Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding team up for an operatic retelling of Euripides’ play.

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 14, 2021 5:22 pm

Washington

Opera is about voices and foundational myths, so what better place to give a voice to the voiceless and retell myths from alternative points of view? “… (Iphigenia),” an intriguing new opera by the jazz luminary Wayne Shorter and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, which was performed at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater this weekend, is the latest work to tackle those revisions. Like The Industry’s “Sweet Land” (2020), a multi-collaborator project that explored colonialism, and last month’s Met premiere, Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” which told the Orpheus legend from Eurydice’s point of view, “Iphigenia” rewrites a familiar story.

In Euripides ’ play “Iphigenia in Aulis,” the Greek armies, en route to Troy to retrieve the abducted Helen, wife of Menelaos of Sparta, are becalmed at Aulis. Their leader, Agamemnon, is told by a seer that the goddess Artemis will revive the winds if Agamemnon sacrifices his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. An ensuing battle of wills involving Agamemnon, Menelaos, the warrior Achilles, and Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, ends when Iphigenia agrees—begs—to be sacrificed for the good of Greece. Mr. Shorter and Ms. Spalding suggest that this acquiescence puts the words of the patriarchy into the victim’s mouth; in their “Iphigenia,” she finds her own.

The piece incorporates techniques not typically associated with opera. In the pit, an orchestra heavy on brass sonorities is contrasted with a fleet, improvisatory jazz trio— Danilo Pérez (piano), John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums), members of the Wayne Shorter Quartet, positioned on the stage. Characters adopt a range of vocal styles—traditional operatic singing; chanting; and speech, as in the role of the Usher ( Brenda Pressley ), who questions the received narrative. The six Iphigenias, including Ms. Spalding, often sing in wordless vocalises. Ms. Spalding’s libretto incorporates numerous poetically obscure lines (“Her pardon breaks awake your heart in re-earthing”) as well as lengthy quotations from other writers.

In Act I, the sacrifice is enacted several times, each with a different Iphigenia and a slightly different focus, but always stressing the brutal machismo of the Greek warriors with the pounding orchestra and the hectoring male voices (three principals and a chorus of six). Montana Levi-Blanco’s costumes, Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction and Jen Schriever’s lighting are deliberately over-the-top. As the warriors in their armor and plumed helmets march in circles, indulge in a drunken frat-party, and frantically ride a rocking horse (actually a deer), their antics recall Monty Python skits, but these absurd creatures have weapons. The Iphigenias, each wearing a different color, lie dead along the lip of the stage.

For Act II, the painted backdrop of trees and the stone altar (designed by Frank Gehry ) disappear, and the six Iphigenias are left alone on the dark stage, empty except for the instrumental trio, now revealed in a rear corner. Encouraged by the Usher, the individual Iphigenias sing, speak and chant their own thoughts (the texts are by Ganavya Doraiswamy, Safiya Sinclair and Joy Harjo) in a girl-power circle, supported by the trio, all in a much sparer, mellower musical vibe. The most affecting testimony is the last: As Iphigenia of the Open Tense, Ms. Spalding deploys her trademark vocalizations, the wide, looping leaps that start timidly and then press onward as though she is improvising her way into articulateness. (There’s a parallel moment in “Eurydice,” when the heroine first descends to the Underworld, tries to speak, has no language, and gradually acquires some.)

Act III plunges back into the myth with the men, the noisy orchestra and some new sculptural elements made of crumpled wire mesh (it’s unclear if they are trees or clouds). This time, the text is from the 1904 play “Iphigenia” by Charles S. Elgutter, and the creators exaggerate operatic tropes: Tenor Arnold Livingston Geis (Agamemnon), baritone Brad Walker (Menelaos) and tenor Samuel White (Kalchas, the seer) are practically bellowing at each other in their competitive rage. ( Kelly Guerra, also one of the Iphigenias, signals the opera sendup with a brief appearance as a Metropolitan Opera HD host/opera star at the top of the act.) Ms. Spalding, in a silver jumpsuit and sneakers, starts to play the virgin victim’s role as written, but, encouraged by the vocalizing of the other Iphigenias, breaks character and arrests the trajectory by mesmerizing the men with her own song until finally they take it up themselves and retreat. So much for the Trojan War.

The other excellent Iphigenias included Nivi Ravi, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Alexandra Smither and Sharmay Musacchio (though her impressive contralto was ill served by the bouncing vocal line of her Act II aria, made obvious by the sound design). Clark Rundell conducted the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.

“… (Iphigenia)” works better on a conceptual level than a practical one. At 105 minutes, it feels too long and repetitive, especially since much of the dense libretto text is set so that it is incomprehensible without recourse to subtitles and some advance reading. The most arresting musical passages are Ms. Spalding’s vocalises and the ensemble singing of the other Iphigenias (composer Caroline Shaw did the a cappella vocal arrangements); the dramatic contrast between the jazz trio and the orchestra is underutilized. Ms. Spalding is a virtuoso vocalist and bass player, not an actress, and her elfin stage presence didn’t quite fit theatrically, especially in Act III. And there’s a thin line between satire and looking like a bad example of the thing you are making fun of, those Monty Python stomping marches included. Mocking opera for its outmoded aspects is easy; calling it out for its historical treatment of women is justified. The challenge is to successfully use and transform its considerable strengths to say something new.

