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‘Europeras 3 & 4’ Review: John Cage’s Controlled Chaos

Detroit Opera presents two of the avant-garde composer’s rigidly devised but cacophonous works, jumbling together various arias and piano works from music history into a disorienting whole.

By Heidi Waleson

March 12, 2024

Kisma Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Detroit

What happens when you put classic European operas into a Mixmaster on stage? You get John Cage’s cycle “Europeras 1-5,” a series of happenings devised between 1987 and 1991. Yuval Sharon’s Detroit Opera staging of “Europeras 3 & 4” at the Gem Theatre last weekend, an explosion of controlled chaos, was entertaining and maddening at the same time.

Per Cage’s instructions, “Europera 3” features six singers, two pianists and 12 record players. Each singer selects six arias; each pianist chooses 70 excerpts, ranging from one to 16 bars, from Liszt’s “Opera Phantasien.” The piece lasts exactly 70 minutes. That’s the raw material. When each element will be performed, and where the singers stand on the stage—a grid of 64 numbered squares—was determined through a computer program simulating the chance operations of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination manual. Thus, in performance, the different musical elements, which also include snippets from 78-rpm opera records played on the turntables, have nothing to do with each other.

The resulting musical experience is often cacophonous, and the listener must suspend all auditory expectations. Rhythms, keys and sonorities clash; bits of melody arise from the aural stew and are subsumed again. A singer starts an aria alone; the piano suddenly enters and you expect an accompaniment, but the music is from a completely different work. Opera fans are tempted to play “name that tune”—it’s not the point, and it’s a difficult task given the total lack of musical and theatrical context and how many musical elements are happening simultaneously. I couldn’t resist the game, and recognized only about half of the arias.

Rolfe Dauz and Biba Bell

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

Mr. Sharon likens the piece to a circus, and in his cleverly devised staging there was always something to catch the eye, albeit not necessarily in any straightforward way. Cage’s instructions specify that costumes and props, drawn from the company’s collection, also be chosen by chance, making for interesting opportunities. Soprano Kisma Jordan sang “V’adoro pupille,” Cleopatra’s seduction aria from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” while threatening a dancer with a knife and leaving him for dead at the end. Weapons and killing are certainly operatic tropes: Soprano Melanie Spector, singing Marguerite’s ecstatic “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust,” brandished a shotgun and mimed firing it during one stretch of elaborate ascending coloratura. A giant tombstone, a cake and a television remote control were also in the mix.

Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting contributed to the sense of randomness with flashes and roving spotlights, sometimes illuminating the performers and sometimes not. The backdrop, a giant digital clock in an elaborate, old-fashioned gold frame, counted up the seconds. Moníka Essen was the production designer; Suzanne Hanna the costume coordinator. Here, too, the juxtapositions were often unexpected: Baritone Rolfe Dauz sang Papageno’s “suicide” aria from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” costumed as a toreador.

There’s no room for subtlety in this situation, especially when you may be singing your aria upstage, out of the light, and in tandem with numerous other musical happenings, to say nothing of someone riding a bicycle in front of you or sweeping the floor. Jennifer Cresswell proved hard to miss with her big soprano and commanding stage presence; her performance included a lengthy, nonvocal staged sequence involving a set of door keys before she finally burst into Donna Elvira’s furious “Mi tradi” from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” Interestingly, baritone Robert Wesley Mason stood out with one of the evening’s quieter pieces—Billy’s imprisonment aria from Britten’s “Billy Budd,” but perhaps that was because it was in English. In opera, everything stops for the tenor, but not here, which meant that River Guard’s performances of classic tenor arias were often drowned in the mayhem. The able pianists were John Etsell and Marina Stojanovksa; black-clad dancers Biba Bell, Celia Benvenutti and Chris Woolfolkcarried props and interacted with the singers; the 78s on the record players produced a low, accompanying rumble of sound.

