadowed ensemble sings “Sunrise, Sunset,” here sounding like a memory of perpetual loss. Lyric fielded a potent 40-member chorus; with the dancers, and numerous actors and supernumeraries, in addition to the 18 principal singers, this was a very big show.

Maya Jacobson as Chava, Lauren Marcus as Tzeitel and Austen Bohmer as Hodel

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

Paced astutely by Mr. Kosky, the principal performers, all music-theater specialists rather than opera singers, made the book scenes, with their hoary jokes, sound fresh. As Tevye, Steven Skybell (who also starred in the landmark Joel Grey production in Yiddish) wrestled sincerely with the changing world, especially his daughters’ insistence on choosing their own husbands; his refrain, “On the one hand . . . on the other hand” felt genuine, as did his conversations with God. “Do You Love Me?” sung with Golde, had the hesitant approach of a man coming to grips with something new; in “Chavaleh (Little Bird),” his despair over his daughter Chava, who has married a Christian, felt bottomless.

Debbie Gravitte was a sensible Golde; as Hodel, Austen Danielle Bohmer brought a pure, heartrending soprano to the devastating ballad “Far From the Home I Love.” Lauren Marcus (Tzeitel) and Maya Jacobson (Chava) were lively, as were the three suitors (Drew Redington, Adam Kaplan, Michael Nigro), with Mr. Redington (Motel) turning in an exuberant “Miracle of Miracles” as the timid tailor suddenly finds his voice. Joy Hermalyn was a classic, kibbitzing Yente; Melody Betts, a hilarious, cleaver-wielding ghost of Fruma Sarah in Tevye’s nightmare. Drake Wunderlich, a fifth-grader, was the endearing link to today—in a green hoodie and jeans, he rode onstage on a scooter, pulled a violin out of a wardrobe and played the eponymous fiddler’s tune, summoning Tevye, Anatevka and the story.

Omi Lichtenstein as Bielke, Liliana Renteria as Shprintze, Steven Skybell as Tevye and Debbie Gravitte as Golde

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

Conductor Kimberly Grigsby kept the show percolating; the 33-member orchestra, larger than most Broadway pit bands and enhanced with mandolin, accordion and drum set, sometimes sounded scrappy but rose to the occasion in the extended klezmer-inspired sections, especially the Bottle Dance at the wedding. Peter Wiejaczka’s sound design was tinny and unnecessarily loud. And while the final scene suggests a happy ending for the wanderers—Tevye, Golde and their two youngest daughters are headed for America, perhaps to be the ancestors of the boy in the green hoodie—the memory of their forced displacement remains.

***

Russell Thomas in ‘Ernani’

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER

Lyric’s production of Verdi’s “Ernani” (1844) was pure tradition, but in a good way. The buoyant conducting of Enrique Mazzola, the company’s music director, demonstrated his profound understanding of the opera’s bel canto roots, and Louisa Muller, the director, embraced the absurdities of the plot and managed to make its conflicting debts of honor plausible. 

The shortish version: Ernani, a nobleman living as an outlaw after his father’s murder by the previous king of Spain, is in love with Elvira; Elvira’s elderly guardian, Don Ruy Gómez de Silva, and Don Carlo, the King of Spain, are also intent on marrying her. After various confrontations, disguises, and uncomfortable alliances made and broken among the three men, Ernani finally weds Elvira, only to be obliged to kill himself in fulfillment of an oath made to Silva.

Ms. Muller interpolated a nonsinging actor to play Ernani’s father—we saw the murder during the Prelude and he appeared sporadically as a reminder of his son’s noble heritage and desire for revenge. Scott Marr’s sets evoked early 16th-century aristocratic Spain with their Moorish-inspired decoration and air of chilly, empty grandeur, as did his dark-hued costumes and Duane Schuler’s moody lighting. (Lyric previously mounted this production in 2009 with a different director.)

Quinn Kelsey and Tamara Wilson in ‘Ernani’

PHOTO: LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

The principals were top-notch. Russell Thomas was a lyrically passionate Ernani, his tenor penetrating without being stentorian. As Elvira, the rich-voiced soprano Tamara Wilson brought youthful joy and hope to her opening aria, “Ernani, involami”; there’s little of that to be had in the opera, but Ms. Wilson managed to give her beleaguered character some sense of agency. Quinn Kelsey, his dark baritone exploding with rage and entitlement, created a Don Carlo mired in violence and brutality; his Act 3 decision to be a clement ruler was quite a surprise. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn gave Silva a coldly implacable authoritarian edge; his first costume, trimmed in what looked like wolf fur, suited him perfectly.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

In San Francisco, the celebrated minimalist’s newest opera attempts to balance political drama with romantic tragedy but is held back by its reliance on traditional tropes

Amina Edris and Gerald Finley

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 13, 2022 5:44 pm ET

San Francisco

The San Francisco Opera, celebrating its centennial this season, is optimistically touting the future of opera as a living art form rather than simply recalling the glorious past. In keeping with that theme, it opened the season with “Antony and Cleopatra,” a world premiere by John Adams, who blazed a new operatic trail in 1987 with “Nixon in China.” Now 75 years old, he is one of America’s most celebrated composers. 

With “Antony,” Mr. Adams has embarked on yet another path. Rather than setting another pastiche libretto created by Peter Sellars, his longtime collaborator, he adapted his own text from the Shakespeare play. With a complex narrative and three strong characters built in, his “Antony” is paced more like a drama than his oratorio-style works “Girls of the Golden West” and “Doctor Atomic.” The orchestration is inventive and encyclopedic; the sprawling dramaturgy well-corralled; the text setting clear. But why this story? Mr. Adams may have thought to measure himself against Verdi’s final Shakespearean masterpieces, “Falstaff” and especially “Otello.” But his style doesn’t lend itself to the grand catharsis of romantic tragedy; as in his earlier operas, the effect is intellectual rather than emotional. The lovers die, but we don’t weep for them. 

In consultation with director Elkhanah Pulitzer and dramaturge Lucia Scheckner, Mr. Adams strategically narrowed the libretto’s focus to the political conflict between Antony, the great Roman warrior, and the young Caesar (Octavian). Once allies following the murder of Julius Caesar a decade earlier in 44 B.C., they are estranged due to Antony’s liaison with Cleopatra, the fascinating Queen of Egypt. Antony, the “old lion,” is dallying in the fleshpots of the East and neglecting his military obligations. Summoned to Rome and married off to Caesar’s sister Octavia, Antony soon returns to his lover. Caesar declares war on them; Cleopatra’s ships flee in the battle of Actium, and when Antony follows his humiliation is complete. That’s Act 1. Act 2 includes Caesar’s lengthy demagogic speech about his world-domination intentions (interpolated from Virgil’s “Aeneid”; Caesar would become Augustus, the first emperor of Rome) and the serial suicides of the defeated lovers. 

There should be a dramatic balance between Rome and Egypt, but in the opera the strength of Caesar’s calculating, ruthless character, communicated with ferocious directness by tenor Paul Appleby, means that the lovers don’t have a chance. Mr. Adams’s music evokes a languid, seductive atmosphere in the Egyptian scenes, but Cleopatra herself, sung by the eloquent soprano Amina Edris, seems more manipulatively petulant than magnetic in her “infinite variety.” Poor Antony, a despondent Gerald Finley, repeatedly tries to break free and reclaim his soldier’s honor but gets pulled back in again and again. Various male characters—including Antony—call Cleopatra a whore, and the production concept, which depicts her as a screen siren in 1930s Hollywood, plays up the performative nature of her mercurial personality. It’s hard to pull that off and be sympathetic, and Ms. Edris, who took over the part when Julia Bullock, for whom it was written, dropped out due to pregnancy, doesn’t have a big enough stage presence. 

