AndyManshel.nyc

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). 

0

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).

György Kurtág’s first opera, adapted from Samuel Beckett’s one-act play and completed at age 91, is filled with compassion for its four aged characters

Frode Olsen

PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE

By Heidi Waleson

May. 12, 2022 5:16 pm

The bleakness of György Kurtág’s opera “Fin de partie” (“Endgame”), now playing at the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier, could be a commentary on that theater’s ornamental excess: The opera’s four aged characters, trapped in a claustrophobic existence and waiting for an end that never seems to come, seem like the remnants of a civilization that collapsed under the weight of its own exuberant egotism. Yet Mr. Kurtág, who adapted and streamlined Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play into his first opera, which he completed in 2017 at age 91, has found beauty in that bleakness. The composer has deftly amplified and elaborated on the music of Beckett’s original French text with his own, building a new level of emotional resonance. Beckett’s bitterly comic banter remains, but Kurtág’s version is filled with compassion for these characters mired in exhaustion, desolation and especially old age

Hilary Summers and Leonardo Cortellazzi

PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE

They are not easily lovable. The blind, wheelchair-bound Hamm is a crotchety, self-important bully. He has no patience for his bickering, legless parents Nell and Nagg, who are confined to trash cans, or for the servant Clov, who wearily tends to the other three. Yet in Mr. Kurtág’s hands, we can feel for them. As portrayed by the remarkable bass Frode Olsen, Hamm becomes a tragic, Wotan-like figure, acting powerful, yet utterly powerless. When Nell (the touching contralto Hilary Summers) and Nagg (the beguiling high tenor Leonardo Cortellazzi) reminisce about the past, including the tandem-bicycle accident that cost them their legs, their laughter is built into the score, as is the mutual affection that suffuses their banter. The setting of Nell’s recollection of a day on Lake Como draws out the sound of the French words and phrases, such as “On voyait le fond ” (We saw the bottom), to make it even more wistful and elegiac. And when Clov (baritone Leigh Melrose) finally explodes in frustration about the feelings he’s never understood or expressed, we see the humanity of a character who, up until then, was a limping, awkward drudge.

Under the skilled leadership of Markus Stenz, the orchestra of 67 creates a precisely chiseled sound world, with low instruments prevalent, arranged like chamber music rather than in noisy tuttis. The opera starts with bleats of brass; fragments of melody are interspersed with silences. Individual characters sometimes have orchestral partners, like the bassoon that accompanies Nell or the low brass and muted timpani that take Hamm from domineering posturing to anguish. Instruments not commonly found in opera orchestras—a twangy cimbalom, two accordions, a steel drum—have a bracing, astringent effect, folk-like and ironic at the same time.

Leigh Melrose

PHOTO: SEBASTIEN MATHE

Director Pierre Audi devised the incisive production for the opera’s world premiere at La Scala in 2018. It went next to Amsterdam before arriving in Paris, all with the same splendid singers, who play off one another like a family. Designer Christof Hetzer’s stark, black scenery matches the opera’s tone—it shows the exterior of a simple hut, which rotates for every scene, providing a slightly different perspective—and Urs Schönebaum’s lighting is by turns glaring and gloomy. There are just a handful of props—a ladder, an alarm clock, a pole with a hook on the end.

The performers stand out against this desolate backdrop, their vivacity all the more remarkable since three of them use only their upper bodies. Details neatly reinforce character: Hamm’s sleeveless vest gives him a thuggish air, while Nagg’s hair, standing up in tufts, is of a piece with his comedic demeanor and the lengthy Borscht Belt joke that he tells, complete with voice imitations, about a tailor taking three months to make a pair of pants. Clov’s lurching gait and repetitive movements—in the first scene, he carries a ladder to a window, climbs it, descends, carries it to the other window, climbs, descends—make his ability to walk seem less normal than the stasis of the other three. Mr. Melrose is skilled at being off-kilter: At the end, when Clov has been dismissed and has supposedly left the stage, he stands frozen in place, clutching a suitcase and a sheet, poised for flight, throughout Hamm’s final monologue.

Even with these arresting performances, the piece feels slightly too long at two hours. Yet perhaps this is the point. As Hamm says at the outset: “It’s time it ended, and yet I hesitate to end.” Mr. Kurtág’s alluring score keeps the audience trapped in this suspended moment, in sympathy with these people who, despite the profound limitations and miseries of their lives, still want those lives to continue. The orchestral epilogue, which again begins with a wail of brass and fades into silence, hints scarily at the nothingness that is the alternative.

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).

Le chemin de St. Jacques from Cahors to Moissac and Paris

The Met’s new production of the Donizetti work, by Simon Stone and dubbed ‘Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life,’ transports the tragic tale to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day.

By Heidi Waleson

April 25, 2022 5:10 pm ET

Simon Stone’s remarkable new production of Donizetti’s “ Lucia di Lammermoor, ” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, updates the opera to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day and dubs it “Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life.” The show is a feat of technical wizardry, encompassing a turntable that revolves almost constantly—during the action and while set pieces are moved on and off it—as well as a lot of live and pre-recorded video. Yet the most startling effect is how profoundly this thoughtful interpretation erases the opera’s Romantic aura and accentuates its universal despair, upending the traditional balance of tragedy elevated through beautiful sounds. Here, the singers, especially the two splendid leads, really seem to be singing for their lives.

