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In Opera Parallèle’s remount of Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer’s fact-based opera, the story of a perilous mountain expedition is presented using sophisticated animation. 

By Heidi Waleson

July 19, 2021 5:39 pm ET

“Everest,” an opera by Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer, made a powerful impression at its Dallas Opera world premiere in 2015. A taut, absorbing depiction of a real, ill-fated expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 1996, the piece zeroes in on three climbers— Rob Hall (the expedition’s leader), Doug Hansen and Beck Weathers —and Jan Arnold, Hall’s pregnant wife back home. It explores their connections but mostly their profound isolation in the face of the raging blizzard that will cost Rob and Doug their lives.

Opera Parallèle, the home company of conductor Nicole Paiement, who led the premiere, has remounted the piece as a digital graphic novel, which is now available on demand from the Dallas Opera’s new streaming channel (rental $19.99; no subscription required; available through Jan. 16, 2022). This ingenious production focuses the action even further on that isolation, as well as on the hubris that prompts humans to challenge the unforgiving natural world, and the porous border between life and death.

Directed by Brian Staufenbiel, with the work of illustrator Mark Simmons and director of photography David Murakami, the film is laid out to look like a book, with multiple panes per page, floating in a black, starry background of seemingly infinite space. Black, white and shades of blue dominate the visual palette, depicting the mountain and a blank-eyed chorus of the dead—representing the hundreds of climbers killed over decades of attempts at the summit—that surrounds the living characters. Only the living humans are drawn in warm colors. They are animated in a lifelike manner, their faces made mobile with technology that reproduced the expressions of the singers as they recorded their parts in a studio. That color and movement embodies the living characters’ hope of survival but also their frailty, since the chilly, block-like backgrounds; the stiff, looming chorus; and the steady, inexorable pacing of the rest of the animation all point to a bad outcome.

This visual environment and tempo complemented the music, which balances the hopeful solo voices against the storm that rages in the orchestra and the eerie, echoing constancy of the chorus that counts out the time—“2:59. 3:12. 3:21”—with every minute making a safe descent less likely. The vocal characterizations are distinctive: Nathan Granner’s poignant tenor expresses Rob’s adventurous spirit, his sense of responsibility for his clients—rather than leaving the ailing Doug behind, he drags him along and finally dies beside him—and his love for Jan. Baritone Hadleigh Adams ably conveys Doug’s fundamental weakness; mezzo Sasha Cooke makes Jan, patched through to Rob as he dies on the mountain, a heartbreakingly stalwart companion. Bass Kevin Burdette embodies Beck’s life force as he hallucinates a backyard barbecue and his daughter, Meg (Charlotte Fanvu); her appearance draws him back from death and prompts him to save himself.

The chorus part was performed by a quartet of singers, their voices skillfully expanded into a larger ensemble through multitrack recording. The big orchestra called for in the score was represented by a digital soundtrack created by engineer Magnus Green in collaboration with Ms. Paiement, who also conducted the singers. It was efficient, and supplied the necessary momentum and background, but the richness and variety of the acoustic instrumental sound was missing, flattened into a more generalized, electronic timbral effect. Drawing and animation successfully rendered the story of “Everest” through a new lens; however, compressing its orchestral music into one dimension, while appropriate for the medium and certainly cost-effective, felt like a loss.

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

Boston Lyric Opera teams up with television professionals on an inventive project set in a supernatural motel. 

By Heidi Waleson

June 2, 2021 4:37 pm ET

Live opera performance with in-person audiences is gradually returning, with summer festivals putting on (mostly) outdoor productions and opera companies announcing indoor seasons for the fall. This is a happy development, but I hope that producers will not forget about the enormously innovative and creative work in digital media that has enlivened these locked-down months and revolutionized ideas about what opera can be. One such project has its debut on June 3: “Desert In,” commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera and produced in association with Long Beach Opera, is an opera miniseries in eight episodes, each 10 to 20 minutes long. It streams on BLO’s operabox.tv, with two episodes released for subscribers each Thursday, and the general public on Friday. 

Conceived by composer Ellen Reid, playwright christopher oscar peña, and director James Darrah, “Desert In” is a highly original marriage of opera and series television. Eight writers, most of them with television credits, divvied up the episodes; eight composers contributed music. Only three of the characters are played on screen by singers; the others are portrayed by actors, their sung parts voiced by unseen vocalists. Mr. Darrah directed five of the episodes; the other three directors include, in television series fashion, one of the project’s writers and one of its actors. 

Rough cuts of the first three episodes offer a tantalizing, if sometimes frustrating, window on the project (I had to watch them twice to figure out what was going on). The basic premise: In a motel somewhere in the American West, people can be reunited with their dead loves—for a price. In Episode 1, “This House Is Now,” we meet the inn’s owner, Cass (mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard ), and her wife, Sunny (soprano Talise Trevigne). Motel guest Ion (actor Raviv Ullman ; baritone Edward Nelson ) is having a joyously steamy reunion with Rufus, his dead lover (actor Alexander Jon Flores ; tenor Jesus Garcia ), but he doesn’t have enough money to keep the magic going. We also meet the vaguely menacing handyman, Federico (actor Anthony Michael Lopez ; tenor Alan Pingarrón ). The two next episodes introduce the Lounge Singer (vocalist Justin Vivian Bond ) and Derek (actor Ricco Ross ; bass-baritone Davóne Tines), whose wish to reunite with his dead son appears to have consequences for Ion. 

Music, text and cinematography are inextricably entwined. Spoken monologues open each episode; music then launches the action. Ms. Reid’s score for episode 1 is lush and expansive, its voluptuousness setting the amorous tone. The photography and visual pacing (Mr. Darrah directed) also shape the storytelling: Our viewpoint on Ion and Rufus keeps switching between their lovemaking in the motel room and a day at the beach, when Rufus takes his surfboard into the waves and disappears. This episode has only brief snatches of song, most of it performed by Ms. Leonard’s Cass; the instrumental music, remarkably varied for an ensemble of just seven players, conducted by David Angus, supplies aural tension and texture.

The vibe of episode 2, “Love Is Like the Sea,” also directed by Mr. Darrah, is quite different. The opening monologue by Mx. Bond (who uses the gender-neutral honorific)—a comic, over-the-top TV pitch for the inn—sets its tone (Joy Kecken is the writer). Nathalie Joachim’s jittery, percussive music animates a raucous nighttime pool party, its champagne-fueled abandon laced with unease. Visual density and overlapping camera shots enhance the colorful, deliberately chaotic atmosphere, but also contribute to some narrative confusion: Since the actors don’t sing, it can be hard to match character with vocals. Printed text—“Ion sings” or “Rufus responds”—is sometimes splashed over the images; it helps, but also calls attention to the artifice of the conceit. 