A scene from ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Musically, there are splendid moments. The love scenes in which Cleopatra draws Antony back into her orbit have a magical serenity. The opening of Act 2, when they reconcile after the Actium disaster, has an elegant Stravinskian clarity, as the lovers first talk past each other and then kiss; Antony’s death is a poignant, long-breathed sigh, tuning out the world of the martial, brass-heavy Roman sequences. 

The orchestral writing is kaleidoscopically grand, particularly during the scene changes, and Mr. Adams drops in the occasional sly reference, like a quote from Wagner’s “Ring” as the set shifts from Rome to Egypt before Actium. One ingenious orchestral flourish is the use of the cimbalom, whose percussive twang gives the score an exotic color without making it ethnically stereotypical. The vocal writing is carefully tailored for textual intelligibility, and each of the principals has a distinct vocal character—Cleopatra’s undulating seductiveness, Antony’s struggle, Caesar’s implacability. Supporting roles are also notable: the smooth-tongued Roman general Agrippa (baritone Hadleigh Adams); the throaty Charmian, Cleopatra’s attendant (Taylor Raven); the upright Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong); Antony’s loyal lieutenant Enobarbus (Alfred Walker). The chorus goes from horrified observer (narrating the battle of Actium) to sycophantic echo of Caesar’s “rule the world” speech, making a long sequence seem even longer and scarier. Conductor Eun Sun Kim ably balanced grandeur with intimacy. 

Mimi Lien’s sets effectively used the device of a camera lens opening and closing to frame the scenes and transition seamlessly from Alexandria to Rome and Greece. Period (1930s) newsreels evoked the Roman crowds and Caesar’s political prowess; giant images of his face contorting as he delivered his oration suggested Mussolini; they contrasted with images of Cleopatra, the movie star, gazing impassively. (Bill Morrison designed the projections; David Finn the filmic lighting.) Constance Hoffman’s costumes—Cleopatra’s negligees and flowing jumpsuits, the suits and military uniforms of the Romans—also set up the dichotomy and ensured the eventual Roman triumph. Ms. Pulitzer’s directing worked best in the intimate scenes; the battle of Actium, with supernumeraries carrying sails and flashing lights, was hard to follow. 

Is “Antony and Cleopatra” representative of the future of opera? One could infer a contemporary political commentary about a republic giving way to an empire that crushes all in its path. But in choosing a Shakespearean text—and not deconstructing it, in the manner of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” for example—Mr. Adams hews to a traditional narrative, and the heroine dies in the end. At least she’s not a victim. For a more modern story, we’ll have to wait until June 2023, when San Francisco does Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” or for the 2023-24 season, when Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” about the aftermath of a school shooting, will be on the bill. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

In her final season as artistic director, she presents a comedic Rossini pastiche, ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Carmen’ and a thematically linked double bill of ‘Taking Up Serpents’ and world premiere ‘Holy Ground.’

Keely Futterer in ‘Tenor Overboard

’PHOTO: KARLI CADEL/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Aug. 16, 2022 5:21 pm ET

Cooperstown, N.Y.

Francesca Zambello’s final season as artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival reflects many of the initiatives that she pursued over her 12-year tenure, efforts to lift it out a period of doldrums and turn it back into a must-visit summer destination. Repertory innovations included classic American musicals staged with full orchestra and no amplification; new productions of recent and classic American titles; and the commissioning of Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s “Blue,” one of the best new operas of the past 20 years. In casting, she tapped famous singers, such as Eric Owens and Christine Goerke, to serve as artists in residence, and went out of her way to hire and promote BIPOC artists. She hired conductor Joseph Colaneri as music director to get the orchestra into shape. She developed a Youth Ensemble, commissioning some wonderful new operas for performance by young people, and she expanded the company’s community reach with visits to Attica (the maximum-security prison), as well as lectures, concerts and other events. 

During the pandemic, she improvised: an appealing series of short films in 2020 and an outdoor festival, complete with specially built chalets in addition to lawn seating in 2021. A constant presence on the grounds, Ms. Zambello exudes seemingly inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm, and under her leadership the festival has, for the most part, done the same. 

Ms. Zambello has a populist bent, and the surprise delight of 2022 was “Tenor Overboard,” a confection devised by playwright Ken Ludwig, Mr. Colaneri and dramaturge Kelley Rourke in which lesser-known Rossini extracts were repurposed as musical numbers in a new comic script. Mr. Ludwig’s book is old-fashioned and a little corny—a 1940s caper on an Italy-bound ocean liner featuring two sisters disguised as men, their pursuing father, a male vocal quartet, and an egomaniacal film actress—but the music, along with slightly massaged texts, is so wittily integrated that it doesn’t matter. Musical selections—all sung in Italian—are as varied as “La danza” (a famous Luciano Pavarottiencore, here arranged for male quartet); the Act I finale of “L’italiana in Algeri,” an a cappella mourning ensemble from “Stabat mater”; and a buffo number from “Il viaggio a Reims.”

Jasmine Habersham and Reilly Nelson in ‘Tenor Overboard’

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

The game young cast played the comedy with aplomb. The standout singer was Keely Futterer as the daffy Jean Harlow-esque actress Angostura, who knocked out the bravura “Bel raggio lusinghier” from “Semiramide” (a Joan Sutherland staple) with total command. Mr. Colaneri’s effervescent conducting kept the fun bubbling throughout. Co-directors Ms. Zambello and Brenna Corner did the same, dropping in sight gags like a wandering gondola and an octopus that flies on board during a storm, aided by James Noone’s playful set, Loren Shaw’s clever costumes, and Robert Wierzel’s heavily saturated, colored lighting. Good comedies are in short supply: This show would make a terrific gala event, especially with a raft of top-flight Rossini singers. 

Ms. Zambello’s championing of American musicals started shakily in 2011 with “Annie Get Your Gun” but has gained strength over the years. Memorable productions include “Carousel,” “Candide” (which is returning next summer), “Oklahoma!” and “West Side Story.” Ms. Zambello has judiciously seeded the Young Artist program with musical-theater-trained performers (who know how to dance) and for the most part cast music-theater specialists as principals when necessary. 

Mikaela Bennett, Nadia Buttermann and Michael Mayes in ‘The Sound of Music’

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

This year’s “The Sound of Music” was sumptuously produced. Clever backdrops enabled Peter J. Davison’s rotunda set to look convincing as both the abbey and Captain von Trapp’s elegant living room and Aleš Valášek’s costumes captured the period. Soprano Mikaela Bennett was vocally assured and charming as Maria; baritone Michael Mayes made Captain von Trapp’s metamorphosis from martinet to human being convincing; Alexandra Loutsion was an imposing Mother Abbess; Peter Morgan and Alyson Cambridge were nicely wry as Max and Elsa, the show’s cynics. Young Artist Tori Tedeschi Adams was a fine Liesl and the six younger von Trapp children were terrific, a credit to Glimmerglass’s work with its Youth Ensemble. Ms. Zambello’s direction made the Rodgers and Hammerstein show seem fresh rather than saccharine, and hearing the score played by a full orchestra, conducted by James Lowe, was a pleasure. 

Michael Mayes in ‘Taking Up Serpents’

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

Ms. Zambello has a mixed track record in recent and classic American operas. Standouts, in addition to “Blue,” were revivals of mid-20th-century works—Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” with Eric Owens and Robert Ward’s “The Crucible” with Jamie Barton. This year, a double bill of “Taking Up Serpents” by Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye(2018) and the world premiere of “Holy Ground” by Damien Geter and Lila Palmer offered contrasting looks at religion and parenting.