Melanie Spector and Ms. Jordan

PHOTO: AUSTIN RICHEY

“Europera 4” had a very different vibe. It was more intimate, with just two singers on a dim stage with chairs placed on three sides—a song recital rather than a circus. The digital clock was still there, this time counting up to 30 minutes. Mezzo Susan Graham and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, their unaccompanied arias overlapping, enacted clashing emotions in song and action—Ms. Graham’s frantic despair as she paced the stage in Dido’s farewell scene from Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” contrasted with Mr. Tines’s calm delivery and robotic walk in “Leave me, loathsome light” from Handel’s “Semele.” After their first arias, the two opera stars sat in silence for two minutes before Mr. Tines launched into a powerful “It is enough” from Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and started throwing chairs around. Perhaps the most dramatic moment arrived about midway, when Ms. Stojanovska finally started to play, layering Liszt’s elaborate, ebullient take on Verdi’s “Rigoletto” over the somber German pieces of the two singers; a few moments later, a scratchy old recording of a tenor was added to the mix.

There was an autumnal quality to “Europera 4,” particularly since Ms. Graham’s final piece was Cherubino’s “Non so piu cosa son” from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” A diva in her 60s depicting a randy adolescent boy—a role usually sung by a mezzo at the start of her career—could suggest that the days of those operas are gone or that meaning doesn’t matter. “Europeras 3 & 4” presents the audience with the ingredients of opera, shaken and stirred, leaving us to decide what to make of it. For an audience that doesn’t know the arias and the stories, the untranslated texts might be saying anything; the intense emotions they express—fury, frustration, joy, despair, love—are easily flipped by the staging to mean something completely different while their large-scale expressive style slips easily into caricature. With storytelling and emotional content stripped away, what is left? An art form that is chopped into bits and repurposed, a recycling process that has transformed plastic bottles into tote bags, obliterating the living essence of the original.

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).

‘La Forza del Destino’ Review: A Light in the Darkness at the Metropolitan Opera

Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Verdi’s revenge drama moves the action to a war-torn present and stars the shining Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen.

By Heidi Walseon

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Soloman Howard and Lise Davidsen.

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

New York

Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, valiantly attempts to impose theatrical coherence on this famously sprawling work, with mixed results. The Met’s previous production, last mounted in 2006, plunged everything into literal darkness; Mr. Treliński opts for metaphorical gloom as well.

Piercing through that darkness was the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsensinging Leonora, her first Italian role at the Met. Ms. Davidsen has triumphed at the house over the past several seasons, unleashing her astonishingly huge clarion sound, innate musicality and theatrical instincts on Strauss’s Ariadne, Chrysothemis and the Marschallin, as well as on Wagner’s Eva in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Based on Monday night, Verdi’s very different style holds no terrors for her. In the final act, for which she was costumed (by Moritz Junge) like a particularly downtrodden mendicant pushing a shopping cart, her “Pace, pace, mio Dio (Peace, oh Lord)” rang out like an announcement—after years of suffering, Leonora’s anguish is still alive and pulsating. The ovation that followed it was such that Ms. Davidsen briefly broke character, acknowledging the applause with a smile, a very rare occurrence these days.

The vocal splendors offered by Ms. Davidsen and tenor Brian Jagde as her unfortunate lover, Don Alvaro, brightened up the whole show. Updated from the 18^th century to the present, Mr. Treliński’s scenario suggests that Alvaro’s accidental killing of Leonora’s father, the Marquis of Calatrava, sets off not just the vengeful rage of Calatrava’s son, Don Carlo, but also a war that pushes the world to apocalyptic ruin. Thus, the crowd scenes, set in a tavern and a military camp, which usually act as a lighter counterbalance to the revenge plot, get a sinister cast. Even the chorus of monks, assembled at the end of Act 2 to send Leonora off to her hermitage, flagellates her with sticks. These scenes feel contemporary, while Carlo’s implacable pursuit of Alvaro and Leonora across years and miles remains firmly—and jarringly—rooted in old-style melodrama. There was a moment in Act 3 where the supertitles could have read: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Lise Davidsen and Brian Jagde.

