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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). 

Michel van der Aa’s film opera imagines what it would be like to leave your body behind to have your mind preserved in the digital world. 

By Heidi Waleson

March 24, 2022 5:52 pm ET

New York

Michel van der Aa’s work explores the intersection of music, film and technology. “Upload,” his haunting new film opera, which had its North American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, skillfully harnesses all those elements to ask existential questions: What does it really mean to be alive, even as technology increasingly mediates and expands the space between life and death? Is it possible to be alive—and human—without a body? Even more important, is it possible to be human without pain?

The 85-minute piece starts in cavernous darkness. A disembodied soprano voice sings pairs of words that are all about physicality—“expand-lungs,” “pull-muscle,” “carry-weight.” A baritone voice joins in, alternating with its own word pairs. The list ends with “weight-less,” which is the current state of one of the two main characters. The story—Mr. Van der Aa wrote the eloquent libretto, in addition to composing the music and directing the show—is revealed through flashbacks. The Father (baritone Roderick Williams ), profoundly depressed after the death of his wife, has submitted to a radical new procedure. His mind has been uploaded and stored on a proprietary blockchain; his physical body and brain were destroyed. Post-transfer, he is visible to his beloved Daughter (soprano Julia Bullock ) as an avatar with no corporeal presence. Uploads, we discover, are minds freed of the infirmities of biology; they speak, feel, evolve and are eternal. 

The flaws in this seemingly ideal solution soon become apparent: The Father realizes that the unbearable trauma of abandonment that he was trying to escape is still part of him. He must now persuade the Daughter to “terminate” him or he will suffer forever. She, who was not consulted in advance about his upload and is distraught about his new state, is faced with the terrible prospect of having to kill him herself. 

The stage has a large screen at the rear and three movable screens in front of it. The action alternates between past and present. In the present, the Daughter appears live and the Father is an onscreen image. (The actual Mr. Williams is at the side of stage; his performance is transmitted in real time via motion capture technology.) The past, shown in a film that uses seven speaking actors, traces the process of being uploaded at the clinic.

Scenes set in the present are sung and brim with messy human emotionality, particularly from Ms. Bullock, who gives an unrestrained, impassioned performance. The yearning lyricism of her arias and the force of her untrammeled anger contrast with Mr. Williams’s more measured, articulated vocalism; Father and Daughter are arguing from different spheres. The 11-member orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Otto Tausk, is often punchy and percussion-forward, mirroring the chaotic upheaval of the characters’ reality and its dramatic arc. When the instrumental texture smooths and thins, the characters are recalling a nostalgic past or envisioning an unknown future. In one of the most moving effects, a funereal organ sound accompanies matching arias as the two contemplate the possibility of eternal separation from each other.

By contrast, the all-spoken scenes of the film of the upload clinic imply a scientific confidence in perfectibility. The laboratories there are furnished with mysterious technological objects. Even creepier is the clean, corporate, youthful amiability of both the CEO ( Ashley Zukerman ) and the psychiatrist ( Katja Herbers ), who, in order to model the Father’s brain, interviews his brother-in-law ( Samuel West, startlingly recognizable as the curmudgeonly vet from “All Creatures Great and Small”). When there is live orchestral accompaniment for the film, it has a noisy, mechanical vibe, suggesting some stress underneath the smooth façade.

Similarly, Mr. Van der Aa’s varied, textured use of film elsewhere in the opera goes far beyond illustration. In the scenes with the Daughter in the present, it serves as the set, depicting a large New York loft and a roof garden, but is never quite static. Mr. Williams’s avatar is sometimes a straightforward copy; at others, it is hugely enlarged and pulsating in streams of pixels. Midway through the opera Ms. Bullock sings a gorgeous, meditative aria that tries to picture the Father’s present existence. As she muses, “This is where you are now,” images unfurl around her. They could be undersea reefs, subatomic structures or mathematical fractals—beautiful but uncategorizable to her or to us. 

And in the penultimate scene, as the Daughter lies in bed, trying to decide what to do, a huge sheet is lowered over the audience, showing enormous video images of the heads of Father and Daughter on their respective pillows, as if we were at an IMAX movie. Again, they sing the word pairs as they did in the beginning, and the images seem as real as the humans. We aren’t told what the final decision is, but here, the two appear at peace with each other, just as music, film, and technology have coalesced. Are we being lulled into acceptance, as we were visually seduced by those beautiful fractals? Mr. Van der Aa isn’t telling. 