The centerpiece of Episode 3, “Someday you’ll know…they’re calling you too,” with music by Ms. Reid and Vijay Iyer, is a torchy cabaret song, “My Boy,” dispatched by Mx. Bond with gravelly voiced authority. That episode ends with a ritual led by Ms. Leonard, whose cartwheel black hat, elbow-length red gloves, and imperious gesticulations suggest glamour and sorcery. Also in television style, mysterious elements keep curiosity simmering between episodes. 

The screen actors are skilled and attractive; Mr. Ullman’s Ion is especially poignant. Ms. Leonard is in her element as the gorgeous, hard-edged innkeeper—the setup is clearly not benign—and her brief, eloquent arias drop naturally into the cinematic texture. Mx. Bond’s outsize, gender-fluid persona adds to the unconventional ambience. The work of Michael Elias Thomas (director of photography), Yuki Izumihara (production design), Molly Irelan (costume design) and Pablo Santiago (lighting design) is central to the series’ hallucinatory atmosphere. 

“Desert In” represents an extreme deconstruction of opera’s familiar tropes. Singing voices are a single element among many rather than the driving force of the narrative—but when we hear them, we pay attention. The “auteur” tradition is upended: The different composers inject unusual variety, and the writers’ room technique of communal plotting and character development gives each episode a distinctive outline while maintaining a consistent narrative. As was the case with BLO’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Mr. Darrah is experimenting and forging a new art form.

Other talented creators are also working at the intersection of opera and film: Check out, for example, the haunting lullaby “The Island We Made” (Angélica Negrón/Matthew Placek/Sasha Velour) on the Opera Philadelphia Channel and “Gallup (Na’nizhoozhi)”(Matthew Aucoin/Blackhorse Lowe/Anthony Roth Costanzo and Davóne Tines), LA Opera’s newest Digital Short Opera has metamorphosed many times over its four-century-plus history. Why should it stop now? 

—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).

Three virtual walking tours from On Site Opera explore Black music and history in New York; the Tulsa Opera pays tribute in song to the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

By Heidi Waleson

May 5, 2021 5:39 pm ET

New York

In normal times, On Site Opera stages works in locations that relate to their subject matter. With “The Road We Came,” an ambitious project designed for abnormal times, the company has instead used music and technology to illuminate the rich history that is buried in familiar places. Three self-guided walking tours trace the experience of Black people in New York, starting in Lower Manhattan in the 17th century; moving north to Midtown in the late 19th century; and then up to Harlem in the 20th century. Each of the 16 tour stops has a narration by historian Eric K. Washington and a short film by Ryan and Tonya McKinny in which bass-baritone Kenneth Overton, accompanied by pianist Kevin J. Miller, sings music by (mostly) Black composers. Accessed through a dedicated app, the tours are $60 each; all three are $165. 

These fascinating journeys can be taken virtually or in person; I walked the Lower Manhattan route on a windy Friday afternoon. It’s a hike—3.1miles, according to the app—and it took two hours, rather than the estimated 90 minutes, to do the walk and take in all the filmed and recorded content at each of the five stops. The tour begins at the African Burial Ground on Duane Street, a somber monument in water and stone to the thousands buried there between the 1690s and 1794; Mr. Overton’s rendition of William Grant Still’s plaintive “Grief” is a fitting accompaniment. The next site, a plaque in Tribeca marking a stop on the Underground Railroad, gets a fiercer song: “Oh Say, Do You Hear? (Abolitionist National Anthem),” with E.A. Atlee’s graphic text about whipped and bloodied bodies set to the tune better known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 

The tour continues north through Greenwich Village, zigzagging to Astor Place and into Chelsea. It was illuminating to learn about Henry and Sarah Garnet, a prominent Black abolitionist couple (he a minister and orator; she an educator), outside their house on MacDougal Street, and Mr. Overton’s haunting performance of Wallace Willis’s “Steal Away” stayed with me along the next leg of the walk. Who knew that the Wanamaker’s department store, which once stood opposite Cooper Union, had an all-black employee chorus? Or that Sarah Garnet’s three-story school, built in 1870, still stands on 17th Street, albeit with a peeling façade and gated windows? For this location, Mr. Overton, wearing one of many colorful, African-patterned jackets ( Jessica Jahn designed the costumes), stood like a greeter at its door, singing the spiritual “De Gospel Train” with its appropriate refrain, “Get on board, little children.” 

I took the Midtown Manhattan tour virtually, losing the immediacy of those physical sites and the disturbing sense of how history gets paved over. On the plus side, it is easier to appreciate the films, as well as Mr. Washington’s absorbing commentaries, without the extraneous light and noise of the street. The tour explores the history of the vanished West Side Black neighborhoods, like San Juan Hill, along with the growth of mainstream audience interest in the work of Black performers, heard at Carnegie Hall, and in the Eubie Blake musical “Shuffle Along,” which opened in 1921. The most stirring moment is Mr. Overton’s performance—in front of the Metropolitan Opera House—of “Peculiar Grace,” from Terence Blanchard’s 2019 opera, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” This affecting aria depicts a gay Black boy’s yearning to leave his home in the South and be “finally free.” “Fire” is slated to open the Met’s 2021-22 season, its first-ever opera by a Black composer.

The Harlem tour, the most geographically compact, traces the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance with visits to landmarks like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the house where Langston Hughes lived in his final decades. I was intrigued by the two row houses on West 131st Street which briefly (1914-19) served as the home for the Music School Settlement for Colored People: Its director of music was John Rosamond Johnson, who, with his brother, the poet James Weldon Johnson, wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” often called the “Black National Anthem.” That piece was featured on the Midtown tour; here, Mr. Overton offered a quieter composition by the brothers, the soulful “Since You Went Away,” taking off his fedora, seemingly as a sign of mourning. 

Hughes’s close collaboration with the composer Margaret Bonds is celebrated in the evocative “Three Dream Portraits”; Mr. Overton also performs striking settings of Hughes’s poems by Florence Price and William Grant Still. The tour concludes on Strivers’ Row, at the home of James H. Williams who, as “Chief” of the red cap porters of Grand Central Terminal, hired Black, college-educated men. Fittingly, the optimistic final piece, “Night Song,” with a text by the Harlem Renaissance poet Clarissa Scott Delany, is by H. Leslie Adams —a living composer. 