—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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Appeared in the December 15, 2021, print edition as ‘A Sacrificial Figure Finds Her Voice.’

The Metropolitan Opera’s staging of the work by composer Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhl refreshes the familiar. 

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 24, 2021 5:54 pm

New York

On Tuesday, for the second time in just two months, the Metropolitan Opera presented the New York premiere of a new opera to an enthusiastic reception. If the pandemic-enforced absence from live performance has taught us anything, it is that new voices, rather than business-as-usual repertory, are the lifeblood of this old art form. It is especially telling that the piece, “Eurydice” by composer Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhl, tackles one of opera’s foundational stories and finds something new to say about it. 

I saw “Eurydice” at its world premiere at the LA Opera in February 2020. It felt tighter and more persuasive here, and Erin Morley’s richly varied soprano gave the title character more depth and poignancy than Danielle de Niese did in Los Angeles. The tragedy of “Eurydice” creeps up on you. In this telling, based on Ms. Ruhl’s 2003 play, it is Eurydice’s tragedy, rather than the story of a man who loses his wife twice. The journey to the Underworld is a psychological one. First, Eurydice finds love with Orpheus, although they are different—she is about words, he is about music. Vaguely discontented, she retreats to the protection of her (dead) father. He laboriously helps her rebuild her consciousness and remember what love is, but when offered the opportunity to move forward, she turns back. It is the wrong choice. Eurydice’s refusal to take on adulthood, with all its contradictions, results not in a safe, eternal childhood but rather in emptiness with neither words nor music. 

The piece is never weighty or didactic. Ms. Ruhl’s spare, direct text leavens seriousness with comedy, and Mr. Aucoin’s music, though heavy on percussion, follows suit, allowing those elements to coexist. The composer, who is 31 years old, is deeply versed in opera—his forthcoming book, “The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera,” demonstrates how profoundly he thinks about it—and throughout “Eurydice” he and Ms. Ruhl play with our expectations. For example, they gently poke fun at the story’s conceits: Orpheus’ song at the gates of Hell is a heroic salvo rather than a plea. In the myth, Orpheus’ singing can make stones weep; in the opera, three characters are actual Stones, and these rather dopey, bossy guardians do indeed weep, but we have to wonder why. 

Philip Glass is the clearest musical influence in the score, especially in the orchestration, yet Mr. Aucoin’s use of repeated figures and phrases works in its own way. Rather than pushing forward or inducing a hypnotic trance, the music of individual scenes feels swirling and circular, inviting the listener to sit with the feelings as the characters uncover them, and each scene has its own distinctive tone. The effect is cumulative. In the final scenes, Hades, until then a comic figure, is revealed in all his sinister cruelty and power. Eurydice, rather than becoming his unwilling bride, sings a wrenching final aria that encompasses all the love, warmth and humanity that she has found, and then chooses to dip herself in the river of forgetfulness; the opera ends in orchestral grunts and abrupt silence.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Ms. Morley’s vibrant soprano encompassed Eurydice’s naiveté, playfulness and growing understanding, moving from a bright, flexible, high-lying tessitura to a more dramatic and lyrical expressivity. As Orpheus, baritone Joshua Hopkins conveyed an artist’s macho single-mindedness. Orpheus’ Double, a countertenor, represents his musical consciousness. The ploy works most effectively when the two have slightly dissonant duets; Jakub Józef Orliński was occasionally inaudible but always noticeable, especially when he was shirtless and wearing the flowing, gold-embroidered black pants designed by Ana Kuzmanic. Bass-baritone Nathan Berg brought an affectionate warmth to Eurydice’s Father, and Barry Banks’s stratospheric tenor toggled effectively between Hades’ comic and sinister natures. Stacey Tappan, Ronnita Miller and Chad Shelton supplied bumptious comedy as the Stones. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin artfully made the score’s percussive extremes expressive (the orchestra took a well-deserved, onstage bow at the end), and the invisible, wordless chorus of the dead sounded like loss personified.

Director Mary Zimmerman’s production emphasized the opera’s meditative quality, and Daniel Ostling’s spare set and T.J. Gerckens’s lighting used simple means to evoke place and emotion. The upper world is a bright, sunny beach, sparsely furnished with a couple of beach chairs; the Underworld is a dark, patterned stone wall and the cutout yellow sun is now black. An elevator between the two worlds is a clever touch; efficiently, the shower inside it confers the forgetfulness required in the land of the dead. Ms. Kuzmanic used bright colors, patterns and fabrics to mythologize the quasi-modern costumes—I especially liked how Hades’ attire went from a loud suit to a long gown (he was on stilts), with full-length tail and horns for his final appearance as his true self—and the Stones, encased in gray like giant Michelin Men, looked properly absurd. Denis Jones supplied amusingly goofy ’60s-flavored choreography for the wedding scene, and S. Katy Tucker’s projections included graphically varied titles—all caps for shouting, calligraphy for letter-writing—that integrated seamlessly with the décor. 