—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 U.S. premiere of a show, delayed by Covid-19, drawn from a Chinese compilation of myths that was first transcribed in the fourth century B.C.

By Heidi Waleson

March 17, 2022 6:11 pm ET

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Over the 80 minutes of “Book of Mountains & Seas,” which had its U.S. premiere on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse, composer Huang Ruo and director-designer Basil Twist create the world and destroy it. Their materials are simple: 12 singers and two percussionists along with some lengths of silk, large pieces of driftwood-like material and paper lanterns manipulated by six puppeteers. The piece is based on the eponymous Chinese compilation of myths that was first transcribed in the fourth century B.C.; the sung text is in Mandarin Chinese and an invented language. Yet the plots of the four myths that the composer adapted into the libretto are given only the most basic outline in the English supertitles, for the spirit of this haunting evening is atmospheric rather than narrative. “Book of Mountains & Seas” is an exquisite masterpiece of suggestion, an immersive tapestry of sound and image that weaves itself into your consciousness and makes its point about the interdependence of humans and their planet without ever saying it outright.

The opera begins in darkness. Only the faces of the singers, members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, are illuminated; you can barely make out the percussionists ( Michael Murphy and John Ostrowski ) positioned at stage right and left. The singers, three per voice type (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), all have independent lines, and the music layers the voices in various combinations to create different textures and sonic effects. In the first scene, depicting a creation story about Pan Gu —a being whose body parts ultimately become the Earth’s rocks, rivers and finally humans—solo lines come together to build a hypnotic, chant-like texture with tight harmonic intervals. Here, it is mostly a cappella, with just some soft gong strokes adding another color. The singers move apart to reveal, at center stage, driftwood pieces emerging from Pan Gu’s cosmic egg; the glowing lanterns that are his eyes become the sun and the moon.

In the three subsequent scenes, new combinations of all these elements expand the piece’s mythic universe. In “The Spirit Bird,” a billowing sheet of silk becomes the ocean; a smaller one, flapping above, is the bird, once a princess who drowned. In revenge, she flies back and forth above the ocean, dropping twigs and branches into it. The percussionists trade bass drumbeats, symbolizing the ocean’s vastness and tides, as the soprano and alto lines swoop above the men’s repeated phrases.

In the third myth, 10 suns take turns revolving around the Earth until the day they decide to all come out together. The setup is extended at a length that seems impossible to sustain, but it works: The suns, paper lanterns, glowing orange and carried on long poles, emerge one at a time as the high and low voices alternate, with more joining in at each entrance, accompanied by the shimmering drone of a temple bowl and a high-pitched finger cymbal. When all the suns are visible, the ritual mood suddenly evaporates and violence takes over. The drum and marimba pound while the suns dance, change color and even dangle menacingly over the audience—their combined heat makes the Earth burn and die. The archery god then shoots nine of them, turning them blue, and leaving one—along with a single bass voice, the cymbal and the temple bowl—to light the Earth..

For the final scene, the driftwood pieces are gloriously assembled into the giant Kua Fu, whom we see chasing the sun across the Earth, but never catching it. A percussionist pounds out his journey, weaving around the rhythmic, repeating voices, symbolizing the frustration of his quest. The giant falls in exhaustion and drinks the (silken) rivers dry. Finally, he dies—pieces of his body are taken away. Once again, we are in the dark, with only the illuminated faces of the singers visible. The titles tell us that the giant’s staff became a forest of peach blossoms; bits of bright paper drop from above; and the final notes, soft solo voices over a drone, suggest a faint hope for rebirth. The cycle, it implies, will begin anew; we are fated to keep creating and destroying the planet.

Poe Saegusa designed the lighting; Lynne Buckson devised the black velvet costumes that were perfectly invisible until the curtain call. Huang Ruo conducted from the booth behind the audience. This extraordinary piece, co-produced and co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, had its world premiere last November at the Royal Danish Opera House with the choir Ars Nova Copenhagen. It was supposed to be part of January’s Prototype Festival, which was canceled due to the Covid-19 surge. Its resurrection two months later seems of a piece with the fragile hope of its ending: Perhaps there is something to be learned from death and devastation.

—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).

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, monument-inspired premieres from diverse creators

By Heidi Waleson

March 8, 2022 6:51 pm ET

Washington

Operas written for special occasions have a long history—for example, the many French Baroque pieces created for coronations and weddings. “Written in Stone,” which had its premiere by the Washington National Opera on Saturday, commemorates both the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center, WNO’s home, and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, the company’s fruitful new-works development program. The project deftly combines the two, casting the Kennedy Center as a “living monument” and a diverse group of living creators as the appropriate people to explore the idea that monuments are more than cold stone.