“Serpents” examines the toxic relationship between Kayla (the wiry-sounding Mary-Hollis Hundley) and her father, a snake-handling Pentecostal preacher (the dynamic Mr. Mayes). Ms. Sankaram’s well-shaped score, with its repeating motifs, eerie whirly tube interjections and full-on praise services, powerfully juxtaposes Kayla’s longings with her dominating environment. The piece has been revised since its premiere at Washington National Opera and given a fuller production—by Chloe Treat, with a set by James F. Rotondo III—that clarifies some elements. However, I was chilled to see that Kayla’s liberation from her fear appears to include a future in snake-handling. 

“Holy Ground,” by contrast, is an earnest imagining of a contemporary Annunciation: How might a new Virgin Mary accept the responsibility of incubating the Second Coming? A comic band of archangels—decked out in brightly colored satins and brocades by Trevor Bowen—deputize their youngest, Cherubiel (the lively tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes) to make the ask. (They’ve already been turned down by 489 women.) Their target, Mary (an affecting Jasmine Habersham), who is in the process of being married—in effect, sold to an older man as breeder—and wants more from her life, starts off a no but gets to yes. The score, which includes skillful vocal writing, is tuneful but conventional; the comic and serious elements don’t quite jell. Lidiya Yankovskaya was the incisive conductor for both operas.

Jonathan Pierce Rhodes and Jasmine Habersham in ‘Holy Ground’

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

Glimmerglass was my third, and thankfully last, encounter with Bizet’s “Carmen” this summer, and the chaotic production by Denyce Graves, once an arresting Carmen herself, did nothing to mitigate the pain. As Carmen, the dry-sounding Briana Hunter undulated through sexy poses; as Don José, an undirected Ian Koziara seemed to think he was singing Siegfried; Symone Harcum’s vocal wobble marred her Micaëla. Bass-baritone Richard Ollarsaba (Escamillo) introduced some vocal richness; his eye patch, man bun and slinky suit also supplied some danger. Otherwise, Oana Botez’s costumes went overboard on flowered skirts; Riccardo Hernández’s bleak set, along with the bulletproof vests on the soldiers and a mystifying green jumpsuit for Carmen in Act 3, suggested some vaguely contemporary time period. Mr. Colaneri was the efficient conductor. For standard repertory shows, Ms. Zambello’s legacy is better served by the Native American-inspired “Magic Flute,” the commedia dell’arte “Barber of Seville” or, back in 2011, a “Carmen” directed by Anne Bogart that stripped this chestnut to its essence: a battle to the death.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The 2022 roster includes the world premiere of ‘M. Butterfly,’ plus productions of ‘Falstaff,’ ‘Barber of Seville,’ ‘Carmen’ and ‘Tristan und Isolde’–the company’s first Wagner in over 30 years. 

Kangmin Justin Kim and Mark Stone

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN/SANTA FE OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Aug. 9, 2022 5:34 pm

Santa Fe, N.M. 

This season’s Santa Fe Opera world premiere, “M. Butterfly” by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang, is an absorbing new incarnation of Mr. Hwang’s 1988 hit play, which was drawn from the true story of a French diplomat who carried on a 20-year affair with a Chinese, female-presenting Peking Opera performer without, apparently, realizing that his lover was a man. The two were tried for espionage in 1986: The Chinese lover was a Communist government spy. 

The play was ahead of its time, examining Western assumptions about Asians through the lens of gender, and using Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” as a touchstone throughout. Today, gender fluidity and the orientalist constructs of “Madama Butterfly” are regular topics of discussion rather than shocking reveals. The “M. Butterfly” opera deploys them, through astute dramatic and musical choices, to investigate the political and emotional landscape of this story more deeply.

The diplomat, René Gallimard (baritone Mark Stone), tells the story through flashbacks from his French prison cell, still boasting of how he was able to enjoy the love of “a perfect woman.” He meets Song Liling (countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim) at an embassy party in Beijing in 1964 and is entranced by her singing of “Un bel di,” which reflects his fantasy of the submissive Asian and the virile westerner. That fantasy will persist throughout their relationship, even when his related geopolitical opinions—“Orientals will always submit to a greater force”—are proved wrong by events in Vietnam. 

Huang Ruo’s music slyly underlines the Frenchman’s point of view. There are hints of Puccini—a humming chorus, a snippet of the love scene. Sections focused on westerners have an insistent rhythmic edge as opposed to the gauzy, dreamy atmosphere of the scenes with Song. Brief clangs of Chinese percussion do warn us that there are other forces at work, as do the fervent People’s Liberation Army scenes. 

Yet the music, with its pervasive sense of ambiguity and instability, also asks us to wonder what Song is thinking, especially given Gallimard’s stiff, unromantic vocal persona. What slowly becomes clear is that Song, who is gay, an actor, and a member of the elite, has been forced to construct the character that Gallimard loves and spy on him in order to survive in a society that tolerates none of those things. Fans of John le Carré will relate. 

Mr. Kim, with his mellowly alluring sound, was extraordinarily adept at conveying artifice disguised as sincerity, even when he literally stripped naked. Mr. Stone’s performance as the pathetic dupe was courageously unsympathetic. Kevin Burdette, Hongni Wu and Joshua Dennis ably sang supporting roles; the chorus was lively as bored expatriates and Gallimard-mockers. Carolyn Kuan was the acute conductor. 

James Robinson’s precise staging clarified the complex web of time periods and motivations, aided by Christopher Akerlind’s pointed lighting. In set designer Allen Moyer’s mostly black-and-white palette, Song’s red boudoir—complete with divan, Chinese screen and fringed lamp—popped; so did Song’s colorful qipao and kimono, designed by James Schuette. Greg Emetaz created evocative scene-setting projections of cityscapes and Mao propaganda; Seán Curran’s choreography recalled “The Red Detachment of Women.” 

Santa Fe doesn’t usually do Wagner—just three productions of “The Flying Dutchman,” the last in 1988, in over six decades—so this season’s “Tristan und Isolde” was a major event. The orchestra, under the impassioned leadership of James Gaffigan, rose handsomely to the occasion. The show also provided a showcase for some impressive young Wagnerians—Tamara Wilson, a powerful Isolde with ringing top notes and whose tender “Liebestod” was worth the wait to the end of the evening; Jamie Barton, a playful Brangäne; and Nicholas Brownlee, a strong-voiced Kurwenal. Eric Owens brought gravitas and excellent diction to King Marke; Simon O’Neill’s harsh, steely tenor made for a very long Act 3, which is basically Tristan dying. 

The production took abstraction to boring extremes, with a set of geometric, mottled white walls (Charlap Hyman & Herrero), vaguely medieval costumes (Carlos J Soto), lighting that alternated between glaring white and stygian dark (John Torres), and pose-and-sing direction (Zack Winokur and Lisenka Heijboer Castañón). 

Quinn Kelsey

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN/SANTA FE OPERA

Verdi’s “Falstaff” fared better. The production by David McVicar (director and designer) was staged with just the right comic flair on a Globe Theatre-inspired wooden structure of balconies and staircases; the final masquerade scene was a hilarious riot of grotesques. Quinn Kelsey was a superb Falstaff: His booming baritone and outsize stage presence perfectly captured the fat knight’s humanity along with his outrageous pomposity. The rest of the competent cast did not reach his level, though Eric Ferring’s aria as Fenton showed off his bright tenor; Paul Daniel conducted with wit and pizzazz. 