—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).

https://www.metopera.org/season/2021-22-season/porgy-and-bess/

San Francisco Opera new production of Beethoven’s work, set in a detention facility, might leave some hoping for an early release. 

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 19, 2021 3:15 pm

San Francisco 

Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” an Enlightenment paean to freedom and a celebration of the triumph of courage over tyranny, is regularly updated to reflect contemporary struggles. A 2018 production by New York’s Heartbeat Opera did a particularly thoughtful job, exploring American mass incarceration and recording the voices and images of actual inmates for the opera’s famous Prisoners’ Chorus. Perhaps most wrenchingly, the whole opera was staged as the heroine’s fantasy: Becoming a guard in the prison where her husband has been held incommunicado for two years and rescuing him happens only in her dreams. San Francisco Opera’s new production, directed by Matthew Ozawa, which opened last week, sets “Fidelio” in a “detention facility in the recent past or not-so-distant future.”

Alexander V. Nichols’s grim set, a huge two-level cube of steel bars and fluorescent lights, first shows offices and then revolves to display chain-link cages crammed with detainees in a mix of prison jumpsuits and modern street clothes; the armed guards herding and sometimes beating the inmates wear bullet-proof vests with “Security” stamped on the back. ( Jessica Jahn did the costumes; JAX Messenger and Justin A. Partier, the suitably gloomy lighting.) One couldn’t help thinking of detention facilities on the American southern border; the word “cages” appears in the translated supertitle text. For Act II, both levels are stacked high with file boxes. The walls of Florestan’s corner cell flash constantly with black-and-white security video of the cages, presumably as torture, and he is chained to a chair. 

These are all reasonable ideas, in keeping with the theme, but they don’t cohere together or with the opera. Who are these people? Nearly all detainees are white, so they are presumably not undocumented border-crossers; and, at the end, the liberator Don Fernando refers to them as “our citizens.” The flashing screens in Florestan’s cell turn off as this solitary prisoner starts his aria with the words “God! What darkness here!”—which is supposed to be a cry of agony, but in this case would more likely be one of relief. This is an invented facility, a mashup of contemporary prison tropes.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The clumsy directing didn’t make things any clearer. Group scenes had no finesse: When the prisoners were released from the cages, there was very little space on the catwalks for them to spread out and sing their chorus, so they filed obediently up or down staircases to get into position. Smaller scene work was similarly awkward and static, and the most dramatic moments were unconvincing: When Leonore leaped between the murderous villain, Pizarro, and Florestan, declaring “I am his wife!” she got a laugh. That is never a good sign. 

Elza van den Heever, crammed into a bullet-proof vest and cap, seemed constrained as Leonore; she was best when she was able to expand into lyricism, as she did with “Komm, Hoffnung.” As Florestan, Russell Thomas gave an intense, nuanced account of “Gott! Welch dunkel hier!”—more man-in-extremis than clarion tenor. James Creswell made Rocco, the jailer, a jocular, amiable fellow, oddly unfazed by his job. Greer Grimsley glowered and raged persuasively as Pizarro. As Marzelline, the jailer’s daughter, Anne-Marie MacIntosh’s bright, appealing soprano stood out in the ensembles; Christopher Oglesby was properly annoying as her persistent suitor, Jaquino, and Soloman Howard unfurled his opulent bass in a bit of luxury casting as Don Fernando. His sharp suit and glad-handing for the news cameras in the final scene suggested a politician on the make. Zhengyi Bai and Stefan Egerstrom were effective as the First and Second Prisoners. The San Francisco Opera Chorus sounded full-bodied and splendid. 

In the pit, Eun Sun Kim, the company’s new music director, opened the evening with a vigorous account of the overture, but afterward her conducting leaned toward the foursquare, efficient rather than inspiring. “Fidelio” is a mix of styles, ranging from light comic byplay to grand solemnity, and welding them into a whole can be a challenge. Ms. Kim brought transparency to the small ensembles, but the overall shaping of the piece felt inflexible and episodic. In the final scene, Leonore removes the chains from Florestan’s wrists and begins the ensemble “O Gott! O welch’ ein Augenblick!” This rapturous moment should seem suspended in time, but Ms. Kim pushed ahead into it, diminishing its power. 

That “Augenblick” (literally, “moment”) is the crux of the opera: We must believe that Leonore, through her devotion and courage, has liberated not only Florestan, but all the prisoners, whoever they may be. In this production, the superimposition of a contemporary setting over an 18th-century story and form was too awkwardly done to allow us to believe such a fairy tale. 

—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).

While companies slowly return to in-person performances, online videos like ‘La Voix Humaine’ and ‘In Song’ continue to bring the opera house to your home. 

