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‘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).

‘Intelligence’ Review: Jake Heggie’s Songs for Spies

The composer’s new work, which had its premiere at Houston Grand Opera in a production by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, follows a Confederate landowner and an enslaved woman in her household as they run a Union espionage ring during the Civil War.

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 25, 2023 at 5:34 pm ET

Jamie Barton and Janai Brugger

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

Houston

In 2000, Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” launched a flurry of activity in the creation and production of new American operas. It became one of the most produced 21st-century titles and made it to the Metropolitan Opera last month. On Friday, Houston Grand Opera opened its season with the world premiere—the company’s 75th—of Mr. Heggie’s most recent work, “Intelligence.”

Like “Dead Man,” “Intelligence” is based on a true story, this one more than a century older. During the Civil War, Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond landowner, ran a Union spy ring with the assistance of Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved woman in her household. Mr. Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar have blended historical record and imagination to fashion a tale centered on Mary Jane’s journey toward finding the truth of her traumatic past. The path is logical, but that narrative drive, full of heavy-handed foreshadowing, toward Mary Jane’s discovery—a slave auction and the forced separation of mother and child 20 years earlier—feels formulaic. The lengthy opera is an inert, mechanical structure, its characters and situations erected as plot points rather than an authentic, developing story with dramatic sweep.

The 80-minute first act is crammed with information: We meet Mary Jane, Elizabeth and Lucinda, a mysterious woman who seems to know a lot about Mary Jane. A pair of cardboard villains—Callie Van Lew, Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, and Travis Briggs, a Confederate Home Guard—who embark on a romance even though Callie’s husband is off fighting for The Cause are bent on uncovering the suspected spying activities. Also in the mix are Wilson, Mary Jane’s husband, who is part of the spy operation, and Henry, Jefferson Davis’s butler, who falls in love with Mary Jane. Events include a devious plan: Mary Jane goes to work in Davis’s home, the Confederate White House, where she can surreptitiously pick up information since no one suspects that she is literate. She sets the Davis house on fire as a distraction from her activities; Elizabeth, fearing discovery of the spy ring, buries the journal that contains her codes and other secrets. The 50-minute Act 2 features murder, revelation and apotheosis.

Michael Mayes and Caitlin Lynch

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

It’s a lot of material, and Mr. Heggie’s music tends to be blandly pretty, with little to distinguish one character from another. Each gets at least one obligatory aria, but Mary Jane’s opening song, a minor-key lament that establishes her ignorance about her origins, doesn’t sound all that different from Elizabeth’s declaration, “I didn’t know I could hate like this.” The copious text abounds with expressions of rage and terror, but we never hear it in the music, and Mr. Heggie’s ensembles often go on long past the moment when they’ve made their point.

Only the singing—Janai Brugger’s lyrical soprano (Mary Jane) contrasted with Jamie Barton’s powerful mezzo (Elizabeth)—supplied some variety of tone. The sole character with any real edge is Travis, sung with verve by baritone Michael Mayes. The scene in which he threatens and fondles Mary Jane as if he had every right to do so was the one moment in the evening that made the power dynamics of slavery visceral. Caitlin Lynch’s high soprano brought a slyness to Callie; mezzo J’Nai Bridges was a cipher as Lucinda; Nicholas Newton’s sumptuous bass-baritone gave Henry authority; and tenor Joshua Blue was poignant as Wilson, whose love for Mary Jane means he will do anything for her. Kwamé Ryan was the capable conductor.

J’Nai Bridges and Ms. Brugger, surrounded by the dancers of Urban Bush Women

PHOTO: HOUSTON GRAND OPERA / MICHAEL BISHOP

One unusual element in the piece is its built-in dance component, featuring eight members of Urban Bush Women, ebulliently choreographed by Ms. Zollar, the company’s founder. One dancer played Mrs. Davis; the others were a continual presence, embodying the ancestral roots that support Mary Jane and Lucinda. In an early scene, they surrounded Mary Jane and helped her walk toward the danger of her undercover role in the Davis house; in Lucinda’s aria “Who am I?” about the horrors of the slave trade, they formed a single line behind her, representing the trafficked and exploited. In Act 2, as Mary Jane gleans more information about her past, their dances become more elaborate—and elaborately costumed—accompanied by African drumming from the pit. They also acted out Mary Jane’s culminating discovery. The spying tale fades away, and the opera concludes with uplift as Mary Jane, backed by the dancing ancestors, resolves to tell her own story. Like the rest of the opera, it’s logical, but pat.