Jack Swanson, Kyle Miller and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN/SANTA FE OPERA

By contrast, Stephen Barlow’s antic production of Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” tried too hard for comedy. Expensive-looking elements included the set (a hollow, rotating head with a giant topiary mustache for Doctor Bartolo’s house), 15 chorus men in mariachi costumes to accompany Count Almaviva’s opening serenade, and six bullfighters getting haircuts in barber chairs to go with Figaro’s “Largo al factotum.” (Andrew D. Edwards was the designer.) Some of the anachronisms clashing with the mostly 18th-century costume design—such as Almaviva’s Mormon missionary disguise—were genuinely funny; others, like having Bartolo (Kevin Burdette) do a yoga routine in mid-aria, were distracting. The star of the show was Jack Swanson, whose ebullient tenor and imaginative vocal ornamentation made Almaviva enormously fun. As Rosina, Emily Fons’s best moment was the music lesson; conductor Iván López-Reynoso opted for speed rather than subtlety. 

Michael Fabiano and Isabel Leonard

PHOTO: CURTIS BROWN/SANTA FE OPERA

Director Mariame Clément’s dark take on Bizet’s “Carmen” suggested that the eponymous heroine’s much-vaunted freedom is an illusion and, like all women, she exists at the mercy of men. Some of the ideas resonated: The cigarette women were caged behind a chain-link fence and ogled by the soldiers like animals in a zoo. Others felt incoherent: such as a child Carmen introduced into the action, miming how little girls are conditioned early to play their adult roles; and the elements of a broken-down amusement park—a carousel horse, curtained booths, and a skeleton-festooned haunted house that appeared for a few seconds before rotating out of sight. (Julia Hansen designed the sets and costumes.)

Stripped of her agency, Isabel Leonard’s Carmen seemed to be trying to disappear, though she sang the music well and even played the castanets skillfully during her Act 2 dance for her lover. This left the field wide open for Michael Fabiano, whose explosive Don José dominated the show. Even his “Flower Song,” gorgeously sung, with no hint of strain, felt of a piece with this characterization of a man whose confidence in his right to control a woman tips into insanity. Michael Sumuel brought easy power to Escamillo. Other pluses were the use of spoken French dialogue instead of recitative, which sharpens the story, and Harry Bicket’s sensitive conducting that took the orchestra beyond mere color and into commentary.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith’s new, luxuriously cast opera, which premiered in Cincinnati, depicts cousins at odds over family property in 2008’s American South and the complex history of their black ancestors. 

Reginald Smith Jr. and Talise Trevigne

PHOTO: PHILIP GROSHONG

By Heidi Waleson

July 26, 2022 5:24 pm

Cincinnati

What makes a narrative operatic, demanding to be sung rather than spoken? In the haunting final aria of “Castor and Patience,” given its world premiere by the Cincinnati Opera at the School for Contemporary and Performing Arts on Thursday, all the other characters fade away as Patience (soprano Talise Trevigne) sings: “What happened hasn’t left us. What happened is. We’ve got to tend to it. That’s what the ancestors tell us.” Here, music and the text deftly encapsulate the message of the opera, a richly layered tale about a black American extended family and its fraught relationship with land, history and obligation. But up until that moment, composer Gregory Spears (who wrote the justly praised “Fellow Travelers”) and first-time librettist Tracy K. Smith (a two-term U.S. poet laureate) only intermittently reached that standard. Much of “Castor and Patience” felt more like a play with accompaniment: “Death of a Salesman” with tunes. And without the death.

The complexities of Ms. Smith’s original story reveal themselves gradually over nearly 2 1/2 hours of music. Castor, who lives in Buffalo, N.Y., brings his wife and two teenage children to visit his cousin Patience at her island home in an unspecified Southern state. It is 2008; he is in grave financial difficulties and hopes to persuade Patience to sell some of their jointly owned land to bail him out. But Patience views the land as more than an economic entity: It connects her to her ancestors, the formerly enslaved people who bought it and the descendants who managed to hang onto it against all odds. For her, selling land to rich developers means cultural erasure, and she sees Castor’s alienation from those familial and spiritual roots as the true cause of his suffering.

And Castor’s suffering is intense, conveyed in several explosive arias by the imposing baritone Reginald Smith Jr. He is about to lose his Buffalo house, which was purchased by his father, who left the island when Castor was a child. He feels weighed down by guilt; emasculated by his failure to provide for his family; under existential threat from white people; and shadowed by an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Raven McMillon and Reginald Smith Jr.

PHOTO: PHILIP GROSHONG

But the juxtaposition of this titanic pair—the shamanistic Patience and the disintegrating Castor—is embedded in a complicated web of other characters, all with their own issues, and expressed in a libretto that is mostly prose, with lines like, “Last week she turned up with a great big case of tissue boxes.” In one scene, Patience’s adult son West (baritone Benjamin Taylor) and Castor’s children Ruthie (soprano Raven McMillon) and Judah (tenor Frederick Ballentine) have an awkward conversation about feral cows and racial profiling. It’s interesting, and gives information about the characters and their situation, but you still wonder, why are these people singing?

The 36-member orchestra, led by Kazem Abdullah, supplies a subdued, minimalist underpinning, a gentle, tonal river that flows along under the voices with occasional outbursts of brass and percussion. When Ms. Smith turns to poetry, Mr. Spears writes vibrant, soaring arias that make us snap to attention. But in between, the pace often sags as the libretto, rather than the music, is tasked with building up the complete picture, incorporating many details that ultimately seem peripheral, and tending to tell rather than show. The ending is ambiguous, though since Patience gets the last word, we are urged toward the idea that if Castor’s family dropped the idea of selling the land, gave up their northern existence and remained on the island, everyone would be healed.

The opera was luxuriously cast. In addition to the charismatic leads, Jennifer Johnson Cano brought urgency to Celeste, Castor’s white wife; Mr. Ballentine was a wonderfully bristling Judah, struggling on the edge of adulthood; Ms. McMillon was affecting as his younger sister. Mr. Taylor, though hampered by the need to sing in a mask due to Covid-19 protocols, effectively made West the translator between the two worlds; as his sister, Wilhelmina, Victoria Okafor had two standout arias, both poignant explorations of how loss can be a blessing.

The five excellent ensemble members, each playing multiple roles, helped supply context from the past. In a scene depicting the family’s 19th-century, newly landowning forebears, tenor Victor Ryan Robertson had an arresting cameo about how freedom “gave work a different hue.” And in an 11th-hour revelation scene, set in 1966, Amber Monroe and Phillip Bullock, as Castor’s parents, Clarissa and Cato, explicated the very personal reason for their move to the North. Ghostly wisps of a hymn, “I’m not ready to go home, Lord,” kept all that history alive in the present-day scenes.

Director Kevin Newbury set out the conflicts clearly; set designer Vita Tzykun used scrims and S. Katy Tucker’s projections to evoke the trees and marshes of the island, as well as a few furniture pieces for the interiors and the ferry dock and rail that symbolized the island’s remoteness. Thomas C. Hase’s lighting helped create a sense of the past that is always present, while Jessica Jahn’s costumes captured the multiple historical periods as well as the characters’ personalities. Patience’s brightly colored, flower-patterned dresses made her stand out as the voice of the land—and, finally, perhaps, the winner of the argument.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

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The company’s 50th season highlights the strength of its programming with the premiere of ‘A Thousand Acres,’ based on Jane Smiley’s novel, and stagings of ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

Elise Quagliata and Roger Honeywell

PHOTO: DUANE TINKEY

By Heidi Waleson

July 13, 2022 5:26 pm

Indianola, Iowa

Air travel being what it is these days, it was a challenge to get to central Iowa last weekend for the Des Moines Metro Opera’s 50th anniversary season. Still, an unplanned two-hour drive across the state, with lush green fields of corn and other crops unfolding mile after mile along the highway, proved an apt prelude to the world premiere of Kristin Kuster and Mark Campbell’s “A Thousand Acres.” Based on Jane Smiley’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the opera, like the book, is about poison infusing that verdant landscape: the patriarchal toxicity of land acquisition and exploitation, and how women become the victims of the farmer’s heroic narrative. 