Based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott, set centuries ago in a world of warring Scottish aristocrats, the story translates neatly to the present. Enrico (Artur Ruciński) plans to marry his sister Lucia ( Nadine Sierra ) to Arturo ( Eric Ferring ) to revive the failing family fortunes. Their shared commercial interests aren’t specified—here Enrico seems to run a shady car business—but criminality is implied. Lizzie Clachan’s astonishing set, in which facades and cross-sections of buildings— including a pawn shop, a 24-hour pharmacy, a motel with a neon cross on its roof, and more—are jammed into claustrophobic proximity and viewed from constantly changing angles, evokes the seediness and desperation of the town. Video, some of it filmed in real time by onstage camera operators who follow the characters around, offers still more angles and closeups. We can watch Lucia climbing out her bedroom window to join her lover Edgardo (Javier Camarena) in the mini mart where he is a cashier while Enrico plots in his downstairs office. And that’s just the first scene. 

The direction explicitly heightens the opera’s central themes of escape and violence. Lucia visits the pharmacy and swallows some opioids; she is high when she sees the ghost at the fountain (a water treatment plant). The ghost, seen on video, is a young woman bleeding to death after being stabbed by her lover. Lucia and Edgardo meet behind the screen of a drive-in movie that is showing a 1947 Bob Hope comedy (an unlikely choice, but certainly escapist); Edgardo leaves his dead-end job to join the army. Enrico, threatening Lucia, seizes her by the hair and shoves her, a warning of worse to come. As Edgardo and Enrico face off at the end of Act 2, after Edgardo interrupts the forced wedding ceremony, a group of women in the background launch into a kicking, hair-pulling fight of their own. 

Ms. Sierra’s Lucia, in tight pants, crop top and a pale pink bomber jacket, is no fragile flower. With her crystalline soprano, bright, fluid coloratura and fearless ornamentation, she comes vividly alive and tries to resist her fate. Her mad scene feels more like a suicidal performance. Beautifully and confidently sung—especially the duet with the eerie glass harmonica—it is her construction of the wedding she wanted for the benefit of the guests. On the stage, she’s covered head to foot in Arturo’s blood (we’ve already seen his blood-soaked body in the motel room); in the video, she’s kissing Edgardo in the motel. There’s no collapse or vague death from the vapors—on the video, she grabs a gun and blood spatters on the wall behind her. There may be no way out for Lucia, but she took one male tormentor with her. There is some loss of poignancy as a result, however. Can we only feel for female operatic victims if they go without a fight?

Interestingly, the production gives space to the struggles of the opera’s men as well. Mr. Camarena, a thrilling bel canto tenor, makes Edgardo sympathetic as well as amorous and hot-headed. Even the bully Enrico, stalwartly sung by Mr. Ruciński, seems caught in the toils of economic decline. The scene at the beginning of Act 3, when Enrico, waving a whiskey bottle, leaves the wedding to challenge Edgardo to a fight, suggests that their mutual male aggression stems from a hopeless lack of options. For sheer unexpectedness, this had some of the poignancy that the subsequent mad scene lacked. Bass Matthew Rose avoided the unctuous manner that can affect Raimondo, the priest/confidant who betrays Lucia; his singing and demeanor were chillingly accepting of his own powerlessness, even as he sat beside Arturo’s bloody corpse. 

Conductor Riccardo Frizza’s stylish and buoyant reading of the score worked securely in tandem with Mr. Stone’s direction, reflecting its continual motion, yet knowing when to stop and expand into a moment, such as the long breaths of the Act 2 sextet. The chorus work improved after some coordination issues in the first scene. Costumes like Enrico’s drab plaid shirt and Arturo’s sharp pink suit, by Alice Babidge and Blanca Añón, helped cement the milieu. James Farncombe’s lighting made the set’s innumerable details pop, and evoked mood and time with clinical precision. As the buildings broke apart, turned, and were shoved together in different configurations, the audience could experience the disorientation that unmoors and destroys the opera’s characters along with them. 

—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 Los Angeles, Du Yun’s solo opera about a father’s struggles has its premiere and the Los Angeles Philharmonic teams with Deaf West Theatre for a unique take on Beethoven’s work. 

By 

Heidi Waleson

Updated April 18, 2022 6:29 pm ET

Los Angeles

In an early scene of Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes”—a solo opera commissioned, developed and produced by Beth Morrison Projects that had its premiere last week at Redcat as part of LA Opera’s Off Grand series—baritone Nathan Gunn, as an expectant father writing a journal, sings, “I have decided to become the protector of your story.” As the harrowing 70-minute piece unfurls, the nameless protagonist’s understanding of his power to protect or influence anything will undergo serious re-evaluation. His emotional shifts, exposed and parsed at a granular level through Michael Joseph McQuilken’s economical libretto and Du Yun’s multihued score, are the opera’s subject; the pregnancy’s agonizing trajectory is the agent of those changes. 