The design concept ingeniously evoked the opera’s multiple locations: Mimi Lien’s set, a multilevel, movable box with transparent sides, suggested hiding places and secrets, as did John Torres’s mysterious lighting; Wendall K. Harrington’s shadowy projections depicted the real (an oak tree, a bookshelf) as well as the remembered (sheets transformed into ship sails; daguerreotype portraits; slave auction posters; African fabric designs). The costumes, originally designed by Carlos Soto and realized by Clair Hummel (who also designed the dancers’ costumes), contrasted sober period authenticity for the living characters with vibrant colors and vivid details for the spirit dancers. Ms. Zollar’s rudimentary scene direction exposed the static quality of the libretto; her explosive choreography appeared to belong to a different show altogether.

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 Hunt’ and ‘Sin-Eater’ Reviews: New Songs of Old Worlds

Kate Soper’s opera, which had its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre last week, adapts a medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns; David T. Little’s work, performed by Philadelphia’s The Crossing, stems from the bygone practice of paying social outcasts to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead.

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 17, 2023 at 5:31 pm ET

Brett Umlauf, Christiana Cole, Hirona Amamiya

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York and Philadelphia

Kate Soper’s specialty is turning old stories on their heads, and with “The Hunt,” a sort-of chamber opera that had its world premiere at Miller Theatre on Thursday, she investigates the medieval legend about virgins used to trap unicorns. Ms. Soper wrote her own text and adapted lyrics from sources as disparate as Hildegard of Bingen and the poet H.D. Spoken sections are modern girl talk; the poetic songs have harmonies that start out sounding medieval and then stray into dissonant and alluring realms. “The Hunt” is tighter and more focused than Ms. Soper’s sprawling “Romance of the Rose,” a medieval allegory about love done at Long Beach Opera in February; it is closer in spirit to her feisty “Here Be Sirens” (2014), about another mythical trio awaiting their prey.

The three virgins—Fleur (Brett Umlauf), Briar (Christiana Cole) and Rue (Hirona Amamiya)—are sopranos; the first two double on ukulele, and Ms. Amamiya plays the violin. They have been hired as bait to enable the King to capture a unicorn. The 90-minute show is a series of similarly constructed scenes: a perky livestream update (“Day 43!”), lunch, a bawdy riddle, a sung trio, a possible sighting of the unicorn, and a solo aria. There’s a lot of material, and it takes a bit too long for the virgins to get to the show’s turning point, the realization that capturing the unicorn means killing it for the greater glory of the patriarchy. Their response: “We are not going to deliver that creature into the hands of a bunch of blood-thirsty, sword-wielding thugs just so they can mutilate it in the name of a depraved power grab that they got out of a f—ing fairy tale.” They decide instead to “spoil the bait.”

The comic byplay is mildly amusing, but the show is about the songs. Ms. Soper has a wonderful feel for layering women’s voices, and the trios, with their arresting harmonies, are never the same, whether the selection is a dark folk song or the culminating erotic set piece. In one delicious moment, the three, having ingested a drug meant for the unicorn, create an entire edifice out of vocal noises and lip trills. The voices shine individually in solos—Ms. Umlauf’s coloratura; Mx. Cole’s darker, more vibrato-tinged sound; Ms. Amamiya’s sensual line—and the other two sometimes back up the soloist with a wordless bass line. The instrumental accompaniment provides delicate support and counterpoint: the ukulele line is rudimentary, the violin playing more virtuosic. Supertitles would have been helpful; the poetry texts were often incomprehensible.