The brief curtain raiser, the solo piece “Chantal” by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, calls the very permanence of monuments into question. Ms. Moran, a potent mezzo, plays a surveyor who declares, “You know I know you’re leaning” and suggests that some monuments have outlived their time. “Rise” by Kamala Sankaram and A.M. Homes and “it all falls down” by Carlos Simon and Marc Bamuthi Joseph use the monument theme to make statements about changing times: the first regarding the role of women in civil society, the second about homosexuality. Finally, “The Rift” by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang looks at the divisions in American society through the story of the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“Rise” starts out playfully, its jaunty orchestration depicting Alicia (Vanessa Becerra), a Latina Girl Scout lost in the Capitol and desperate for a bathroom. She encounters a Powerful Woman ( Daryl Freedman, whose mezzo voice indeed powerful); the comic byplay about how long it took to get a convenient women’s rest room in this male bastion serves as a slightly awkward metaphor for the larger issue. The rest of the piece, featuring J’nai Bridges as a Black Capitol police officer, revolves around the Portrait Monument, Adelaide Johnson’s massive sculpture depicting Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was presented to Congress in 1921 in celebration of women winning the right to vote, and then ignominiously consigned to the Capitol crypt until 1997. We learn that part of the monument is rough and uncarved, emblematic of the struggle that continues. The opera is educational, if a bit didactic, and the final burst of inspiration—“Rise and add your name”—is appropriately fervent.

“it all falls down” is tighter and more character-based, built on the conflict between Mtchll, a pastor, and Bklyn, his son and successor, over the revelation that Bklyn is gay, and the efforts of their wife/mother, Laurel, to bring them together. The ostensible monument here is the Supreme Court, and its 2015 decision recognizing same-sex marriage, but the real monument at issue is the Black church, and whether it can accommodate such a challenge to its traditional values.

Church cadences of preaching and congregational response infuse the score; the chorus parts supply the sense of community and familial strength, even as the three central characters enact a struggle that could pull it apart at the seams. As Laurel, Ms. Bridges had more opportunity to shine than she did in “Rise,” her voluptuous soprano soaring in the peacemaker’s role. Bass-baritone Alfred Walker and tenor Christian Mark Gibbs brought vocal heft and theatrical intensity to father and son. In the final scene, the chorus sings text from the 2015 decision, as if approving of it, yet James Robinson’s directing astutely leaves open the question of whether Mtchll will agree to the premise of “Love over rules” and accept his son as he is.

“The Rift,” the longest and most substantial work in the evening, recalls the conflicts over the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, from the time it was authorized in 1980, revived the pain of a deeply unpopular and divisive war. Four excellent singers play multiple characters, including Maya Lin ( Karen Vuong ), the Yale undergraduate who submitted the winning design (out of 1,421) to the blind competition, and Robert McNamara ( Rod Gilfry ), the defense secretary whose role in escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam made his name synonymous with its disastrous progress and outcome. The opera opens with a rhythmic, repeated, two-note motif, emblematic of the rift itself; then brief but potent scenes, each one musically distinctive, look at all the angles. In one, detractors squabble in a spoken melee (“No memorial for baby-killers!”); in the next, Maya Lin passionately describes her project, “It appears as a rift in the earth.” The aria, in which Mr. Hwang artfully mingles his own words and Ms. Lin’s, becomes an eloquent vision of catharsis and finally, healing.

Healing takes some time. We get McNamara’s self-exculpatory, yet not unsympathetic, musings, and vicious attacks on the design and the designer ( Ross Perot’s description is “some ugly black slab designed by an egg roll”). Grady Mitchell (Mr. Gibbs), a veteran with traumatic memories, and Phuong Tran ( Nina Yoshida Nelsen ), a refugee whose dead husband, a South Vietnamese soldier, will not have his name on the memorial, think it’s meaningless. But, young as she is, Maya Lin stands up for her design and her Asian heritage; Mitchell, Tran and McNamara visit the memorial and find some solace there as the two-note motif reappears. The opera ends with it resolved in a chord.