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

Boris Kudlička’s revolving set permits seamless switches between public and private scenes without being too distracting. In Act I, the luxury Hotel Calatrava alternates between a ballroom, where the patriarch/hotel owner/dictator, in military garb, enjoys Nazi-esque salutes from his henchman, and his Art Deco office, where Leonora anxiously awaits Alvaro for their elopement. The set and Marc Heinz’s lighting grow progressively darker all evening: Act 3 is a barbed-wire-enclosed military camp; by Act 4, we’ve arrived at an elaborate, multistory ruined subway station, complete with broken glass, graffiti and wrecked escalators. Video projections by Bartek Macias extend the apocalyptic theme with army helicopters and a bombed-out city and strive for continuity with images of a soldier—presumably Carlo in his obsessive pursuit—hacking through snow-covered woods and riding a train.

While the stage pictures are often striking, the directing doesn’t necessarily clarify the story—a challenging task in any case. Act 3, done at the Met as an unsatisfying conflation of Verdi’s two versions of the opera (1862 and 1869), concludes with an abortive fight between Carlo and Alvaro, after which Alvaro slashes his own face—why? Prior to that, Mr. Treliński turns the colorful military-camp crowd scene into a dour performance for wounded soldiers, featuring a sextet of dancers wearing black rabbit heads (the slo-mo choreography was by Maćko Prusak) and Preziosilla, the fortuneteller/war cheerleader (mezzo Judit Kutasi, vocally bland in her debut, despite her sparkly gown). He then has Preziosilla sing her rousing “Rataplan” to Alvaro, lying wounded in a field hospital, leaving the accompanying chorus nearly invisible behind the barbed-wire fence.

Lise Davidsen (foreground).

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

Along with Ms. Davidsen, the singers sold the show. Mr. Jagde’s heroic, unforced tenor was exhilarating, and he captured the pathos of poor, noble Alvaro, who keeps trying to convince Carlo that the whole thing was an accident. As Carlo, baritone Igor Golovatenko seethed with rage throughout; the Alvaro-Carlo duets were high points. Soloman Howard, a riveting bass, sang both Leonora’s father and Guardiano, the father superior of the monastery where she begs for refuge. That identification between patriarchs perhaps reflected Leonora’s own psychological confusion—the padre’s office had the same desk as her father’s; Guardiano slapped Leonora across the face while interrogating her about her intention to withdraw from the world; and he was costumed as Calatrava for the final trio as he urged Alvaro to learn faith and piety from the dying Leonora. Verdi’s penchant for plots about fathers and daughters is well known, so this fit right in while injecting a hint of doubt into the religious consolation of the finale. Bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi brought a welcome comic energy to Fra Melitone, though—in keeping with the show’s character—his ranting had a nasty edge.

The Met chorus, even when stashed in the background as it frequently was, sounded full and warm. The orchestra was equally on point; the clarinet solo accompanying Mr. Jagde in his opening Act 3 aria was eloquently mournful without being bathetic. Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin supported the singers with sensitivity and clarity, and his pacing, though brisk, was organic rather than headlong, bringing some shape to an often mystifying evening.

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 Anonymous Lover’ and ‘Handel: Made in America’ Reviews: New Angles on the 18th Century

Boston Lyric Opera gave the work by Guadeloupe-born composer Joseph Bologne a snappy staging without making a strong case for its score, while MetLiveArts deftly put the more famous composer’s work in a global context.

By Heidi Waleson

Ashley Emerson and Brianna J. Robinson in ‘The Anonymous Lover’

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

Boston and New York

With opera companies eager to perform works by creators from groups previously underrepresented on their stages, the biracial composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799), is having a contemporary moment. Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a French planter and an enslaved woman, he was sent to Paris to be educated and had a brilliant career there, first as a fencer and then as a violinist, conductor and composer. “L’Amant Anonyme,” his only surviving complete opera, had its premiere in 1780 in the private theater of Madame de Montesson, wife of the Duc d’Orléans. LA Opera presented a socially distanced, streaming-only version in 2020; the Minnesota, Atlanta and Madison opera companies have mounted the work; and Chicago’s Haymarket Opera staged and recorded it in 2022. The latest production, a collaboration of Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia, had its premiere here on Friday at the Huntington Theater as “The Anonymous Lover.”