***

Tulsa Opera’s “Greenwood Overcomes,” a live concert with an in-person audience at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, commemorating the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre by celebrating Black resilience and artistry, was a laudable undertaking. (The May 1 livestream is available through May 31 on the company’s site. A higher quality recording will be available May 19.) It featured music by 23 living Black composers, including eight world premieres, four of them commissioned for the event, performed by an all-Black cast of eight singers with piano accompaniment by the valiant Howard Watkins, who co-curated the project with the company’s artistic director, Tobias Picker. 

While overlong at two hours, with 30 numbers and no intermission, the concert had numerous high points. My favorites were the two performances by the superb young bass-baritone Davóne Tines, arresting in “After Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—Tyshawn Sorey’s chilling deconstruction of the spiritual, which stretches out the cadences of the familiar text and pares the accompaniment down to a death march. Mr. Tines also gave a storyteller’s intensity to the most gripping of the commissions: “There Are Many Trails of Tears” from Anthony Davis’s forthcoming opera “Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921.” 

Also memorable was Issachah Savage, who channeled his lavish, buoyant tenor into directness and simplicity for H. Leslie Adams’s “Prayer,” and gave Nkeiru Okoye’s “A Kiss on the Forehead,” one of the world premieres, an easy, expansive sincerity. Leah Hawkins brought a rich soprano and considerable charm to “Liza” and “Nobody’s Business (But Me Own)” by Peter Ashbourne.

The sheer number and variety of composers was also impressive. I liked Quinn Mason’s dreamy “Eclipsed World,” sung by tenor Noah Stewart ; the serene lyricism of Kathryn Bostic’s “State of Grace,” sung by mezzo Krysty Swann ; and Melanie DeMore’s consoling “Sending You Light,” sung by mezzo Denyce Graves. Mr. Watkins got a solo moment in the spotlight with the poignant “Billie’s Song” by Valerie Capers. Not everything came off well: Bass Kevin Thompson seemed stiff and uncomfortable with the rhythms of Tania León’s lively “Mi Amor Es,” while James Lee III’s “Songs for the People,” another commissioned work, sung by Ms. Graves, had an old-fashioned vibe in both setting and text—a poem by Frances E.W. Harper about how the world needs music. It was also a miscalculation to have soprano Leona Mitchell, who was born in Oklahoma, sing four songs: Hearing what remains of her once-glorious soprano, now past its prime, was hard. Finally, most of the repertoire was chosen for uplift, which grew wearying in such a long program. Some more challenging fare would have been welcome in the mix. 

—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 soprano, with collaborators guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Christian McBride and pianist Dan Tepfer, tried to create a jazz-club vibe at the socially distanced Hudson Yards venue with a mix of classical and popular fare.

By Heidi Waleson

April 22, 2021 3:49 pm ET

New York

There was a live, in-person performance at The Shed at Hudson Yards on Wednesday night, but first you had to show up exactly at your specified entry time; then wait, shivering, in line on the wind-whipped plaza as ushers scanned vaccination or negative Covid-19 test certificates and checked IDs; and, finally, get your temperature taken. Inside, the cavernous, airplane-hanger-like space felt similarly dark and chilly, with stone underfoot and dim, hazy lighting melting away toward the distant, invisible roof. Seats, single or in pairs, were separated by the regulation six feet. I kept my coat zipped; on the plus side, there was a luxurious amount of leg room. 

Soprano Renée Fleming and her virtuoso collaborators—guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Christian McBride and pianist Dan Tepfer —did their best to create a jazz-club vibe, although they, too, were all separated onstage by six feet, and the miking balances were off, with the piano tinnily loud and the guitar too soft. Ms. Fleming’s stylings tended toward the careful; her eclectic, 80-minute program mixed nostalgia for what now seems like a very distant past, acknowledgment of the trauma of the past year, and a little bit of playfulness. It opened with a spare, meditative rendition of Maria Schneider’s “Perfectly Still This Solstice Morning,” from the song cycle “Winter Morning Walks,” the program’s most recent piece, then zoomed about three centuries backward in time for two brief Handel arias, “O Sleep, why dost though leave me?” from “Semele” and “Bel piacere e godere” from “Agrippina.” Both were smoothed into prettiness, with none of the characters’ manipulative sensuality in evidence, though Ms. Fleming had fun with ornaments in the “Agrippina” aria. 

A move into the American Songbook gave Ms. Fleming’s collaborators more scope, which was all to the good: Mr. Tepfer offered an elaborate improvisation between the verses of Jerome Kern’s intimate “All the Things You Are,” and Mr. McBride cut loose with a toe-tapping solo on Richard A. Whiting’s up-tempo “When Did You Leave Heaven?” 

One could feel Ms. Fleming’s intense connection to the next group of songs, all from her youth. Her voice opened up, embracing the complexities of revisiting the past. She was poignant in “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell, whom Ms. Fleming cited in her introduction as a central inspiration for her artistic life; in Chuck Mangione’s big band number, “Land of Make Believe,” her optimism felt tempered by experience. Saddest of all was Sandy Denny’s wistful “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”—which Ms. Fleming connected to the toll that the pandemic year has taken on artists unable to perform together and for others. 

The mood turned more upbeat for a virtuosic instrumental number: Miles Davis’s rollicking “ Donna Lee, ” featuring some ferocious licks from Mr. McBride. Ms. Fleming then invited each of her collaborators to say something about their year; it turns out that Mr. Tepfer and Mr. McBride have been playing together over the internet, including performing “Donna Lee” “even faster than we just did,” much to Mr. Frisell’s professed amazement. It was an amiably humanizing moment. 

The final set saluted New York institutions. First came the plaintive “Touch the Hand of Love” by Blossom Dearie, a staple of the city’s club scene of the 1960s. Next, the “Barcarolle” duet from Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” with Mr. McBride supplying a mellow, bowed mezzo line, was offered as a tribute to the Metropolitan Opera, which seems far from resurrection if indoor, seated audiences continue to be capped at 150. Finally, in Cole Porter’s “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor),” Ms. Fleming playfully tossed in a little chest voice.

The encore, Stephen Foster’s haunting “Hard Times Come Again No More,” with Mr. Tepfer and Mr. McBride joining in on the vocal in the chorus, seemed to round out the program’s theme: a plea—it’s enough, already—but also the profound sense that things will never be what they were. In the darkness, the audience stood to applaud, sort of together, but still separate.

—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).

Carl Maria von Weber’s ‘The Marksman,’ moved to today’s corporate world; a song cycle by composer Jake Heggie and poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, performed by baritone Joshua Hopkins in response to the murder of his sister by her ex-partner.