Robert Spano led the capable WNO Orchestra, which was behind a scrim on the Eisenhower Theater stage. Erhard Rom designed the blocky, no-frills set, leaving it to S. Katy Tucker’s black-and-white projections to provide salient details—the Portrait Monument; the church’s stained-glass windows, the helicopters over the rice paddies. Dede Ayite designed the costumes (the outfits of the congregation in “it all falls down” were the liveliest) and Mark McCullough did the lighting. Ms. Moran did her own blocking for “Chantal”; Mr. Robinson’s direction of the other three pieces was efficient if broad-stroked.

“Written in Stone” proved an ambitious and thoughtful way to mark two significant anniversaries, and to make the point, through all of these different voices, that the work is never done.

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

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Composer Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann offer an updated, Americanized take on the Japanese director’s ‘Rashomon.’

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 22, 2022 6:08 pm EST

Pittsburgh

‘In a Grove”by composer Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, which had its world premiere at the Pittsburgh Opera’s Bitz Opera Factory on Saturday, is all about atmosphere. Based on the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa story that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s renowned 1950 film “Rashomon,” the 60-minute opera’s moody, haunting score, laced with electronics, explores the uncertainties—multiple, conflicting testimonies—that are the hallmarks of the story and the film. However, its libretto insists on resolving the mystery, which the story does not.

The setting has been updated from ancient Japan to Oregon in 1921; other significant details have been changed as well. The Outlaw, Luther Harlow, sees The Settler, Ambrose Raines, and his wife, Leona Raines, riding through a mountain landscape left desolate by a wildfire. Luther decides that he wants Leona. He lures Ambrose into a grove with the promise of a hidden treasure, ties him up, and then goes back to rape Leona. Ambrose ends up stabbed to death. 

Seven testimonies—four from witnesses with fragmentary knowledge, three from the participants themselves—offer conflicting interpretations of what happened. Each of the three participants claims responsibility for Ambrose’s death. In the Japanese original, the woman having been raped is the core of the story, making honor—that of the woman and that of her samurai husband—a critical factor. In a modern feminist twist, the opera’s woman is given more agency. Leona saves herself from being raped; she tries to rescue her husband and intervenes in the fight between the men. Finally, the revelation that Ambrose has a weak heart as a result of rheumatic fever in childhood—the frailty in the relationship is his, not hers—becomes central to the unraveling of the mystery.

Mr. Cerrone’s score, for nine instrumentalists and electronics, opens with a wind-like wash of sound; the instrumental soundscape, with fragments of melody subtly woven into a foundation of percussion, remains alluringly and dramatically hypnotic. Vocal lines are direct and unembellished, often with repeated notes and a sudden drop into a lower register for just a syllable or two. Like the instruments, the voices are amplified and sometimes electronically manipulated and distorted, alerting the listener to the fact that a character may be lying, or remembering wrong. Turning points are carefully signaled: For example, when Leona realizes—or thinks she realizes—that her husband hates her, the pounding orchestration disappears to leave her voice nakedly and poignantly exposed. 

Four skilled young singers each sang two roles—a participant and a witness—with only slight changes of hair and costume. Baritone Yazid Gray gave Luther a harshness as well as the seductive allure that tempts Ambrose off the path, and he brought stolid clarity to the Woodcutter who finds the body. Andrew Turner’s lyrical tenor supplied Ambrose’s pathos and the directness of the Policeman who arrests Luther. Soprano Madeline Ehlinger was luminous and sympathetic as Leona and forthright as her mother, who describes her missing daughter as an aspiring botanist. Countertenor Chuanyuan Liu sang the Medium through whom the dead Ambrose tells his version of events with an otherworldly flourish; his final duet with Mr. Turner—two Ambroses together—was a high point. He also illuminated the brief role of the shy Priest who sees the couple on the road before they meet Luther. Conductor Antony Walker, working with the instrumentalists from a loft high above the singers, ably welded the ensemble together.

For the stage, set designer Mimi Lien placed a runway, marbled in black and white, down the center of the small, black-box theater, with the audience seated on both sides. A translucent panel, its utility unclear, bisected the runway and moved from one side of it to the other between testimonies. The only other set pieces were two glowing images of naked tree trunks, one on each long wall behind the audience, which also shifted position, sliding along the walls, between scenes. There were no props. Mary Birnbaum’s acute, choreographic direction told the story clearly, with the aid of Yuki Nakase Link’s ghostly lighting and Oana Botez’s monochromatic period costumes that hinted at Japanese shapes. The look of the show paid homage to the story’s Japanese origins, coexisting ingeniously with the opera’s more American style in its dissection of this young couple’s tragedy. 

—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).