The piece includes spoken dialogue and ballets in the French opéra comique style; its libretto by Desfontaines-Lavallée is based on a play by Madame de Genlis. The aristocratic principal characters, Léontine (Brianna J. Robinson) and Valcour (Omar Najmi), are afraid to confess their feelings for each other; meanwhile, for four years, Valcour has been showering Léontine with gifts in the guise of an “anonymous lover.” With the aid of their friends Ophémon (Evan Hughes) and Dorothée (Sandra Piques Eddy), and Jeannette and Colin (Ashley Emerson and Zhengyi Bai), a pair of villagers who are getting married, the truth is at last revealed.

Ms. Robinson

PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS

The BLO version, sung in French, kept the 18th-century setting but tweaked the form. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge wrote snappy new English dialogue, updating the language and situations just enough to make it flow and spark a few laughs; the elimination of the dances streamlined the evening to an intermission-free 90 minutes. The modest production made do with a few pieces of furniture (including a harpsichord), colored lighting by Driscoll Otto, and quasi-period costumes by Leslie Travers. Some important turning points were unclear in Dennis Whitehead Darling’s otherwise efficient stage direction.

Bologne’s music proved charming and mellifluous if not very inventive. Vocal numbers were often internally repetitive—Léontine’s soul-searching arias about whether she can open her heart to love were conventional, and the small ensembles didn’t capture the accelerating cut and thrust of characters at cross purposes. Ms. Robinson’s sumptuous soprano was the most imposing voice of the evening; Ms. Emerson’s sparkle enlivened every scene in which she appeared, especially the strophic chanson, “Jouissez de l’allégresse” (“Enjoy the happiness”), with chorus, intended to send Léontine the message, “To love well is to live well.” Ms. Eddy showed a flair for comedy in her acting; in her aria—a piece interpolated from Bologne’s first opera, “Ernestine,” since the role of Dorothée as written has only dialogue—she exaggerated its mournfulness for comic effect. Mr. Najmi and Mr. Hughes pushed their voices; Mr. Bai’s pitch was insecure. David Angus, leading the 34-member orchestra, which was positioned upstage behind a scrim, began well with the sprightly Italianate overture, but his conducting for much of the rest of the show was rhythmically dull and unarticulated, and didn’t help make a case for this rediscovered score.

***

“Handel: Made in America,” presented by MetLiveArts at the Metropolitan Museum last week, looked at the representation issue from a different angle. In collaboration with director Pat Eakin Young and scholar Ellen T. Harris, Terrance McKnight, the WQXR radio host, constructed a program inspired by the luxury objects in the museum’s British Galleries of decorative arts, linking 18th-century global trade, colonialism and slavery with the artistic flourishing in London of musicians like George Frideric Handel during the same period.

Terrance McKnight

PHOTO: HANJIE CHOW

Acting as narrator, Mr. McKnight deftly tracked these connections through his own life story—studying classical piano and accompanying hymns in his pastor father’s Baptist church; finding black male solidarity at Morehouse College, where Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony annually performed Handel’s “Messiah” with a Morehouse graduate as tenor soloist; finding a kinship with Handel, who temporarily lost the use of his right hand after having a stroke in 1737, when Mr. McKnight suffered a similarly catastrophic, potentially career-ending injury.

The excellent, all-black musical forces—four opera singers, a 14-voice chorus and a 13-member chamber orchestra, led by conductor and harpsichordist Malcolm J. Merriweather—became the extension of this exploration and the thorny question of how black American performers think about the music of Handel, given that the trafficking of their ancestors helped pay for the creation of his operas. (As Mr. McKnight noted, the Duke of Chandos, one of Handel’s principal patrons, as well as many investors in and subscribers to his Royal Academy of Music, were invested in the slave-trading Royal African Company.) Lightly staged by Ms. Young, they became the community, singing spirituals, arias and choruses that, for all their stylistic differences, treated similar themes. In one incisive pairing, tenor Noah Stewart’s harrowing rendition of “Total eclipse” from Handel’s “Samson,” depicting the blinded Samson plunged into darkness, was followed by bass-baritone Davóne Tines, soprano Latonia Moore and the chorus singing the rousing spiritual “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” in which the constellations in the night sky mark the path to freedom.