By Heidi Waleson

March 3, 2021 4:45 pm ET

Trying to give Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” (“The Marksman”) a contemporary twist is fraught with peril, since magic, omens and the power of the natural world are integral to this 1821 classic of early German Romanticism. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production at the Bavarian State Opera, available for streaming through March 15, cleverly transposes “Freischütz” into the modern corporate world, but it takes some work: The director’s explanatory character descriptions and “thought bubble” texts projected above the stage are essential to understanding what’s going on, so be sure to activate the English titles if you don’t speak German. Bits of dialogue have also been strategically added or excised.

In the original story, the huntsman Max must make a perfect shot in order to marry Agathe, the daughter of the head forester, Kuno, and become head forester himself. However, his aim has deserted him, and his friend Kaspar, who has sold his soul to the devil, offers him magic bullets to get the job done. In Mr. Tcherniakov’s version, Kuno owns a big corporation and is estranged from Agathe, who has left home. She returns because she plans to marry Max, a low-level employee in the company. Max is ambitious and hopes that the marriage will bring him into the boss’s inner circle.

Those insiders gather during the overture on Mr. Tcherniakov’s single set, a fancy conference room with a modernist starburst chandelier and an undulating rear wall of wood panels that swivel open to reveal a panorama of glass skyscrapers. They watch as a rifle is set up on a tripod, aimed out a side window, for Max to take his shot. A video of his view through the rifle’s scope shows the targets: people walking on the street below. Max recoils, declaring, “I cannot shoot a living being.” Kilian, one of the observers, shoots instead, and we see the victim fall. Admission to the inner circle, therefore, requires actual murder. It’s no wonder that Max spends the rest of the opera gibbering with hysterical laughter and getting increasingly drunk.

This concept darkens an already dark story, since success, it appears, requires jettisoning one’s higher principles from the outset. (Is it better or worse that at the end of Act I, chatter among white-jacketed waiters reveals that the killing is faked?) The supernatural elements are portrayed as psychological and societal. Kaspar, we are told, is a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, so the pivotal Wolf’s Glen scene, in which the magic bullets are forged, becomes his personal hallucination, into which he literally drags the terrified Max ( Gleb Filshtinsky’s lighting gives the conference-room set some extra menace here). An intense Kyle Ketelsen voices the thundering words of the Black Huntsman, Samiel, the opera’s devil, a spoken role, along with Kaspar’s part; clearly, the demon is inside him. In the finale, after Max shoots Agathe, the redemption from the holy Hermit and happy ending become merely Max’s hallucination, and Agathe is really dead. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, Mr. Tcherniakov implies, you don’t control the black magic—it controls you.

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The production was handsomely cast. Not only was Mr. Ketelsen mesmerizing, but the poignant tenor of Pavel Černoch, as Max, went well with his aptly unhinged acting. The easy power of Golda Schultz’s creamy soprano suited the production’s concept of Agathe as an independent woman who nonetheless worries about her man. Anna Prohaska infused the bright merriness of Agathe’s friend Ännchen with spite: It seems that the two women had a romantic relationship that is now ending. Ännchen’s handsome powder-blue trouser suit and coat, emphasizing her elegant toughness, was just one of Elena Zaytseva’s telling costumes; another was Max’s green pullover sweater, demonstrating his otherness in a room full of people in chic corporate attire. Bálint Szabó gave an expansive menace to the usually minor role of Kuno, now a ruthless tycoon.

Antonello Manacorda’s conducting seemed deliberately heavy, putting a damper even on the jolly, folk-inspired parts of the score. It all made sense, particularly in retrospect, but it wasn’t much fun.

***

“Songs for Murdered Sisters,” a film streaming on the Houston Grand Opera website and Marquee TVthrough March 21 (the audio recording on Pentatone will be released on March 5), also has violence at its center. The creation of this 30-minute song cycle by composer Jake Heggie and poet and novelist Margaret Atwood was set in motion by baritone Joshua Hopkins in response to a shocking case of domestic violence: On Sept. 22, 2015, in Ontario, a man slaughtered three ex-partners, one of whom was Mr. Hopkins’s sister. Mr. Hopkins’s gripping performance of the cycle speaks to a tragedy that is both personal and universal.

The film was shot in the 16th Street Train Station in Oakland, Calif., a large room whose shadowy vastness complements lines in the first poem, “Empty Chair”: “She is now emptiness / She is now air.” We see the singer, the composer at the piano, a screen on which different colors are projected, and a single empty chair.

The language of the eight poems is spare, direct and painful, the words of the bereaved brother making his way through different aspects and stages of his grief. The piece builds skillfully, and Mr. Heggie, who writes lyrically and idiomatically for the voice, unerringly finds the musical kernel of each. One is reminded of Schubert’s “Winterreise” and of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” both mental journeys of grievous loss, particularly in the way that a song may begin in one emotional register, then take a sudden turn. “Enchantment,” for example, blithely recounts fairy tales about lost girls with happy endings, but concludes, “This is…not that kind of story…” Bleakness and fury gain the upper hand in “Rage,” about the desire for revenge; its introductory lines are sung a cappella, with just the harsh strum of the piano’s strings between them. And in the saddest song, “Bird Soul,” the piano imitates bird songs as the singer wonders “If birds are human souls / What bird are you?” but finally acknowledges “I know you are not a bird…I need you to be somewhere.”

James Niebuhr’s subtle film direction includes color changes—red for “Anger,” pinks and violets for “Bird Soul”—and varied camera angles. The single empty chair is the physical embodiment of one murdered sister; at the climax of the sixth song, the anguished “Lost,” which moves beyond the personal to the larger universe of domestic-violence victims, the camera pulls back to show a whole semicircle of empty chairs. And as the final song concludes, lights flicker on over the chair, warming the space for the words “You are here with me…” as the singer—and the listener—finds some real solace at last.

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

Boston Lyric Opera fuses Philip Glass’s 1987 work with the story of a migrant child in detention; Washington National Opera releases a graphic novel version of Beethoven’s only opera.

By Heidi Waleson‘

Feb. 2, 2021 2:32 pm ET

James Darrah’s new film of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” available on Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv, represents an intriguing take, both in medium and interpretation, on Philip Glass’s 1987 work. However, be warned that you may be perplexed about what’s going on.

Raúl Santos’s screenplay layers the contemporary story of Luna, a Guatemalan migrant child who is interned alone at the U.S. border, over Arthur Yorinks’s original libretto based on Edgar Allan Poe’s horror tale about the twins Roderick and Madeline festering in their decaying Gothic mansion. Luna’s story is depicted in animated charcoal drawings; the Usher tale uses dolls in stop-motion filmmaking. A third visual stream comprises archival television footage, much of it from the 1960s. What do these narratives have to do with one another? Apparently, Luna, mute and traumatized, imagines the Poe story, as if acted out with dolls in an abandoned dollhouse that she finds. The connection is not obvious, but if you can get past a need for literal coherence, the storytelling resonates on more abstract and emotional levels.