Optimism reigns through the first half of the piece. We hear about ultrasounds and the heartbeat; in a comic, jazzy section titled “Cravings,” the protagonist scours seven stores for items—including flax, coconuts and Moon Pies. Even the darker parts—the admissions of his need for attention and his alcohol dependency; a scary dream about diving into a frozen lake to rescue the child—end in resolutions to do better. The lake dream, for example, concludes with the line “I’ll hold my breath forever if that’s what it takes to save you.” But that classic, grandiose parental vow turns out to be useless. Midway through the opera and the pregnancy, we discover that the fetus, a girl, has a rare condition that is “incompatible with life.” The parents opt to carry to term in order to donate her organs and help other sick babies, but even that power, it seems, may be denied them. 

Mr. Gunn explores vocal expression far beyond typical baritone lyricism with whispers, speech and crooning into a microphone. There’s even a raspy, throaty howl of pain during “The Bar,” which is scored like a cacophonous death-metal song, as he has a dream about getting “blackout drunk” on learning the diagnosis. Every vocal turn seems authentic to the singer; even the lyric parts are never merely pretty but infused with raw feeling. Mr. Gunn disappears into this flawed person who ultimately finds strength he didn’t think he had. 

The six-member orchestra (violin, cello, clarinet/saxophone, trumpet, electric guitar and percussion), skillfully conducted by Kamna Gupta, conjures up an astonishing variety of timbres as the instruments solo, are mixed and set against each other or joined into a visceral wave. Each section—with a xylophone that sounds like a child’s toy; a muted trumpet suggesting hope in the midst of tragedy; a hint of a siren underlying squealing strings—reflects a new and different dive into the complexities of the protagonist’s emotions. 

The production, directed by Mr. McQuilken, with set and lighting by Maruti Evans and costumes by E.B. Brooks, is a physical metaphor for the protagonist’s struggle for control. The set is his workshop, where he assembles a crib, pries up a floorboard to find his hidden whiskey, and, in “The Bar” dream sequence, flips open a table to reveal a wall of bottles, hellishly illuminated in red. Filmed material adds texture, beginning with the opening sequence, a nonvocal, sparely orchestrated dream of a child who floats out of bed and through a house, past a father building model airplanes and a mother drinking tea, and out into the cosmos. In “Cravings,” the supermarket freezer cases scroll by; in “Legacy,” a father takes his daughter to buy a piano. As the piece proceeds, Mr. Gunn rips down the video screens and crams them into a trash can. By the end, it’s just him, taking stock of what he’s learned.

***

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s collaboration with Deaf West Theatre on Beethoven’s “Fidelio” last week at Walt Disney Concert Hall was intriguing in theory. In the semistaged performance, each singing character had a deaf actor counterpart, thereby creating a double show for hearing and nonhearing audience members. Solange Mendoza’s costumes, which resembled medieval robes, differentiated through color and fabric, with the singers in bulky layers of white and the actors in more fluid grays and browns; James F. Ingalls’s lighting helped focus attention appropriately. At times, director Alberto Arvelo had the singers stand still and serve as the voices for the ASL-signing actors; at others, the two performers playing the same character interacted with each other; and sometimes, everyone was in action together. Spoken dialogue passages were ASL-only, making for unusual onstage silences. Colin Analco was the ASL choreographer.

At first, it was fascinating to watch, especially given actors like Russell Harvard (Rocco), who conveyed an acute physical sense of the music’s pulse and duration and its aural power. But after a while, the broadness of the ASL gestures, necessary for them to read in the large theater, became distracting for this hearing audience member, especially in scenes with multiple characters. Ironically, operatic acting was once all semaphoric, a style that fell into disfavor with the modern emphasis on realism, and the gestures of the deaf actors at times seemed like a throwback. (Listeners unaccustomed to the over-the-top sound of the operatic voice might well think it similarly exaggerated.) 

The musical rendition had its own problems. As Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her imprisoned husband, soprano Christiane Libor was underwhelming, her pitch wavery and her line insecure. As her husband, Florestan, tenor Ian Koziara started out strong with his opening exclamation of “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!” but his power faded quickly, a liability in this vocally challenging role. The star of the show was Ryan Speedo Green, whose sumptuous bass-baritone gave the jailer Rocco buoyant heft and personality. Bass-baritone Shenyang was also vocally imposing as the wicked Don Pizarro, though his actor counterpart, Gabriel Silva, upstaged him, playing the classic dastardly villain in black. Gabriella Reyes was a sweetly innocent Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel pushed the tempi mercilessly, giving much of the performance a rough-and-ready feel. The stage setup, with the orchestra in front and the singers and actors on a raised semicircular platform behind it, meant better aural presence for the orchestra than for the singers.

The singing/signing duality worked well for the chorus parts. The Los Angeles Master Chorale sang eloquently from tiered seats flanking the stage while the Coro de Manos Blancas from Venezuela signed from the platform. The Coro’s rendition of the prisoner’s chorus, “O welche Lust,” with its synchronized gestures, communicated the same magical feeling of awe at release from bondage, however temporary, as the singing did. 

—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).