Music, Mr. McKnight suggested, belongs to everyone; he quoted Langston Hughes’s advice to black artists: “[We] express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.” That self-assertion was palpable as mezzo J’Nai Bridgesembodied youthful fury in “Come rouse yourselves to vengeance,” an English translation of Sesto’s aria from “Giulio Cesare”; even more so in Mr. Tines’s commanding rendition of “I, Too,” Margaret Bonds’s setting of Hughes’s famous poem, which includes the line, “Nobody’ll dare say to me ‘Eat in the kitchen’ then.” The celebration and juxtaposition of the riches of both the classical canon and black American song allowed the music to speak for itself.

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

Prototype Festival Review: Originality in Opera

The annual festival returned with an uneven slate of new works, from Huang Ruo’s oratorio ‘Angel Island’ to Heather Christian’s lively ‘Terce: A Practical Breviary.’

Heidi Waleson

Jan. 16, 2024 at 5:30 pm ET

A scene from ‘Angel Island’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

New York and Brooklyn, N.Y.

At its best, the annual Prototype Festival, coproduced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, whose 11th iteration runs through Sunday, revels in original forms and challenging subjects. “Angel Island,”Huang Ruo’s haunting oratorio, which had its New York premiere at BAM Harvey in Brooklyn last week, fit the bill, evoking the spirits of the hundreds of thousands of Asian people who arrived at San Francisco’s Angel Island during the first decades of the 20th century. Detained under harsh conditions for months or even years, a consequence of draconian 19th-century laws restricting Asian immigration to the U.S., they carved poems into the wooden walls of the barracks.

For a non-Chinese speaker, the poems, set in a repetitive minimalist style and performed by the Del Sol String Quartet and 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, had an incantatory effect. English translations in the projected supertitles—“twisting seascape,” “like a trapped pig held in a bamboo cage,” “you were buried beneath clay and earth”—were just the starting point; the hypnotic, nonlinear musical settings plumbed the authors’ despair. In the final part, as a singer struck a Chinese gong, the poem—about being deported—became a chant of futility.

Interspersed sections—featuring two unseen narrators reading grisly, racist historical documents accompanied by quartet scherzos—were too long and lacked the musical punch of the choral movements. Matthew Ozawa’s staging was only intermittently effective. Dancers Jie-Hung Connie Shiau and Benjamin Freemantle represented a contemporary descendant of Angel Island migrants investigating the past and the unwelcoming America, respectively; the choristers, with uneven acting skills, were the detainees; and the stylized choreography by Rena Butler didn’t always connect. Bill Morrison’s flickering black-and-white film images were most striking when they aligned with the emotion of the music, such as ghostly figures superimposed on the steps of the old barracks, or the sea flowing over a rock until it disappeared.

A scene from ‘Adoration’ PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

In Mary Kouyoumdjian and Royce Vavrek’s more traditional “Adoration,” which had its world premiere at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, a teenager uncovers a foundational lie about his family. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the opera weaves together the imagined past, the actual past and the present. For a high-school assignment, egged on by his teacher, Simon superimposes a news story about a terrorist who hid explosives in his pregnant girlfriend’s airplane luggage on his own family tragedy: Years before, his Lebanese father (Sami) and Canadian mother (Rachel) died in a car crash. His racist grandfather (Morris) insisted that Sami crashed the car on purpose.

The unwieldy journey to the truth involves commenters in cyberspace, Simon’s uncle Tom, and his teacher Sabine, whose motivations are more than meets the eye. Yet Ms. Kouyoumdjian’s music was slow and deliberate throughout the opera’s 90 minutes, reflecting the dreamy process of exploration but missing any dramatic spark of suspense or revelation. Mr. Vavrek’s overly detailed libretto, set for intelligibility, had the upper hand, and the solution to the mystery proved as unsavory as the original lie.