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 4, 2021 2:59 pm ETSAVEPRINTTEXTListen to articleLength 6 minutesQueue

While live, indoor opera has returned in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, other opera companies are taking a more gradual approach. Some are waiting until November or even later to perform, and several are presenting concerts instead of staged operas. Opera Philadelphia is opting to wait until January for its indoor return and has announced a fall season of new offerings on its successful streaming channel. Although two of the planned projects fell through, the first, a film of Poulenc’s one act, one-woman opera, “La Voix Humaine,” is now available ($20 for a one-time rental or free with a $99 annual Channel Pass).

“La Voix Humaine” is well-suited to film treatment. Based on a monodrama by Jean Cocteau, the 1959 piece delves into the emotional state of Elle (She), whose lover of five years has left her. Over its 45 minutes, their telephone conversation—we hear only her side of it—gradually exposes the rawness of her loss and despair. With its ability to vary location, lighting, angle and focus, the film, directed by James Darrah and starring soprano Patricia Racette, provides an intimate, X-ray perspective into Elle’s internal turmoil.

Shot inside the Elkins Estate, a grand Gilded Age manor house in Elkins Park, Pa., the film opens in Elle’s sumptuous living room, with its grand piano and gold drapes. In a leopard-print fur coat over a dark satin negligée, Elle berates the wrong-number callers who keep ringing her rotary telephone. Finally, the call from her lover comes through. At first, she pretends that she is fine, she is pursuing her normal life, the breakup is all her fault; her tone is appeasing, trying to keep her lover from getting angry and hanging up. Then her fragile defenses start to crumble, and she admits that she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills but called a friend for help after deciding that she did not want to die alone. Elle ricochets between insisting that she is coping and revealing the depths of her sorrow. Each time the call is interrupted, her anxiety skyrockets. She is desperate to hold on to the telephone line, her last connection to her lover. It is, she says, wrapped around her neck.

The piece is mostly recitative, its French text replicating a real phone conversation, and Ms. Racette makes the phrases sing, their musical shapes articulating their emotional subtexts whether she is sharply chastising an interrupter, wheedling, pleading, or sinking into a reverie, all the while trying hard to retain her dignity. Mr. Darrah’s eloquent direction makes the most of her expressive face. The close-ups reveal, poignantly, that she is not young, adding the suggestion that this love affair may be Elle’s last. The camera’s changes of perspective follow the narrative’s dramatic arc. When she admits to her suicide attempt, it follows her into a coldly lighted bathroom, where she studies her face in a fogged-over mirror. The final shot of the empty living room—its floor strewn with crumpled letters, the phone left off the hook—suggests that the wreckage of Elle’s life is complete. Christopher Allen was the sympathetic pianist; Tony Fanning designed the production and Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko the costumes.

Film projects like “La Voix Humaine” represent a side benefit of the pandemic, as opera companies sought new ways to perform and disseminate their work. Several of them plan to continue their explorations in film and video even after live, in-person performance becomes more generally feasible. Boston Lyric Opera, for example, is shooting a dance-based film of Ana Sokolovíc’s “Svadba-Wedding” for later this season. Film has proved a fertile medium for small-scale commissions, pairing composers with visual artists to create unconventional operatic music videos—check out the haunting “The Island We Made” with music by Angélica Négron (Opera Philadelphia) ($10 rental or free with the annual Channel Pass) and the poignant “The First Bluebird in the Morning” with music by Carlos Simon (LA Opera) (free).

In another creative use of film, San Francisco Opera’s charming “In Song” series (free), produced and directed by Elena Park, takes opera singers on journeys back to their nonclassical roots. In a recent episode, mezzo Jamie Barton visits the rural Georgia valley in the foothills of the Appalachians where she grew up amid church, country and bluegrass music. We see the family’s trailer home and visit the church where her father taught her to sing harmony. She teams up with the banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck for a little Purcell and a traditional ballad, “Bury Me Beneath the Weeping Willow,” and talks about coming out as bisexual to her family; their unquestioning support is part of the story.

In another episode, the Mexican-born tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz goes home to Miami and visits a mariachi conservatory to experience the music that pervaded his youth. (“Your culture is your superpower,” he tells the students.) He sings Augustín Lara’s “Granada” with their band and, during a family scene, recalls how he once told his young son that life, and therefore singing, is all about giving love. His full-throated rendition of María Grever’s “Júrame” makes that abundantly clear. Such appealing portraits, offering insights into the artists we appreciate onstage, also help position opera as a part of a rich musical continuum, just as all these film projects offer a new level of accessibility to the art form.

—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).

Monday night’s performance, the first in 18 months, featured the Met’s first-ever opera by a Black composer: a stage adaptation of the memoir by Charles M. Blow.

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Sept. 29, 2021 6:58 pm

New York

Opening night of the Metropolitan Opera on Monday was a major event: The country’s largest opera company returned to the stage after 18 months. The vaccinated and masked capacity audience was thrilled just to be there, cheering when the lights went down for the orchestra to tune. And the standing ovation that erupted at the end of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was nearly earsplitting, a demonstration of appreciation for the Met’s first-ever opera by a Black composer. 