Ms. Amamiya and Ian Edlund

PHOTO: ROB DAVIDSON/MILLER THEATRE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

“The Hunt” was efficiently and elegantly produced. The set conflated modern and medieval: Scenic designer Aoshuang Zhang’s flat rear wall seemed prison-like until its revolving panels offered glimpses of a world beyond; Camilla Tassi’s projections included both snippets of the Cluny Museum’s “Unicorn” tapestries (the inspiration for the piece) and the virgins’ livestream. The lunches, in plastic deli clamshells, arrived through a small hatch in the wall; silent men occasionally came through with brooms to sweep the trash to one side of the stage. Terese Wadden’s clever body-concealing white gowns—a parody of virginity, as seen from a male point of view—were gradually shed, along with one virgin’s wig, to reveal more modern attire and tattoos. Aided by Masha Tsimring’s dramatic lighting, stage director Ashley Tata and music director Mila Henry deftly paced the action from blind acceptance to revolt.

***

David T. Little’s “Sin-Eater,” which had its world premiere at the Annenberg Center on Saturday, also stems from an old practice—this one real: In Wales, through the mid-19th century, poor social outcasts were paid to absorb the sins of the wealthy dead by literally eating bread and beer that had been placed on the bodies. Mr. Little’s “ritual grotesquerie,” commissioned by The Crossing, Philadelphia’s renowned new-music choir, and Penn Live Arts, considers that practice in contemporary terms, through those who absorb the worst horrors of the modern world so others don’t have to.

“Sin-Eater” was supposed to be fully staged by the Dutch director Jorinde Keesmaat and have additional performances in Amsterdam, but funding shortfalls curtailed those plans. In the more minimalist production conceived by Donald Nally, The Crossing’s artistic director and conductor, the 24 singers were arrayed at two banquet tables, their places set with bread and wine, with a string quartet (the Bergamot) positioned in front. White catering aprons were donned and doffed, napkins waved in the air, knives pounded on the table for percussive effect. The singers sometimes ventured out of their places into the foreground and lighting designer Eric Southern supplied some dramatic color changes. Yet the theatricality of Mr. Little’s music, coupled with his original and adapted text, is so intense that it hardly needed the visual cues to have a shattering impact.

The four-part, 70-minute work grows progressively darker. Part I, “Tell Me What You Eat,” a quote from the culinary pundit Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, which concludes, “and I’ll tell you what you are,” seems almost merry at first, with the women’s voices tripping fast and light over a bouncy bass-drum riff. The menu of a 17th-century French royal feast is comical until we get to “a tiny guillotine” and the vocal lines start to fragment. A description of “humane” butchery, including a seductive line from the women, segues into a solo tenor singing Jonathan Swift’s satirical treatise on cannibalism, “A Modest Proposal.” The chilling relationship between eating and power is clear.

Part II, “The Grotesque Body,” takes the metaphor to even grimmer places: there’s a death march to a Wilfred Owen war poem; in a meditation on horror movies and the disfiguring of women’s bodies, each of the 12 women has her own vocal line, with the highest soprano finally exploding into a shriek. In Part III, “Dirty Work,” the stories become personal and harrowing: a wrenching chorale about working in a slaughterhouse; a description of being part of a firing squad, with single words spit out on top of each other like bullets; a poignant, folky account of a pandemic worker communing with the dead in a refrigerated truck; a slashing, mechanical sequence about social-media content moderators watching torture and beheadings that turns into cacophonous vocal noise. A tiny snippet of the chorale from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is quickly buried in the din.

One might expect Part IV, “Eucharist,” to offer consolation. It doesn’t. Nominally liturgical and evoking the Christian ritual of transubstantiation, the music grows steadily weightier as the singers take on the burdens of others, but the flowing, ominous conclusion is a text from Stephen Crane: “You say that you are holy / But there are those who see you sin.” “Tell me what you eat . . . ” returns as memory. There is no escape.

Led by Mr. Nally, The Crossing’s uncanny ability to articulate text and weave innumerable lines into tapestries of intricate clarity, as well as throw itself into pure noise, brought the dizzying variety of Mr. Little’s settings to vibrant life. The string quartet, along with percussion played by choir members and occasional synthesizer lines, added some rhythm and color, but the voices of The Crossing built a universe all by themselves.

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).