Mr. Campbell’s libretto efficiently condenses Ms. Smiley’s story, a version of “King Lear” told from Goneril’s point of view set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s. Larry, the patriarch, impulsively divides the family farm among his three daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline, and then descends into dementia. As his rage and erratic behavior sow discord and distress among the daughters and their husbands, the family’s buried history gradually comes to light. The deepest wound is Larry’s sexual abuse of Ginny and Rose when they were teenagers; additionally, Ginny’s five miscarriages and Rose’s cancer probably resulted from fertilizer and pesticide-polluted well water. Caroline, protected by her older sisters, escaped Larry’s ravages and became a lawyer; she, ironically, becomes her father’s ally in his fight to regain the land from Ginny and Rose. By the end, all but two of the main characters are dead or out of the picture; the farm is lost; and Ginny has escaped to a new life, free of the burden of those acres and all they mean.

Even at a generous 140 minutes of music, the opera feels crammed with plot—there are 16 scenes, plus a prologue and an epilogue—and the prosaic text gives the characters little opportunity to connect emotionally. At the same time, the arias, however vocally expansive, are accompanied by dissonant minimalist vamping featuring a handful of orchestral instruments. In the resulting harmonic astringency, everything starts to sound the same. 

Some moments do break through. Early on, mellifluous duets demonstrate the bond between Ginny and Rose; in a tryst between Ginny and Jess, an old friend who returns to the neighborhood after a 13-year absence, the underlying marimba beat and trumpet solo signal Ginny’s awakening feelings; and the harsh dissonances between voice and horns work well for the aria in which Rose tells Ginny about Larry’s abuse. Brief orchestral interludes between scenes also supply color and dramatic impulse, displaying Ms. Kuster’s skill as an orchestral composer; this is her first opera. 

Mezzo Elise Quagliata gave an impassioned performance as Ginny, a middle-aged woman painfully breaking out of her role as the obedient daughter who made breakfast for her father every day for two decades. Soprano Sara Gartland was excellent as the volatile, truth-telling Rose; Grace Kahl’s coloratura gave a self-satisfied edge to Caroline. Keith Phares, Taylor Stayton and John Moore did solid work as husbands and lover. As the raging Larry, tenor Roger Honeywell sounded strained and in extremis all the time, which may have been deliberate, but it was hard to listen to. David Neely was the effective conductor. 

The Pote Theatre at the Blank Performing Arts Center, DMMO’s home auditorium, is unusual. The orchestra plays underneath the large thrust stage, its sound emerging through a rectangular opening in the center, and the theater’s 467 amphitheater seats place the audience very close to the singers. Designer Luke Cantarella’s small, moveable sets—a kitchen, a porch—and evocative video limned the farm environment, and Valérie Thérèse Bart’s 1970s costumes aptly established the period. Director Kristine McIntyreused the whole space creatively. In the show’s most chilling moment, as Ginny cowered in her childhood room, replaying her recovered memory of Larry’s approach, her bed was so close to the audience that you could feel her terror.

Michelle Johnson and Kevin Deas

PHOTO: DUANE TINKEY

The theater’s intimacy made the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” feel larger than life, given the powerful voices in the cast and the sound of the excellent 35-member vocal ensemble in full cry in this chorus-heavy show. Kevin Deas was a forthright Porgy, Michelle Johnson an ebullient Bess—her final flight made it even clearer how hard she had been working to conform to the “good woman” expectations of Catfish Row. As Serena, Leah Hawkins’s explosive, wailing, “My Man’s Gone Now” was a high point and the acrobatic Jermaine Smith brought out the malevolence beneath Sportin’ Life’s reptilian charm. Also strong were Jacqueline Echols (Clara), Norman Garrett (Crown) and Lucia Bradford (Maria); the veteran bass-baritone and native Iowan Simon Estes made his company debut in a cameo as Lawyer Frazier; of the featured performers, Demetrious Sampson Jr. was delightful as the Crab Man. All the singers were unusually convincing in the libretto’s dialect, and Michael Ellis Ingram led the impressive orchestra. R. Keith Brumley’s simple, representational set, Harry Nadal’s costumes, Robert Wierzel’s lighting and Tazewell Thompson’s idiomatic, thoughtful staging supplied a fitting frame for all this musical richness.

John Holiday

PHOTO: DUANE TINKEY

Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was uneven. Elizabeth Askren’s conducting captured the score’s magic, as did countertenor John Holiday, a subtle, ethereal Oberon; Sydney Mancasola’s strident Tytania did not. Eight children played fairies, but they only sang the lullaby at the end of act 2, leaving the rest of the fairy music to four oversinging adult women, which radically altered its character. Of the lovers, Alexander Birch Elliott(Demetrius) and Tamara Gura (Hermia) were more persuasive than Isaiah Bell (Lysander) and Susanne Burgess (Helena). The rustics, led by the hilariously confident Bottom of Barnaby Rea, were uniformly strong. Chas Rader-Shieber was the witty director. 

Jacob A. Climer’s designs were especially noteworthy: In addition to his atmospheric forest, the fairies were splendidly arrayed in sumptuous, all-white Elizabethan garb; the lovers in purple and gold college colors, including cheerleader pom poms and a varsity letter jacket; the clever homemade outfits for “Pyramus and Thisby” included a wall woven out of beer cans worn by the hard-drinking Snout (Corey Trahan) and a headdress made out of a bellows for the bellows mender Flute (Michael Kuhn). Such high production values and careful casting make DMMO a find, however difficult it may be to get there. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan). 

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s spring season includes Tobias Picker’s new opera about neurologist Oliver Sacks’s patients suffering from sleeping sickness.

Katharine Goeldner, Andres Acosta, Marc Molomot and Jarrett Porter (foreground) in Tobias Picker’s ‘Awakenings’

PHOTO: ERIC WOOLSEY

By Heidi Waleson

June 27, 2022 5:54 pm

Webster Groves, MO

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis returned to full programming this spring for the first time since the outbreak of Covid-19 with a pair of new works originally intended for its seasons in 2020 and 2021, which were, respectively, cancelled and abridged. 

Tobias Picker’s “Awakenings” is a sensitive adaptation of the eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks’s 1973 book about a group of institutionalized patients who, stricken during the 1920s with encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness), had been locked into mostly speechless, motionless lives for decades. In 1969, using L-dopa, then newly shown to be effective in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Sacks “awakened” these patients, who had Parkinsonian symptoms, to near-normal functioning. Sadly, the drug’s effects were transitory and fraught with side effects, and the patients returned to their earlier states.

Sacks’s is a collection of detailed case studies; Aryeh Lev Stollman’s poetic libretto follows the basic narrative arc of the well-known 1990 film adaptation, framing it with a choral prologue and epilogue recounting the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale and zeroing in on three patients. Mr. Picker’s elegiac, autumnal score, with its eloquent writing for solo string players, treads delicately in these stories of unrealized possibility: Rose (Susanna Phillips), once an aviator with a fiancé; Miriam (Adrienne Danrich), whose infant daughter was taken from her; and Leonard (Marc Molomot), whose awakening is fraught with intense sexual feelings for the nurse, Mr. Rodriguez (Andres Acosta), and apocalyptic hallucinations. Leonard’s devoted mother, Iris (Katharine Goeldner), prefers him in his gentle, unawakened state; her line, “Maybe best to let him be” captures the ambiguity of this medical experiment and its outcome. 