I first saw “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2019, when it had its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. It played differently in the Met’s much larger space, with some of its more intimate moments receding and its grand-opera aspects coming into their own. Mr. Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons also added new material; the chorus was much larger; and Camille A. Brown, who co-directed the Met production with James Robinson, created several vivid new dance numbers. 

Based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, “Fire” depicts a challenging childhood, rife with poverty, infidelity and violence, in the small town of Gibsland, La. The youngest of five boys, dreamy Charles—or Char’es-Baby, as he’s called by everyone—longs for attention from Billie, his distracted mother, and is convinced of his otherness when he is sexually molested, at age 7, by an older cousin. As he gets older, his sleep is haunted by “beautiful phantoms”: Sex with a female classmate, baptism and initiation into a college fraternity can’t banish them, or the shame that he carries “in a holster ’round my waist.” The opera opens with 20-year-old Charles heading home to Gibsland with a gun to kill the cousin who assaulted him; the rest is a flashback to how he got there. 

Scaled up and adapted for the Met, Allen Moyer’s spare sets, with lighting by Christopher Akerlind, looked great. A large, movable open box represented the family’s wooden shack, an abandoned forest cabin, a car, or a plain wall; Greg Emetaz’s shadowy projections—vintage black-and-white photos of houses, a highway at night, a tree-surrounded pond and, most dramatically, a huge image of Char’es-Baby’s haunted face during the assault scene—created atmosphere. The costumes by Paul Tazewell, new to the team for the Met, had a lively vibe, especially the ’70s party outfits for the scene in the seedy bar where Billie pulls a gun on her cheating husband and his girlfriend. Mr. Robinson and Ms. Brown used the expanded ensemble effectively to show the claustrophobia of the community that surrounds Charles, as well as his isolation within it. 

Ms. Brown’s dances added new texture and nuance. At the beginning of Act 2, a “dream ballet”—with 12 male dancers fluidly personifying those “beautiful phantoms”—clarified the teenage Charles’s anguished guilt. At the beginning of Act 3, the dancers, now a close-knit band of fraternity brothers, stomped, clapped and slapped out a ferocious step routine. Its athleticism and sheer testosterone were riveting, and the fraternity hazing scenes that followed seemed doubly menacing. 

“Fire” has some unusual character devices. Charles (baritone Will Liverman ) watches his younger self ( Walter Russell III, a boy treble); sometimes they sing together. Destiny and Loneliness, voices in Charles’s head, are personified by a soprano (Angel Blue). In St. Louis, the intimate relationship of Charles and Destiny/Loneliness came across powerfully; at the Met, especially in Act I, Billie (soprano Latonia Moore ) became the dominant force as she dealt with her sons, her cheating husband, her struggle to make ends meet, and her disappointments in grandly scaled emotion and vocalism. 

While the big house swallowed some of its textual detail, the deftly structured, cinematic libretto maintained its theatrical momentum. The orchestra, under the enthusiastic direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, brought richness and sweep to the score, though it tended to overpower the singers. The women, particularly Ms. Moore and Ms. Blue, were better able to cut through the sound; Mr. Liverman’s impassioned delivery in his arias of pain and fury could not always manage it; he was most effective in quieter, rhapsodic moments, like the love scene with his college girlfriend Greta (also sung by Ms. Blue). 

Ms. Blue brought warm, seductive charisma to her roles; her Act 1 aria, “There once was a boy of peculiar grace,” was particularly alluring. She was also skilled at playing with the orchestra rhythm quartet (piano, bass, guitar and drums) that inflected some of the numbers with a jazz swing; she bent pitches and took time to create a freer delivery. Mr. Blanchard’s music—catchy, up-tempo showpieces like the naughty, bluesy ensemble in the bar (its refrain is “Lord love the sinner”) and wistful laments like the Billie/Charles duet, “Where did Love lose me?”—was tuneful and expansive. 

Notable supporting players in the big cast included Chauncey Packer as Spinner, Billie’s charming but cheating husband; Briana Hunter as his girlfriend Ruby; Ryan Speedo Green as Uncle Paul, who teaches Charles life lessons from farming; Chris Kenney as the jaunty, predatory Cousin Chester; and Donovan Singletary doubling as the baptizing Pastor and the scary fraternity pledge-hazer Kaboom. 

The story has a happy ending—its protagonist, after all, is now a well-known journalist, who took a curtain call with the cast and production team. Even more critically, the Met has finally welcomed Black creators telling a complex, contemporary story of a Black man. May that openness be just the beginning.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal. 