Mr. Glass’s 90-minute opera works well as a film score. There is plenty of space for Luna’s tale in its long stretches of purely instrumental music, and the repeating arpeggios, growing in pulsating intensity, push the narratives along. (Conductor David Angus supervised the music recording remotely; the players worked from a click track.) The disembodied voices of the singers— Jesse Darden (Roderick), Chelsea Basler (Madeline) and Daniel Belcher (William, their visitor)—float as nondominant elements in the texture. Adding to the creepiness, Madeline’s part is a wordless vocalise.

The striking visual components, supervised by production designers Yuki Izumihara and Yee Eun Nam and director of photography Pablo Santiago, embrace the opera’s ambiguity and nightmarish ambiance. William has been summoned by Roderick, but for what purpose? Are the twins lovers? Does Madeline actually get buried alive? What happens at the end? Take your best guess. The stop-motion technique makes the doll characters appear alternately helpless and menacing.

The animated drawings of Luna’s nonchronological story convey a different kind of darkness (especially since they are in charcoal) with their depictions of flight, incarceration, looming guards, a near-drowning and a gravedigger. Early in the film, the television footage depicts a happy, sanitized American Dream landscape, with children on school buses, suburban barbecues and birthday parties. Later, it shifts to animal experimentation, Black people being chased off public beaches, and finally modern-day news clips of migrant children in cages at the border.

This complex tapestry of alternating visual and narrative worlds, though swept along by the music, is deliberately unsettling, pushing the viewer to dig for connections. The horror-movie motif established by the spoken prologue— featuring an actress in a badly fitting man’s suit who brandishes scary instruments from an old-fashioned medical bag and turns on a 1960s-era television—offers a clue. Nothing is benign; perhaps the poisonous house is intended as a metaphor for the corruption of that American Dream. However, the strong erotic undertones of the Usher story—glimpsed especially through the fervor of Mr. Darden’s singing—don’t really mesh with Luna’s ordeal, and finally the film feels as though Mr. Glass’s opera has been repurposed for a different story altogether.

Some of Mr. Darrah’s recent film projects with other performing-arts groups are clearer. “Lumee’s Dream,” co-directed with Adam Larsen, now available as part of LA Opera’s “Digital Shorts” project, presents an aria from Ellen Reid’s opera “p r i s m,” sung by mezzo Rebecca Jo Loeb, as a serenely elegant array of kaleidoscope images of dancer Sasha Rivero and singer Anna Schubert. (A video of the staged production of the complete opera, which Mr. Darrah helmed, is available on the LA Opera website through Feb. 8.) For the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Mr. Darrah serves as the creative director of “Close Quarters,” online videos that accompany orchestral performances. For Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” the camera follows Mr. Darrah as he bicycles through a Los Angeles neighborhood, spinning along busy commercial arteries and residential streets. This steady journey, its scenery so remote from the nonurban inspiration for the Copland piece, seen in split screen with the musicians playing, creates an unexpectedly contemplative atmosphere even as it offers a contemporary gloss on a piece of American nostalgia.

***

As Boston Lyric Opera did with its “Usher” project, Washington National Opera produced a planned 2020-21 season piece in a different medium: The company commissioned a graphic novel, aimed at young readers, based on Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Created by Kelley Rourke (author) and Erik Teague (co-author and illustrator), the book highlights female heroism. It opens with the opera’s back story, casting Leonore and Florestan as co-leaders of the Resistance to the wicked Governor Pizarro, and then proceeds with the opera’s rescue plot, minus the family comedy and the Prisoners’ Chorus.

The vivid illustrations keep the story in its late 18th-century period, but the text is sprinkled with quotes about feminism and justice from Martin Luther King Jr. , John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, emphasizing the opera’s timelessness. And there’s music: A 20-minute digital version of the book, available on the Kennedy Center’s website, features members and alumni of WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists program reading the text (I particularly liked bass-baritone Samuel Weiser’s thuggish Rocco) and singing snippets from the opera with piano accompaniment. It all provides a tidy, focused introduction, with a girl-power spin, to a classic work.

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

A dark opera explores the mind of a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; a pastoral comedy features earnest lovers, meddling gods and sheep puppets.

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 26, 2021 2:29 pm ET

Operas directed especially for film have been an intriguing artistic byproduct of the Covid-19 pandemic, opening new interpretive avenues. A case in point is the movie of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” created for the Opera Philadelphia Channel. The film makes this 2006 monodrama even more powerful than it was as staged theater. It is an immersive experience that takes the audience on a terrifying dive into the mind of a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.

As directed and performed by baritone Johnathan McCullough, with a screenplay by James Darrah and Mr. McCullough, the veteran lives in an Airstream trailer marooned in an otherwise empty field. His home is an encampment, and all the details—the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag outside; the bleak, claustrophobic interior with a constantly operating coffee maker and a handgun on the table—scream isolation and tension. Mr. Little based the libretto of “Soldier Songs” on interviews with friends and family members who served in conflicts from World War II to Afghanistan. Their recorded spoken accounts serve as an essential element in its musical texture, along with the baritone solo part and a small, percussion-driven instrumental ensemble. In the film, the camera’s multiple perspectives add still more layers of meaning and sensation, and accentuate the violent, repetitive quality of the score.

The tight dramatic arc starts with a shot of the open field (there’s a distant booming sound that could be gunfire) before the camera zeroes in on the trailer and its occupant. We see what’s happening inside the veteran’s head as he relives his experiences. He plays at war—as a child with toy soldiers and as an adolescent obsessed with violent videogames—and then segues into the real thing, blasting Metallica “to keep me entertained” while driving a tank. Sometimes it’s now; sometimes it’s then; like the soldier, we’re never entirely sure. The trailer’s window becomes the tank window; burning toast creates a cloud of smoke that becomes a bomb explosion, as Mr. McCullough tumbles out the door in battle gear and cries “Somebody yell cut! This movie is out of control.”

Even quieter moments, like the song about the death-notification visit by two Marines, sustain the undercurrent of dread. In an extended sequence about how soldiers call incoming ordnance “steel rain,” the recorded spoken voices are intelligible at first, then pile on top of each other and dissolve into the noise in the veteran’s head as he crawls, again and again, through the field, fleeing invisible enemies. And that Chekhovian gun in the early scene? It reappears, but it’s an open question as to whether it gets used. At the center of the film, Mr. McCullough proves gifted as both actor and singer, his dead-eyed expression a chilling contrast to the anguish in his voice and the endless torment caused by the experience of war that the audience, thanks to his directorial skills, can feel too. Corrado Rovaris led the incisive seven-member instrumental ensemble.