Dramatic tableaux worked well: In an early scene in the institution’s dayroom, the joy of the newly revived patients is expressed in lilting waltz time; in act 2, as the patients and staff celebrate the miracle cure with a party, a sudden switch into jagged, uptempo dance music triggers Rose’s relapse into Parkinsonian symptoms, signaling the ultimate failure of the drug. At times, the libretto becomes too poetic and takes the score with it: A quintet scene in the New York Botanical Garden about the discovery of love sags. The addition of an awakening theme for Sacks (Jarrett Porter), who did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality until shortly before he died in 2015, felt grafted on, in part because Sacks’s musical personality was muted. His love for his patients comes through, but their stories and struggles are more immediate.

Standout singers included Ms. Phillips, whose generous soprano and vivid acting captured Rose’s understanding of her state—a woman in her 60s who still feels that she is 21 years old. Mr. Acosta brought a bright tenor to Mr. Rodriguez, the apex of a triangle of unrequited love—Leonard’s for him and his for Sacks. Mr. Molomot’s high, jagged tenor gave Leonard’s transformation believable dramatic instability. Roberto Kalb’s conducting deftly balanced the transparent orchestration. 

Allen Moyer’s simple set—some moveable glass panels and misty projections—established locations, mostly in the hospital; James Schuette’s costumes evoked the period. James Robinson’s astute direction incorporated telling details—Leonard, newly awakened, ecstatically smokes a cigarette; Miriam, her L-dopa losing potency, has arm tremors—and Christopher Akerlind’s lighting took the story into brightness and then back into shadows. 

***

Melissa Joesph, Zaikuan Song, Raquel Gonzalez, Thomas Glass and Jesus Vicente Murillo in the new performing edition of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s ‘Harvey Milk’

PHOTO: ERIC WOOLSEY

Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s “Harvey Milk” had its world premiere in 1995 at the Houston Grand Opera. The story of the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco, who was assassinated—along with Mayor George Moscone, by his fellow city supervisor Dan White—in 1978, the opera was a big, sprawling show, a three-act pageant of gay liberation. The new two-act version, commissioned by Opera Parallèle and OTSL, has radically trimmed the number of secondary characters, the size of the orchestra and some of the scenes, narrowing the focus to Milk and his mythic resonance. Just in case we don’t get it, there’s a white-clad Messenger aligning Milk with Moses, the prophet who does not get to enter the promised land.

It still doesn’t quite work. Act 1 packs in a lot and feels long: Milk’s closeted New York youth and its tropes—opera, clandestine trysts in Central Park, secret lovers, fear of police harassment—are juxtaposed with Kaddish-chanting Holocaust refugees, reminding the Jewish Milk that silence equals death. After the Stonewall uprising, we get Milk, now out and prominent in San Francisco, entering politics, and we meet his antagonist, Dan White, ex-cop and fireman, clinging to the good old days. Act 2 has a tighter story arc, as Milk and White clash on the Board of Supervisors and White, frustrated and outmaneuvered, takes revenge. 

The musical material is diffuse, with episodes seeming unrelated to each other, and the words take precedence. Some of the big chorus numbers, like Stonewall and the Milk Train campaign, have jaunty energy, and moments like when a trio warns Harvey to watch out for Dan White snap into focus. However, the arias meander, Harvey’s love duets don’t feel erotic, and the sound of the Kaddish doesn’t read as Jewish, diluting that thematic reference.

Baritone Thomas Glass played Milk with an insouciant irreverence; tenor César Andrés Parreño, a company Young Artist who valiantly replaced a Covid-positive colleague for all but the first performance, brought a chilling edge to White. Bass-baritone Nathan Starkwas so distinctive in three different roles—the leather-clad Horst in New York, the Teamster who joins Milk’s San Francisco campaign and the back-slapping Moscone—that I didn’t realize it was the same singer. Tenor Jonathan Johnson was sweet as Scott, Milk’s lover; countertenor Kyle Sanchez Tingzon stood out as the Messenger (the voice type switch from the original baritone was a plus). Carolyn Kuan was the skilled conductor.

Mr. Moyer’s design centered on a row of closets used for quick changes and in the end, symbolically empty; Mr. Akerlind’s lighting, also symbolically tended towards purple. Seán Curran choreographed and co-directed with Mr. Robinson, bringing the group scenes to life, though Mr. Schuette’s low-budget costumes meant there was not a single drag queen at Stonewall. 

***

Bizet’s “Carmen” is everywhere this summer; how to make it new? OTSL’s production was performed in a clunky English translation by Amanda Holden. As directed by Rodula Gaitanou, it featured a Carmen (the forthright Sarah Mesko) demonstrating her free spirit by riding a motorcycle and wearing pants, and a pregnant Micaëla (Yunuet Laguna, prone to oversinging). Adam Smith, as Don José, also oversang, though his Act 4 sublimation of toxic masculinity into madness was arresting. Christian Pursell, a stalwart Escamillo, seemed the most at ease of the principals, and Rachael Nelson, a flamenco dancer, enlivened act 2. Cordelia Chisholm’s basic set—a wooden wall and pole—and modern-day costumes testified to a limited budget. The show’s best element was the lively orchestra, under the incisive leadership of Daniela Candillari. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

The festival returns to a full performance schedule after two years with works including ‘Omar’ by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels and Yuval Sharon’s production of ‘La Bohème’

Jamez McCorkle as Omar PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER

By Heidi Waleson

May 31, 2022 5:42 pm

Charleston, S.C.

Spoleto Festival USA has returned to a full performance schedule this spring—after the cancellation of its 2020 season and a reduced version in 2021—with a new general director in place. Mena Mark Hanna, age 37, the son of Egyptian immigrants and a scholar of cultural imperialism in the arts, came to Charleston from Berlin’s Barenboim-Said Akademie, where he was the founding dean and a professor of musicology and composition. Revised perspective was a theme of the 2022 Festival’s operas, notwithstanding the fact that the marquee event, the twice-postponed world premiere of “Omar” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, was conceived and developed by Mr. Hanna’s predecessor Nigel Redden, who retired after 35 years. 

“Omar” is about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured from Futa Toro (in present-day Senegal), transported to America, and sold into slavery in Charleston in 1807. His autobiography, written in Arabic in 1831, survives. Ms. Giddens, a virtuoso vocalist, fiddle and banjo player, and songwriter, is devoted to reviving American black roots music. She wrote the libretto; to expand her musical vision into an operatic structure, she enlisted Mr. Abels, best known for his scores for films by Jordan Peele.

The autobiography is short on detail, so Ms. Giddens imagined Omar’s inner and outer lives. Act 1 has action: his capture and transportation; the slave market; Johnson, his cruel first owner; and his escape. Act 2 is more about atmosphere and philosophy: Omar’s Arabic writing on the walls of his jail cell in Fayetteville, N.C., leads Owen, a local plantation owner and devout Christian, to buy him with the intention of converting him. Omar, who died in 1864, still enslaved, did indeed convert; the opera fudges that point, and trails off into musings on commonalities between the two faiths.