In Chicago, a production that moves Verdi’s work to the mid-19th century from medieval times and a concert of Bizet’s classic.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 22, 2021 5:25 pm

Chicago

Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its 2021-22 season on Friday with a new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth” in its regular theater, with full orchestra and chorus. Audience members had to show proof of full vaccination and wear masks; the performance was captured on video for future transmission to ticket buyers who chose not to venture into the theater; and there was no gala party, so no evening dress. Otherwise, this was normal grand opera—for the first time in 18 months—and the near-capacity audience seemed delighted to be there. 

Director David McVicar shifted the story from medieval times to the mid-19th century; John Macfarlane’s unit set depicted a ruined Presbyterian chapel. “Macbeth” is about the destructive nature of power, and the effect of playing all the scenes—blasted heaths and palaces alike—in this confined space, with stygian lighting by David Finn, emphasized its gloomy nihilism. “Macbeth” started out dark and got darker. Moritz Junge’s severe costumes intensified the effect: Most of the men were in military uniforms and the witches of the opening scene wore austere black church dresses. The witches also sat in pews, reading their spells out of hymnals, their gesticulations choreographed by Andrew George. For the Act 3 conjuring scene, they had stripped down to Victorian undergarments and the pews were gone, allowing for some freer cauldron-stirring activity. 

Other eccentric touches included three feral children, associated with the witches, who acted out the murderous prophecies with daggers and a rag doll. Mr. McVicar also supplied the Macbeths with a backstory and a possible explanation for their ruthlessness: at the end of the conjuring scene, we got a pantomime suggesting that their only child died in infancy. The production’s ending also implied that not all was well—Macduff, collapsed in despair upstage, was hard to overlook amid rejoicing at the death of the tyrant. 

Making her role debut, Sondra Radvanovsky lacked some of the vocal heft needed for Lady Macbeth but turned in a committed theatrical performance. As Macbeth, the strident Craig Colclough started off demented and became increasingly more so as the evening progressed. Christian Van Horn was a convincing Banquo; Joshua Guerrero excelled in communicating raw pain in Macduff’s aria about the death of his family. It was a treat to hear the chorus, lurking in darkness and giving voice to the gloomy atmosphere; the lament for their destroyed homeland that began Act 4 was especially moving. Enrique Mazzola, the company’s new music director, led the orchestra with a bel canto-inspired buoyancy. The transparency was welcome, but the Verdian propulsion was missing, and the dramatic momentum occasionally sagged.

***

Chicago Opera Theater’s concert “Carmen,” performed at the Harris Theater on Thursday and Saturday, had an unusual feature: Stephanie Blythe, an eminent mezzo-soprano, sang the tenor role of Don José. Ms. Blythe has been experimenting in cabaret settings with a bearded male alter ego, Blythely Oratonio; this was their first foray into a full opera performance. In addition, Jamie Barton sang her first Carmen. Opera houses tend to choose more sylphlike mezzos for the part and Ms. Barton, who has publicly condemned body-shaming and celebrated her queer identity, was ready to demonstrate that when it comes to singing, size shouldn’t matter. 

Ms. Barton’s sumptuous mezzo made for a rich, expressive Carmen; she played the role with a direct, I-take-what-I-want attitude rather than as a seductress. (As part of Joachim Schamberger’s minimal staging, she rejected the classic red flouncy skirt in favor of silky black trousers and a motorcycle jacket, which she later removed to reveal a spangly transparent blouse over a black bra.) 

Ms. Blythe’s opulent instrument sits comfortably in Don José’s range, and for the most part the voice could have been coming from a man. It sounded almost too easy, however: Some of the excitement in listening to male tenors arises from the difficulty of producing that high tessitura, and that frisson was missing here. Nor did Ms. Blythe develop much of a characterization for Don José, just the occasional, tantalizing flash of impulsivity and repressed violence. Most critically, there was little sense of attraction or sexual tension between the two characters. Even in concert form, thoughtful staging could have produced some original ideas from the gender-bending and queer identities of the two leads; instead, the show was just a showcase for the voices.

The chorus sections and swathes of orchestral writing were omitted, adding to the showcase impression; and the opera was performed in the version with sung recitatives instead of dialogue. Supporting singers included Michael Sumuel, a robust Escamillo, and Kimberly E. Jones, whose thin, pinched tone was ill-suited to Micaëla. Brandon Cedel, Evan Bravos, Lunga Eric Hallam, Rachel Blaustein and Leah Dexter did capable work in the smaller roles. Lidiya Yankovskaya led the ebullient orchestra. 

—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).

My short presentation on Josquin marking the 500th aniversary of his death:

The story of a Black police officer’s family struck by tragedy when their son is killed by a white police officer.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 14, 2021 1:09 pm

Detroit

Michigan Opera Theatre embarked on a new chapter of its history last year with the appointment, as artistic director, of Yuval Sharon, best known for genre-defying, site-specific projects like “Sweet Land” with the Industry in Los Angeles. Mr. Sharon immediately made his iconoclastic presence felt with October’s “Twilight: Gods,” a one-hour version of “Götterdämmerung” performed for audiences in cars, staged in MOT’s parking garage. His distinctive stamp continues: The company’s 2021-22 season includes “Bliss,” a performance art piece that repeats the same three minutes of “Le Nozze di Figaro” for 12 hours, “La Bohème” staged with its acts in reverse order, and the first production of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X ” since its 1986 premiere.