***

After that, I certainly needed some comic relief, which was amply supplied by a new production of Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville’s “Titon et L’Aurore” (1753) from the Opéra Comique. Paris is on lockdown, so the show had only one performance this month, with no audience—the singers and players supplied the applause for one another at the end. The video is available free of charge on Medici.tv through April 19.

This delicious bonbon is served up by director Basil Twist, famed for his work with puppets, with music direction by the great William Christie leading his period-instrument ensemble Les Arts Florissants. It’s a pastoral entertainment with lots of dances and a simple plot: The shepherd Titon and the goddess L’Aurore (Dawn) are in love; a pair of jealous gods, Éole (god of the winds) and Palès (goddess of shepherds), resolve to separate them. Happily, Amour (Love) prevails.

Mr. Twist’s direction and design reflect the airiness of the piece with billowing fabrics that evoke fire and wind, L’Aurore’s iridescent golden dress and Amour’s silver 18th-century court costume, all made vivid by Jean Kalman’s colorful lighting. Puppets are central in the numerous dances, beginning with the Prologue, when earthen statues are brought to life. As befits a pastorale, puppet sheep play a major role. Palès has a fleecy train and pair of sheep companions. Mr. Twist brilliantly builds the comedy, with new sheep for each dance, in the extended scene in which Palès tries to seduce Titon into infidelity. Her ovine companions stand up and dance, other sheep appear in tilting stacks, and still more romping beasts descend from the flies. You can’t keep from laughing.

Standouts in the excellent cast include Gwendoline Blondeel, whose opulent soprano brings warmth and richness to L’Aurore, and Emmanuelle de Negri, a comically vicious Palès (listen to her snarl “haine”—hatred). Julie Roset is a bright-voiced Amour, especially able in the ornamented passages. As Titon, Reinoud Van Mechelen comes into his own in his celebratory final aria; Marc Mauillon could use a bit more vocal weight as the nasty Éole, but his revenge duet with Ms. de Negri is a high point. Mr. Christie’s orchestra sparkles throughout, and their speedy double-time repeats add to the show’s emphatic embrace of fun.

—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).

Now available to watch online, the Atlanta Opera’s in-person performances embraced Covid-19 restrictions as a creative challenge.

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 20, 2021 1:21 pm ET

The Atlanta Opera has been one of the few American companies to perform live for in-person audiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last fall, using a custom-built, open-sided tent situated on a university baseball field and following rigorous coronavirus protocols, the company gave 17 performances of two one-act operas—Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Viktor Ullman’s “The Kaiser of Atlantis,” played on alternate days—as well as three concerts. The salaried Atlanta Opera Company Players—a dozen top singers who live in the Atlanta area—and the six members of its young artist program comprise the casts of all the company’s live and digital events.

Films of the live operas and concerts, plus some additional videos, are being distributed on the company’s new Spotlight Media platform , at various price points. “Kaiser,” which is available now, along with the “Mezzo Extravaganza” concert, demonstrates how imaginative direction can harness Covid restrictions for artistic effect.

Ullmann’s sardonic 60-minute opera, with a libretto by Peter Kien, was composed in 1943 in the Nazi “show” camp Terezín but not performed until 1975 (the creators were killed in Auschwitz). The circus-themed production is directed by Tomer Zvulun, the company’s general and artistic director, with scenic design by Julia Noulin-Mérat, costumes by Joanna Schmink, and lighting by Ben Rawson. It skillfully juxtaposes Holocaust references (mountains of discarded shoes) with the visual signals of our current plague era (masks and four movable booths with clear vinyl sides). Singers inside the booths wear no masks; outside them, other singers and circus performers, all masked, stagger through a seemingly toxic landscape. The despotic Kaiser’s reign has produced a land where life and death are equally meaningless. Drunk with power, he decrees a total war that will kill everyone, but Death, angry at not being consulted, goes on strike. As a result, the populace, afflicted by battle and disease, cannot die.

The vinyl barriers visually separate perpetrators from victims; the face coverings, like Death’s black-edged teeth, the Soldier’s sci-fi mesh visor, and the gas masks in the “Dance of the Living Dead,” make vivid costume pieces. Although masking results in slightly muffled vocal production, and it is not always obvious who is singing, Jon Summers’s skillful sound design and Felipe Barral’s creative camera work keep the audio balanced and the story clear. Mr. Zvulun’s sensitive direction leavens the nightmarish satire with humanity. Even the Kaiser (the mellifluous baritone Michael Mayes ), who finally leaves his booth and submits to Death in order to end the world’s agony, is strangely pitiable as he sings his lament of failure.

The luxury cast includes mezzo Daniela Mack, powerful and bellicose as the Drummer, tenor Alek Shrader as the plaintive Harlequin, and bass Kevin Burdette as the sepulchral Death, alternately taunting and soothing. As the Girl and the Soldier, Jasmine Habersham’s bright soprano and Brian Vu’s urgent baritone make the pair’s quick switch from enemies to lovers believable, and bass-baritone Calvin Griffin is skillful as the Loudspeaker, who has the unenviable job of telling the Kaiser bad news from outside his bubble. Four circus performers (including a knife-thrower and stilt-walker) and two dancers supply motion and color that make up for the distancing requirements of the staging, and the 12-member orchestra, led by Clinton Smith, proves adept at both the Kurt Weill-like edginess and the Mahlerian pathos of the score. “Pagliacci” will be available starting Jan. 22.

The four divas of the Nov. 10 “Mezzo Extravaganza” concert— Jamie Barton, Daniela Mack, Megan Marino, and Gabrielle Beteag —manage to connect with their audience and each other despite occupying separate vinyl booths. Colorfully patterned dresses and chatty introductions help, as do the mostly light-hearted repertoire and the singers’ distinctive vocal and theatrical personalities. Ms. Mack stands out with her voluptuous yet penetrating timbre; she is mesmerizing in pieces ranging from a smoky zarzuela to Rossini’s comic girl power aria “Cruda sorte!” from “L’Italiana in Algeri.” Ms. Barton unleashes a torrent of chest voice and high drama for “O vagabonda stella” from Cilea’s “ Adriana Lecouvreur, ” a marked contrast to Ms. Marino’s lighter sound in a wistful rendition of the traditional Scottish song “ Loch Lomond. ” Ms. Beteag, though a bit more generic in her interpretations than the other three, gives a rousing rendition of the Witch’s aria from Humperdinck’s “Hansel und Gretel” with aplomb. For the final group, each mezzo tackles an aria from Bizet’s “Carmen,” demonstrating how many different interpretations are possible for this familiar character. I was particularly struck by Ms. Marino’s bleak, naked performance of “En vain pour éviter”; this Carmen sees her coming death with a fatalistic chill. Atlanta Opera plans to present “Carmen,” along with Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” live in the tent in April. Any one of these mezzos could be its star.