Laquita Mitchell as Julie PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER

Ms. Giddens also invented some supportive female characters—Omar’s mother, killed in the raid where he is captured, remains a steadying, pious voice in his head; Julie, an enslaved woman, guides him to Fayetteville; Owen’s young daughter tells her father about Omar’s writing (“like a little flock of birds in the sky”) and his praying. Still, the opera is more a collection of tableaus than dramatic scenes. Some of those, particularly the chorus numbers, are powerful: the voices of captured Africans who died at sea; a weary work song on the Johnson plantation; a jolly dance on the Owen plantation. 

However, the tonal, lushly orchestrated score is pleasant but bland. There’s African drumming and some fiddling, but no banjo, and the fresh twang of Ms. Giddens’s compositional voice seems drowned in treacle. Even the arias, impassioned and often well-shaped, feel like ballads blown out of proportion, and the occasional jarring end rhymes (betrayed us/raid us) would make more sense in a music-theater setting, with spoken dialogue and songs, rather than an operatic context. In the libretto, Omar is urged to “tell his story,” but this softened depiction of a hideous time, and particularly the lack of clarity about how he might have struggled with conversion, pushes the piece into uplift territory, which seems odd for the subject.

After Jamez McCorkle, the affecting Omar, injured his leg in rehearsal, director Kaneza Schaal restaged the show around him in a wheelchair in Act 1, contributing to the feeling of stasis in scenes that should have crackled with tension. (In Act 2, when Omar is no longer fleeing, Mr. McCorkle stood and walked gingerly.) Cheryse McLeod Lewis and Laquita Mitchell brought soaring passion to Omar’s Mother and Julie; Malcolm MacKenzie differentiated Omar’s two owners nicely; Adam Klein was strong as the folksy Auctioneer. Conductor John Kennedy ably led his large forces; the chorus was particularly fine. Production designer Christopher Myers and set designer Amy Rubin implied locations using simple materials— mostly draped fabric and projections that included Arabic writing, period images like slave auction posters, and a video of black people square-dancing. The costumes by April Hickman and Micheline Russell-Brown cleverly evoke period dress in Africa and America; they are decorated with Omar’s Arabic script. 

Matthew White as Rodolfo and Lauren Michelle as MimiPHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER

Yuval Sharon’s production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” offers an unusually fresh take on a chestnut: The acts are played in reverse order. It’s not just a gimmick—it works. With John Conklin’s simple set—a tilted, rotating disc; a few bits of furniture—no intermission, and a cut in Act 1, the story becomes one of swift, fleeting youth, the bareness of the characters’ physical lives contrasted with the richness of their dreams. We also leave the performance with the memory of Act 1’s explosion of hope and promise, rather than the story’s sad conclusion, and the rich-voiced Lauren Michelle (Mimi) and the poignant Matthew White (Rodolfo), nicely warmed up at the end of the evening, did their most fervent singing as brand-new lovers. 

The interpolated Wanderer (George Shirley) succinctly narrated the scene changes; his time references (“two months earlier”) underlined the brevity of this love affair. Mr. Sharon’s acute direction accentuated the relationship game-playing of Musetta (Brandie Sutton) and Marcello (Troy Cook); Schaunard (the standout Benjamin Taylor) and Colline (Calvin Griffin) were also a couple here, markedly calmer than the other two. Kensho Watanabe conducted the sometimes overly exuberant orchestra. Jessica Jahn’s modest period costumes and John Torres’s atmospheric lighting were right on point.

Karim Sulayman and John Taylor Ward in ‘Unholy Wars’PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER

“Unholy Wars,” conceived by the Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman, seeks to reframe the “otherness” depiction of Middle Eastern people by European Baroque composers. The centerpiece of the 70-minute show is Monteverdi’s “Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” in which the crusader Tancredi kills the Muslim warrior Clorinda, whom he loves, because he does not recognize her in their nighttime battle. (In her final moments, Clorinda asks for Christian baptism.) Other pieces by Monteverdi and his contemporaries surround “Combattimento,” tracing a story of a man falling in love with a beautiful “Woman of the East” and then mourning her death. 

Mr. Sulayman, soprano Raha Mirzadegan and bass-baritone John Taylor Ward sang the music with stylish elegance and intensity, accompanied by an excellent period-instrument octet led by violinist Julie Andrijeski. The reframing, subtle but palpable, came through in the staging, directed by Kevin Newbury and with water and sand to stand for desert and sea; the brief interludes of haunting electronic music by Mary Kouyoumdjian that separated the Baroque pieces, leaving space for contemplation; the choreography by Ebony Williams, performed by the eloquent dancer Coral Dolphin and the singers (who were impressive in the battle choreography); and the mesmerizing black-and-white animated drawings of Kevork Mourad, in which Jerusalem kept being built, destroyed, and then built again. The program’s love story felt like a metaphor for the fate of the city and its people. Mr. Sulayman delivered the show’s final aria, “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s “Rinaldo” (a century later than “Combattimento” but based on the same literary source), as an exquisitely naked lament for the loss of freedom. Then, during Ms. Kouyoumdjian’s postlude, the city rose again.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Anthony Davis’s opera about the iconic Black Power figure starts a nationwide series of engagements in Detroit. 

Davone Tines as Malcolm X (center)PHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

May 23, 2022 5:22 pm

Detroit

In 1986, when Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” had its world premiere at the New York City Opera, its title character was still considered a highly polarizing figure, remembered more than two decades after his 1965 assassination as a fiery speaker who talked about race war and white devils. The opera house, a traditionally white environment onstage and off, seemed like an uncomfortable venue for his story. “X” nonetheless sold out its four performances—and then basically disappeared. 

Times have changed. In the last decade, new works by black creators telling the stories of black characters slowly started to appear on opera stages, a trend that accelerated after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and reached a broad public consciousness when Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera season last fall. Now “X” has been resurrected by a consortium of opera companies and given its first major, fully staged production since that premiere nearly four decades ago. Detroit Opera (formerly Michigan Opera Theatre), the leader of the consortium, opened the production on May 14; I saw the second performance on May 19, where it got a standing ovation from what appeared to be a substantially black audience. The show will be mounted at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera over the next three years. “X” will also have a semi-staged performance by Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Opera Project on June 17. The opera will then be recorded, for release on BMOP/Sound.

“X” is a significant work, genre-exploding in its form and musical voice. Its subject matter now seems less revolutionary. We have grown accustomed to operas based on modern day public figures, ranging from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atomic bomb, to Anna Nicole Smith, the gold-digging Playboy model. Malcolm X fits right in, and the opera concentrates more on his message of black self-empowerment than on his more incendiary rhetoric. 

Charles Dennis as Young Malcolm and Whitney Morrison as Louise, with dancers Christopher Jackson, Jay Staten, Eric Parra and Andre MalcolmPHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

Structured by story author Christopher Davis and librettist Thulani Davis, “X” follows the packed trajectory of Malcolm’s life. Act 1 depicts his Midwestern childhood, upended by his father’s violent death and the breakup of his family; his life as a young street hustler in Boston; and his conversion to Islam in prison. In Act 2, having shed his “slave name” of Little to become Malcolm X, a disciple of Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, he becomes a leader in the movement. In Act 3, he breaks with the NOI, makes a pilgrimage to Mecca, takes the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, forms his own movement, and is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom at the age of 39. 

However, the piece is more incantatory than narrative. In many of its scenes, only one named character speaks, backed up by the singers of the vocal ensemble, who echo key words and phrases, and repeat them over and over. In its best moments, the experience is like participating in a ceremony, a slowly unfolding realization of meaning and integration into a community. In the pit, where an improvising jazz ensemble of nine players, including trumpet, saxophones and vibraphone, is embedded into the orchestra, a complex, polyrhythmic pulse drives the evening. 