By those standards, the company’s most recent offering was almost conventional: “Blue” by composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson, presented last weekend at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre. This searing 2019 work is the story of a Black police officer’s family struck by tragedy when their son is killed by a white police officer. Several productions of “Blue” were planned to follow its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival but fell victim to the Covid-19 pandemic, so this was the work’s second staging. The venue choice of the 6,000-seat, open-air amphitheater, better known as a home for large-scale, nonclassical concerts, was in part for Covid-era safety reasons, but also an effort to make the work feel more accessible to residents of this majority-Black city who might not gravitate to a traditional opera house. (The socially distanced audience was kept to about 1,300 people.)

Director Kaneza Schaal embraced the vastness of the stage and the space, tapping into the intimate opera’s grander Greek tragedy aspects—it is the story of a family, but also of a community. Three long ramps projected from the stage into the audience; translucent hanging panels at the rear of the stage left the river, and its passing boat traffic, partly visible. Eight dancers, performing in the angular styles of Krump and Detroit Jit, physicalized the emotions of the characters; a live video feed occasionally picked up a dancer or a singer and expanded that image onto the panels. The funeral cortège arrived through the audience. Stage pieces were deliberately small and makeshift—a few chairs; tables and boards quickly assembled and disassembled to evoke a bedroom, a bar, a funeral bier—to keep the focus on the people.

Amy Rubin designed the set; Jessica Jahn the costumes. Joshua Higgason’s projections were mostly abstract, giving the figurative ones—for example, a sea of Black men holding up their arms in surrender—extra punch. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting helped focus attention in the large space.

The grand stage had one big drawback. Amplification was necessary, and MOT employed L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology, with sound design by Mark Grey. I saw the first act from a side rear section of the amphitheater, where the sound felt distorted and the text was almost completely incomprehensible, especially in the higher ranges of the female singers. Supertitles were available via smartphone—if you saw the note in the program and scanned the QR code to get them. I hadn’t, and that was a huge disadvantage, since Mr. Thompson’s wrenching libretto is fundamental to the experience of the piece.

The second act, seen from a closer, more central seat, with the titles, was an improvement. More of the text was intelligible, and I got a sense of the sound system’s possibilities: For example, when a singer walked up the ramp closest to me, her voice moved with her. However, the amplification still made loud, intense singing harshly overpowering and the ensembles lost their rich harmonic texture. The vocal/orchestral balance favored the voices, resulting in a loss of instrumental nuance, and many of the tender subtleties of the opera did not come through.

Still, “Blue” retained the power I felt in 2019, and new moments in the work jumped out. With male voices shown to better advantage by the sound system, bass Kenneth Kellogg (The Father) was even more potent than he was at Glimmerglass, particularly in the first scene of Act 2, as he railed at The Reverend ( Gordon Hawkins ) in a nihilistic fury after the killing of The Son ( Aaron Crouch ). I also loved the final scene: After the rage, the mourning and funeral, we get a flashback to a family meal. The father-son conflict flares, but is soothed by The Mother (Krysty Swann), who playfully lists all the foods she’s prepared “for my boys” in a rhythmic blues. Her line, “The food of our ancestors, putting its arms around us,” encapsulated the opera’s underlying theme about the endurance of love and community, even as they coexist with terrible loss. Ms. Schaal made that loss clear: The parents exit together, leaving The Son alone with a giant projection of an empty silhouette.

The strong cast included Kimwana Doner, Nicole Joseph and Olivia Johnson as the Girlfriends (their dirge in Act 2 was haunting); Camron Gray, Edward Graves and Christopher Humbert Jr. as the Policemen. Conductor Daniela Candillari, positioned with her 30-member orchestra behind the singers, did admirable work keeping everyone together and pacing the show. It was all the more frustrating that the sound system couldn’t deliver their vision.

—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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This year’s festival moved outdoors due to Covid-19 and included ‘The Magic Flute,’ ‘Gods and Mortals,’ ‘Il Trovatore’ and ‘The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson.’

By Heidi Waleson

Aug. 18, 2021 1:37 pm ET

Cooperstown, N.Y.

Francesca Zambello, the general and artistic director of the Glimmerglass Festival, knows how to improvise. With Covid-19 restrictions on live performances and gatherings still in flux as she planned her summer season, she shifted the operation outdoors onto the lawn next to the company’s theater. There was a large, uncovered stage with an elaborate amplification system ( Andrew Harper did the sound design), socially distanced “squares” of lawn, each accommodating up to four patrons, and a semicircle of more expensive, partly enclosed “boxes” beyond them. Performances went on at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m., rain or shine; attendees were encouraged to bring much-needed sunscreen, hats, umbrellas and lawn chairs.