Also on Spotlight Media are “Love Letters to Atlanta,” a series of affecting short films, each showcasing one of the Atlanta Opera Company Players singing a classic song in a famous Atlanta space. Engaging interviews with Mr. Zvulun draw out the singers’ stories and connections to the spaces and the songs—bass Morris Robinson, for example, recalls his father telling him how “we” (that is, Black people) once had to enter the Fox Theater via exterior stairs that led to the balcony. Mr. Robinson then fills that theater’s space with “The Impossible Dream.” In her film, Ms. Barton does the same with an eloquent rendition of “Georgia on My Mind”; in his, Mr. Burdette talks about tradition at the vast Atlanta Civic Center Auditorium, once the home of the Metropolitan Opera tour. His song is “If Ever I Would Leave You.” For now, these international singers are not able to leave, and their home company is smart to embrace and showcase 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).

This year’s Prototype Festival features six boundary-pushing operas, most of which can be enjoyed at home.

By Heidi WalesonJan. 13, 2021 5:07 pm ET

The annual Prototype Festival (through Jan. 16), produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, always explores new territory in chamber opera theater. This year’s iteration, restricted to digital content due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has, paradoxically, gone even further than usual. The festival’s six presentations headily push boundaries in media, composition, content and geography. They are also available to a much wider public than Prototype’s small theaters can normally hold, and all but one (“Modulation,” which costs $25) are free of charge.

For “Modulation,” the 2021 festival’s world-premiere commission, 13 composers—seven of them women, almost all of them people of color—created a series of short films, accessed through an interactive website. On the home page, vocalist Carmina Escobar’s breath-centered music invites the user to select among three lighted doors; these lead to new pages, each a collection of films about “Identity,” “Fear” or “Isolation,” all themes germane to the current moment.

The pieces are as diverse as their creators, and they communicate their personal and political messages with clarity and verve. In “Identity,” Juhi Bansal’s “Waves of Change” juxtaposes melismatic singing in Bengali, a cello solo, and footage of a woman on a surfboard to evoke a sense of boundless freedom. Another “Identity” piece, Paul Pinto’s “Whiteness: Blanc,” uses snappy spoken text and the exponentially multiplied image of the artist’s brown face for a seriocomic exploration of the answer to the question “Where are you from?” “Fear” includes Yvette Janine Jackson’s “Fear Is Their Alibi,” in which a soprano sings a slow blues to an ominous bassoon accompaniment as an animated black line becomes a house, a hand, and a boot that viciously crushes the rest of the line into a helpless black puddle.

There are more noteworthy works behind the “Isolation” door. In Bora Yoon’s expansive “The Life of the World to Come,” bits of Purcell, drumming, the sounds of wind, birds and water, and recorded speech from George Floyd and Greta Thunberg, among others, are layered into a polemical but powerful incantation about the death of the Earth. At the other extreme is the simplicity of Raven Chacon’s haunting “La Indita Cautiva,” a somber captivity ballad. Jimmy López Bellido’s “Where Once We Sang” is the most conventional. It’s an aria, sung by mezzo Sasha Cooke with piano accompaniment, that laments the closing of opera houses and the silencing of live music-making due to the pandemic.

Prototype offers two in-person audience experiences. “Ocean Body,” by composer-singers Helga Davis and Shara Nova with filmmaker Mark DeChiazza, is an alluring 15-minute installation at the arts center HERE. Four viewers at a time can experience the film, which is spread over four screens. On a shell-covered beach, the two women, linked by the strings of their sculptural corsets, sing about constriction, connection and freedom; the experience of hearing the score while surrounded by ocean images offered a fleeting sense of open-air liberation. By contrast, “Times³” (“Times x Times x Times”) by composer Pamela Z and theater artist Geoff Sobelle felt oddly claustrophobic. I opted to listen to this 30-minute sonic evocation of Times Square in the actual Times Square, which Prototype suggests as an option, not a requirement. Samplings of voices talking about rocks, rivers, geologic time, Native Americans, theater marquees, and the subway felt flattened by the dismal scene around me: some mopey Elmos and Disney characters and a few selfie-takers wandering among the pulsating digital advertising signs and the bits of leftover confetti swirling in the chilly wind. It would have been better to listen at home and imagine the place.

Three digital U.S. premieres complete the lineup. The strongest is “The Murder of Halit Yozgat,” composed by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann, a chilling piece of political theater. Rehearsals for the opera’s world premiere in Germany were shut down in April by the pandemic, so Mr. Frost created a filmed version of the staging that shifts its point of view as frequently as the opera does. It is based on a real event: the 2006 murder of a young man in his Turkish immigrant parents’ internet cafe in Kassel, Germany. No one was convicted in the killing, though a neo-Nazi terror cell claimed responsibility; Forensic Architecture, a London research agency based out of Goldsmiths that investigates human rights violations through pioneering techniques, later created a reconstruction of the crime, based on police documents and other testimony, focusing on the mysterious presence of a German intelligence agent.

In the two-hour-long opera, the scene is reconstructed seven times. Each time through, the seven singers—three women and four men—switch roles as the five witnesses, the victim and his father, without regard for gender, age or ethnicity. In the first several iterations, the string and percussion ensemble, led by Florian Gross, is loud and pounding; the all-white, schematic set rotates, stagehands move the walls, as the singers’ words, in German and English, emerge randomly from the din: “I’m calling about the Passat.” “You’re no good to me dead.” After a brief spoken explanation, the reconstructions become slower and less chaotic; the accompaniment thins, and walls and set pieces are permanently removed. In the last one, the singers shiver against an aural windscape in dim light and finally scurry away, leaving only the dead body, and no real answer, behind.

“Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists,” by composer Valgeir Sigurdsson, seen in a video of a staged 2014 performance at the Reykjavik Arts Festival, was vaguer. Based on a book by A Rawlings, the 60-minute piece inscrutably pairs the study of sleep and dreams with the study of the life cycle of butterflies and moths. The production, by VaVaVoom Theatre and Bedroom Community, directed by Sara Martí, gets its punch from the look of the show (the threads that ensnare the male singer/sleeper; a gorgeous, woven chrysalis) rather than the music, although I liked the striking contralto range of Ásgerdur Júníusdóttir, one of the two female singer-scientists.