Miriam Khalil, a big-voiced soprano, shone as the enigmatic Sabine and got the most elaborate vocal writing; Marc Kudisch brought a tough forthrightness to Morris; Omar Najmi embodied Simon’s adolescent confusion; Karim Sulayman’s sweet tenor belied the calumnies heaped on Sami; Naomi Louisa O’Connell and David Adam Moore were solid as Rachel and Tom. Music director Alan Piersonbalanced a live string quartet, electronic processing, and a recorded murmuring choir. Director Laine Rettmer made clever use of live and pre-recorded video and a simple revolving set by Afsoon Pajoufar to switch between time periods.

“Chornobyldorf,” given its U.S. premiere at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, is described by its Ukrainian composer/directors Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeikoas an “archeological opera in seven novels.” It is an imagined post-apocalyptic excavation of the people and culture of Chernobyl, the city famous for the nuclear-reactor disaster of 1986. Fragments of the past were assembled into seven narrative sections, some clearer than others, with 13 performers and video by Dmytro Tentiuk. Orchestral and folk instruments such as the dulcimer and bandura, an elaborate percussion setup, and electronics were massaged into effusions that regularly headed into earsplitting territory (earplugs were distributed at the door, always a bad sign). Singers switched from the nasal, dissonant harmonies of Eastern European folk music to a Bach Mass and a round adapted from a Mahler symphony. The dancers were mostly semi- and sometimes entirely naked. There were striking moments, but not enough of them to enliven the intermissionless 135 minutes.

Wende, the composer and performer of the song cycle “The Promise,” given at HERE, is a charismatic artist with a broad vocal and expressive range and a winning personality. Her material, co-composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, wasn’t always as good. The songs, which plumbed the dark places of a woman’s soul, included an exploration of life as a horror movie and a heartfelt renunciation of motherhood. They ranged from snarly rap to intimate ballads, and finally emerged into hope with the repeated line “It’s not light yet, but it’s getting there.”

Also brimming with full-on female energy, the shortest and liveliest Prototype show was “Terce: A Practical Breviary,” an hourlong riff on the Medieval 9 a.m. breviary Mass addressing the Holy Spirit, in this case the Divine Feminine. Created and led by Heather Christian, and performed by 38 singing, dancing and instrument-playing women wearing creatively embellished and distressed choir robes, it was a jubilant community celebration of female work, striving, disappointment and devotion. To be part of the audience, arrayed in an intimate circle around the performers in Brooklyn’s Space at Irondale, felt like being invited to join the coolest convent ever.

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).

‘Carmen’ Review: A Misguided Modernization at the Met

Carrie Cracknell’s production, which had its premiere on New Year’s Eve, sets the opera in the present-day U.S. while offering few fresh insights into Bizet’s classic

Heidi Waleson

Rafael Davila and Aigul Akhmetshina

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

New York

Director Carrie Cracknell, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut with a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen” on New Year’s Eve, is known for modernizing and giving a feminist edge to classic texts. Her 2022 film of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” for example, artfully interpolated contemporary dialogue into the 19th-century setting and made its protagonist the narrator, even the architect, of her own story. However, “Carmen,” one of the opera canon’s hoariest chestnuts, proved impervious to Ms. Cracknell’s efforts. Updated to present-day America and stripped of its touristic Spanish flourishes (no flamenco or gypsies, a rodeo stadium instead of a bullfighting arena), this “Carmen” offered no new insights into the freedom-craving title character and her hapless, murderous lover, Don José.

Michael Levine’s heavy, ugly sets overpowered the story. Act I offered a looming, full stage-height wall (the factory) with a chain-link fence in front, positioned so far downstage that the chorus scenes were cramped and chaotic. Lillas Pastia’s tavern in Act 2 became a giant tractor-trailer, its spinning wheels and the arrangement of flashing neon lights surrounding it simulating, not very persuasively, a speedy drive down a highway. Escamillo overtook it in a red sports car, accompanied by three pickup trucks full of men waving automatic weapons; the car and pickups then backed out the way they had come to leave room for Carmen and José’s meeting on and around a pair of gas pumps.