Each of the six productions—three operas, two concerts, and a play with music—ran a maximum of 90 minutes, with no intermission. The operas were trimmed, slightly reorganized, and performed with tiny choruses. Orchestrations were adapted for smaller forces, and the orchestra played live inside the theater, its sound piped out to the stage and the lawn. While not the ideal way to experience opera, Glimmerglass on the Grass, as the season, which ran July 15-Aug. 17, was branded, , proved an enjoyable, more casual experience, revised to work in an unsettled time.

I had planned to catch five of the six offerings during the final weekend; unfortunately, “Songbird”—Offenbach’s comedy “La Périchole” reimaged with a 1920s New Orleans jazz sound—was scrubbed due to lightning on Friday evening, only the second cancellation of the 28-performance season. Of those I saw, “The Magic Flute” and “Gods and Mortals,” a concert of Wagner arias, were the most successful.

The adapted “Flute”—with a witty English translation by Kelley Rourke and a deft, transparent orchestration by Joseph Colaneri, the festival’s music director—compressed much of the dialogue and some of the action into a narration spoken by bass-baritone Eric Owens in the character of Sarastro. A handful of musical numbers were jettisoned, and the Three Ladies doubled as the guardian Spirits, necessitating a bit of plot revision, but the result was fleet and entertaining, foregrounding the piece’s human interactions rather than its grander pronouncements. NJ Agwuna’s lively direction fit neatly into Peter J. Davison’s festival unit set—a copse of tree trunks at stage right, an array of colored lightbulbs above—and Christelle Matou’s handsome, sculptural costumes made a clear visual statement. Daylight for all the shows meant that lighting was limited to occasional flashing effects.

Apart from Mr. Owens’s fatherly Sarastro, “Flute” was cast with capable, bright-voiced members of the company’s Young Artists Program. Helen Zhibing Huang’s clear soprano made her an enchanting Pamina; Emily Misch ably navigated the Queen of the Night’s coloratura; Michael Pandolfo was an amusing Papageno; and Kameron Lopreore, who stepped in at the last minute as Tamino, acquitted himself well. Victoria Lawal, Ariana Warren and Maire Therese Carmack were a fiery trio of Ladies.

Glimmerglass normally does very little Wagner, so “Gods and Mortals” was a chance to showcase three impressive young dramatic voices in this repertory. Tenor Ian Koziara and soprano Alexandria Shiner, who were supposed to headline last summer’s canceled “Die Feen,” sang appealing numbers from that obscure early piece and teamed up for heavier work as Siegmund and Sieglinde (“Die Walküre”). While it’s tricky to assess Wagnerian prowess with amplification, both displayed robust, attractive voices with easy power and excellent breath control. Ms. Shiner’s thrilling vocal range in “Traft ihr das Schiff,” Senta’s ballad from “Der Fliegende Höllander,” and Mr. Koziara’s yearning “Dir töne Lob,” from “Tannhäuser,” were also highlights. Mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis made an arresting Fricka spitting out her disdain for her husband in “So ist den aus” from “Walküre,” and a furious, vengeful Ortrud in “Entweihte Götter” from “Lohengrin” A sextet of Young Artists supplied a diverting “Ride of the Valkyries,” and veterans Mark Delavan (“Höllander”) and Mr. Owens (“Ring”) ably rounded out the show, but the young soloists were the stars, and Mr. Colaneri’s orchestral accompaniment supported them splendidly.

Ms. Bryce-Davis was also the star of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” The opera was reordered to start with Azucena’s story—the murdered mother, the baby tossed in the fire—and Ms. Bryce-Davis sang the role with richness and pathos. However, this blood-and-thunder piece suffered from being abridged. The succession of high-voltage arias, with little rest in between, felt relentless, and the amplification exacerbated some pitch issues for Latonia Moore (Leonora), while pushing the sound of Gregory Kunde (Manrico) and Michael Mayes (Count Di Luna) into stentorian territory and sending Mr. Colaneri’s orchestra into audio overdrive. Ms. Zambello and Eric Sean Fogel collaborated on the efficient directing; Ms. Matou’s costumes featured traditional Romani looks, although the program and English supertitles referred to Azucena’s band as nomads.

“The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson,” a 70-minute play by Sandra Seaton, commissioned by the festival, made a worthy effort to bring attention to the now-forgotten story of the National Negro Opera Company and its founder, Mary Cardwell Dawson. However, the clunky script was mostly a scenery-chewing opportunity for mezzo Denyce Graves. As Dawson, she agonized about whether to move an outdoor concert threatened by rain into a segregated concert hall or cancel and face financial disaster; coached three young singers (Victoria Lawal, Mia Athey and Jonathan Pierce Rhodes ) through scenes from “Carmen”; and lectured them about the difficulties of life as Black singers. Ms. Graves thankfully dropped her diva act for a heartfelt final song (by Carlos Simon ), and the “Carmen” performances were agreeable. Kevin Miller was the versatile music director and onstage pianist, Kimille Howard directed, and Jessica Jahn supplied the World War II-era period costumes.

—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).