“The Planet—A Lament,” a collaboration between the Indonesian director Garin Nugroho and the Papuan composer-singer Septina Rosalina Layan inspired by Pacific Islander indigenous traditions, is in some ways the most immediate and visceral Prototype offering. In a stage-performance video, Ms. Layan, the 14-voice Mazmur Chorale and five dancers enact a purification ritual for a despoiled world. The harmonies of the choral lamentations are unusual, but their feelings spark immediate recognition, as do Joy Alpuerto Ritter’s stomping choreography and Anna Tregloan’s sets and costumes, which incorporate trash and indigenous weaving. Art, the show seems to say, will play a central role in resurrection, even with all we have lost or destroyed.

—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).

Short pieces from 20 Irish composers, a serial space opera and a trio of works inspired by famous diaries.

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 28, 2020 2:42 pm ET

With opera gone digital due to the Covid-19 pandemic, fans can experience voices, composers and opera companies they might never otherwise have heard. The Irish National Opera commissioned short (five- to eight-minute) pieces from 20 Irish composers. Recorded in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and filmed in a lively variety of styles, the resulting “20 Shots of Opera”, available free, is an exhilarating jaunt through up-to-the-minute lyric creativity. Unlike the experience of losing yourself in the lengthy grandeur of more traditional operas, you absorb these intimate quick takes like jolts of recognition.

In the opening comedy, “Mrs. Streicher” by Gerald Barry, the best-known of the composers, a tenor sits at a table ranting furiously about servants and laundry, with interjections from a tuba. The text is from Beethoven’s letters. Several pieces explore separation: In Éna Brennan’s “Rupture,” a soprano duels with her inner, critical voice; in Hannah Peel’s “Close,” two women have an awkward first in-person, socially distanced date. One powerful group of works looks at death: In Alex Dowling’s “Her Name,” a sweet-voiced choirboy mourns his mother; Michael Gallen’s “At a Loss” is a large-scale diva turn, as the soprano awaits news of her mother’s death; Andrew Hamilton’s “Erth Upon Erth” is a wordless howl, starting with a woman’s mouth in close-up and ending with her zipped into a body bag on a gurney.

Operas made just for film can inspire highly creative visuals. “Verballing” by David Coonan employs black-and-white animation. A female police officer, getting schooled in how to question a murder suspect, sings just one word—“Yeah,” repeated higher and higher. The instructions appear only in type, and as the tension mounts, the background dissolves so that her white face floats in a sea of darkness. In the hilarious “A Message for Marty (or `The Ring’)” by Conor Mitchell, two sisters call out an ex (who dumped one of them by text); the jittery cellphone picture, the tacky costumes, and the escalating fury, plus a snippet of Wagner, is opera extremism in modern dress. 

Most of the pieces are for women’s voices, exploring different timbres and expressivity. I was struck by the fierce intensity of mezzo Naomi Louisa O’Connell in Emma O’Halloran’s “The Wait,” and the simple, folk-like cadences of Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s “Dust,” a lament for the natural world, poignantly sung by Michelle O’Rourke. And the insidiously floating and twisting soprano line of “Libris Solar,” sung by Claudia Boyle, made me want to hear something longer from composer Jennifer Walshe.

***

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Back in the early months of lockdown, director Kristin Marting, composer Kamala Sankaram, librettist Rob Handel and the arts center HERE experimented with digital opera in their 10-minute Zoom piece, “All Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus.” The team has further developed their technique with “Only You Will Recognize the Signal,” dubbed a “serial space opera,” which was released over seven weeks in live, 10-minute episodes and is now available as a 70-minute stream through Feb. 17, 2021; pay what you wish. “Signal” has background video, designed by David Bengali. The close-up images of six singers (a seventh is only heard), performing from separate locations, are occasionally superimposed on one another. Ms. Sankaram’s ingenious score, with its urgent, repetitive vocal motifs and electronic accompaniment, builds tension and sustains interest over this much longer, more sophisticated story line, while Mr. Handel’s text offers tragicomedy with a light touch.

On a luxury spacecraft, five travelers, immigrating to a distant planet, awaken prematurely from therapeutic hypothermia. Alone in their pods, they frantically relive the histories—which include one another—that they were trying to escape, as the ship’s computer, Bob (baritone Christopher Burchett ), works ineffectually to solve the problem. (Unlike the malevolent HAL of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Bob has an unthreatening human presence and a soothing voice.) As we learn more about each of these troubled people, the jittery musical language mirrors their chaotic pasts and, it turns out, uncertain future. Mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn is splendid as Fennel, the central traveler; Paul An, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones and Jorell Williams add layers of richness in solos and ensembles; and Joan La Barbara has an ethereal turn as another spaceship’s computer with some disturbing news. The show is dubbed “Season 1”; I look forward to “Season 2.”

***

On Site Opera’s live productions have geographical context—like “The Secret Gardener” in an actual garden. Its latest project, “The Beauty That Still Remains: Diaries in Song”($120 for the complete set), creates an emotional landscape for all of us confined to our homes. Three sepia-toned, handwritten diaries arrive in the mail. Each looks like a relic, dug out of an attic or an archive. You follow an internet link to an audio recording, and the first-person account on the pages becomes a haunting voice, the dead speaking from the distant past. 

The series, directed by Eric Einhorn, with pianist Howard Watkins as the sensitive accompanist, has its own dramatic arc. It begins with Leoš Janáček’s “The Diary of One Who Vanished,” a straightforward, fictional drama of a farm boy who falls in love with a Roma girl and leaves his family for her, sung in an English translation. The doodles in the diary match the plaintive youthfulness of Bernard Holcomb’s tenor; the buildup of anxiety in the first group of songs gives way to the seductive allure of Vanessa Cariddi’s mezzo, and a magical trio of background voices. 

In Dominick Argento’s “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ” we are in the real world: The writer’s musings, seen in her tiny, crabbed handwriting, are overlaid by the listener’s own knowledge of Woolf’s books, her life and her suicide. Argento’s eloquent settings turn the prose into poetry; Ms. Cariddi captures its intimacy and introspection, and its sense of random fragments that coalesce to form a whole. Finally, in Juliana Hall’s “A World Turned Upside Down,” taken from the diary of Anne Frank, the immortal teenager’s slender voice is shrouded by global catastrophe. It begins with the gleeful giggles of a 13-year-old, and Cristina Maria Castro’s soprano seems to grow up as the entries get more somber and the sense of claustrophobia and doom overtakes the young author.

—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).