Mr. Davis’s powerful, hugely varied score cements each vignette in its mood and purpose. Malcolm’s mother, Louise, expresses her terror about the racist assaults the family has experienced in a winding, blues-tinged, chromatic aria; the hustler Street seduces Malcolm into a life of crime with a jaunty swing; the hallucinatory chorus of prisoners chanting “Allahu-Akbar” as Malcolm is drawn toward Islam nods to free jazz and Middle Eastern melisma. In one of the most powerful scenes, as Elijah Muhammad chastises Malcolm for disobedience and for being “too big for the Nation,” the choral repetition of “Betrayal is on his lips” acts like an orchestral bass line, driving the split between the two men. 

Ronnita Miller as Ella, Charles Dennis as Young Malcolm and Victor Ryan Robertson as Street PHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

Bass-baritone Davóne Tines was a gripping, theatrical Malcolm, making the most of the character’s monochromatic, declamatory vocal line and physically embodying his transformation from bitter hustler to magnetic, instinctive spokesman. (The adult Malcolm first appears an hour into the show; his vulnerable child self, predominantly a dance role, was ably performed by the pure-voiced Charles Dennis.) Tenor Victor Ryan Robertson got the best solo music and put it across: He was a sweet-toned seducer as both Street and Elijah Muhammad. Whitney Morrison’s metallic soprano turned shrieky in the higher ranges of Louise’s aria; she did better with the sympathetic loyalty of Betty, Malcolm’s wife. Ronnita Miller’s opulent mezzo made his sister Ella, who rescues him from foster care, a soothing presence. Joshua Conyers was stalwart as Malcolm’s brother Reginald, who introduces him to Islam. The hardworking 12-member chorus could have been sharper in the ensembles. Kazem Abdullah was the adept conductor. 

Theatrically, the opera has some longueurs, particularly when the choral repetitions go on too long. Director Robert O’Hara, best known for “Slave Play,” exacerbated those issues by stressing the opera’s mythic qualities and eliding its specificities of time and place. His interpretation made sense with the text’s rhetoric about Black self-determination; designer Clint Ramos’s Afrofuturist spaceship, suspended at the top of the set, signaled that hopeful future as well as providing a handy canvas for the mostly abstract video projections by Yee Eun Nam. Most of the performers took the curtain call wearing t-shirts with the “X” logo rather than their costumes, further shifting focus from the past to the present.

However, the playing area below the spaceship—an open space backed by a small, gold-framed proscenium stage—had to serve for every location, whether it was a dance hall, a prison or a street corner. As a result, some of the vignettes ran together, as in Act 2, when excerpts from five speeches by Malcolm, each with a slightly different message, seemed piled on top of each other. A riot scene heard in the orchestra, staged with four male dancers, was vague to the point of incomprehensibility; in other scenes, the dancers, choreographed by Rickey Tripp, added useful texture to the stage pictures. In the absence of set changes, Alex Jainchill’s lighting helped define context, as did Dede Ayite’s costumes, which limned Malcolm’s transformation from country bumpkin to hustler in a blue zoot suit to the elegantly tailored dark suit of the final scenes. Here Malcolm, declaring himself a man of peace, comes into his own; ironically, the opera ends abruptly with the gunshots that killed him. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).

Brett Dean’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy has its North American premiere at the Met. 

Jacques Imbrailo as Horatio and Allan Clayton as HamletPHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

May 18, 2022 5:37 pm

New York

I was ready tolove Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which had its North American premiere on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera. The video of the show from its 2017 Glyndebourne debut was gripping, a vertiginous journey inside the protagonist’s disintegrating mind. But in the Met’s much larger theater, Neil Armfield’s intimate production receded while Mr. Dean’s cacophonous orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Carter, expanded into a barrage of sound. By the end of the long (105-minute) first act, when Hamlet confronts his mother about her marriage to his uncle, the murderer of his father, it had become nearly impossible to focus on the singers or the action.

Mr. Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn pared Shakespeare’s play to 12 scenes, drawing from different versions of the text and mixing up the lines—Hamlet’s first words are “or not to be,” a fragmentary reference to the famous soliloquy that normally appears in Act III. The audience is expected to know the basic story and experience it as Hamlet’s nightmare rather than as a straightforward narration. Familiar snippets of text leap out, not necessarily connected to others. Even in this streamlined version, many words remain, leaving the listener to try to seize and comprehend them as they go by, not always successfully.

But it is the brassy, volcanic orchestra that drives this show. Extra musicians in the boxes next to the stage create antiphonal effects around the audience; electronics provide creepiness for the ghost scenes and others, while a chorus of eight singers in the pit adds an additional stratum of sound. Much of the solo vocal writing is angular and layered into the orchestral texture; the listener is grateful when a musical section catches the ear, such as Hamlet’s descending scale as he tells Ophelia “I did love you once,” or the brief, haunting quartet that echoes Gertrude’s phrase “Mad as the sea.” Other leavening ingredients include the accordion that accompanies the scenes with the players and the gravedigger; the cluelessness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is emphasized by making them a brace of twittery countertenors.

As Hamlet, tenor Allan Clayton is on stage in nearly every scene, physically and vocally expressive in conveying the character’s anguish and confusion as he thrashes around in seemingly constant delirium. Hamlet’s only point of stability is his friend Horatio (the sympathetic Jacques Imbrailo), to whom he can speak rationally. In perhaps the opera’s most moving moment, just before the final scene, he tells Horatio that he will win the duel with Laertes, yet his plain, fatalistic delivery suggests that he knows otherwise. The orchestration lets up on its assault for a breath, and the intimate moment carries. More of those would have been welcome.

The rest of the cast was equally committed. Rod Gilfry’s chilly, evil Claudius was mesmerizing. In Ophelia’s mad scene, Brenda Rae, smeared with mud and wearing only a man’s tailcoat and underwear, exploded with rage and sexuality. Sarah Connolly played Gertrude like a woman nearly catatonic with repressed guilt; William Burden made Polonius forthright and proper rather than comical; David Butt Philip was an aggressive Laertes. John Relyea brought a distinctive spin to each of his three roles: the ominous Ghost, the amiable chief Player, and the eerie, whistling Gravedigger. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and Christopher Lowrey (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) were creepily effective as Claudius’s unwitting tools.

Mr. Armfield’s production emphasizes the opera’s theme of mental disintegration. In Ralph Myers’s set, the panels of a plain 18th-century-style room break apart and are reorganized differently for different scenes; sometimes we see their reverse sides, as if we were backstage. Even the ceiling drops to create the gravedigger scene; it rises again as the room is reconstituted for the mayhem of the finale. Jon Clark’s lighting differentiates the supernatural scenes from the “real” ones; cleverly, sometimes the difference isn’t entirely clear. Several characters wear white-face makeup, adding to the disorientation. Alice Babidge’s costumes are inspired by 20th-century styles, with the men in black evening dress and the women in straight-lined, couture satin. Only Hamlet looks different, a creature apart in black T-shirt, jeans and pea coat, and Mr. Clark’s lighting zeroes in on him, the perpetual skeleton at the feast.

In Mr. Armfield’s direction, nothing is ever quite realistic, whether it’s Hamlet leaping around the stage like a child playing hopscotch, or the chorus lined up and facing forward, rigid as automatons. Then, in the final scene, the lights go on and we see where this has all been leading: Hamlet, set up by Claudius to die in his duel with Laertes, kills his tormenters—including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who had it coming—one by one. Revenge, and his own death, are both accomplished, and in this version there is no Fortinbras to pick up the pieces. It’s a stark and compelling conclusion, and with a bit less enthusiasm from the pit it might feel more like catharsis and less like a relief.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).