A scene from ’Carmen’

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

For the smuggler’s hideout in Act 3, the now-crashed tractor-trailer lay on its side and rotated far too many times, with Guy Hoare’s lighting picking out whoever had an aria to sing and leaving the rest in gloom. (The smugglers appeared to be running guns taken from the factory, perhaps into Mexico? Unclear.) The bleachers for the rodeo in Act 4 made more sense, although this set also rotated more often than necessary. Shadowy projections by rocafilm/Roland Horvath on a scrim before each act were too vague to offer much insight. Tom Scutt’s costumes fit the scruffy context, especially Carmen’s tiny denim cut-off shorts and turquoise cowboy boots. Choreographer Ann Yee supplied some low-key dance moves for the women partying in the truck.

Ms. Akhmetshina

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Ms. Cracknell’s directing did little to explore the toxic relationship between the two protagonists. One got no sense of their mutual attraction, nor of Don José’s suppressed violence. Perhaps the point was that even the wimpiest-seeming men think that they are entitled to bend women to their will by whatever means necessary, but that’s too subtle a message for this opera. There was no theatrical sense of risk-taking or impending doom; everyone seemed to be going through the motions rather than living the drama. The one directorial choice that did read clearly was the actual murder: Carmen picks up a baseball bat to defend herself and Don José wrenches it out of her hands and slugs her with it—the physically stronger male easily appropriating any and all weapons. However, even here, Bizet already stacked the deck: Don José’s pleading music makes him the more sympathetic character of the two in the scene, giving him an out, so the idea of the inherently abusive man didn’t track with the actual opera.

In the title role, the young Russian mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina had the vocal goods—a throaty, low sound with a hint of steel—and she didn’t overplay Carmen’s seductiveness, but her performance was low energy, lacking the character’s magnetism and seeming more acted upon than acting. Tenor Rafael Davila stepped in for the scheduled Don José, Piotr Beczała, who was ill, and gave a serviceable performance, despite some pitch excursions at moments of high emotion.

The cast standouts were Kyle Ketelsen’s Escamillo, whose crisp diction and snappy delivery galvanized attention, and Angel Blue’s poignant yet strong-minded Micaëla—her Act 3 aria was the evening’s high point. Effective in the supporting roles were Sydney Mancasola and Briana Hunter, peppy and ready to rumble as Frasquita and Mercédès; Michael Adams and Frederick Ballentine, with lively ensemble timing as the smugglers Le Dancaïre and Le Remendado; and Benjamin Taylor and Wei Wu as the soldiers Moralès and Zuniga. The Met Chorus meandered rhythmically and physically through the production, and conductor Daniele Rustioni and the Met Orchestra, though noisy, never generated the drive and excitement that keeps “Carmen” at the top of the operatic hit parade.

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).

‘Rodelinda’ Review: Handel Well-Handled at Carnegie Hall

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

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

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 13, 2023 at 3:54 pm ETSHARETEXT

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New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Florencia en el Amazonas’ Review: Exuberant Spanish Singing at the Metropolitan Opera

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

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 21, 2023 at 5:33 pm ET

Griffin Massey and Mattia Olivieri

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

New York

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

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

Ailyn Pérez

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

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

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

Gabriella Reyes and Mario Chang

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD

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

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

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

‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’ Review: Songs of Struggle at the Metropolitan Opera

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

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 14, 2023 at 6:04 pm ET

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

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

New York

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

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

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

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

Mr. Liverman

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL / MET OPERA

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

Raehann Bryce-Davis as Queen Mother

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

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

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

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

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

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

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

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

‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ Review: A Story of Paralysis Takes Flight

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

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 6, 2023 at 5:33 pm ET

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

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

Dallas

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

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

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

Lucas Meachem and Sasha Cooke

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

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

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

Mr. Meachem and Richard Croft

PHOTO: KYLE FLUBACKER

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

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

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

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

‘Grounded’ Review: An Opera on War Waged at a Distance

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

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 31, 2023 at 5:16 pm ET

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

Washington

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

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

Emily D’Angelo

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

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

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

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

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

A scene from ‘Grounded’

PHOTO: SCOTT SUCHMAN/THE KENNEDY CENTER

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

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

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