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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).

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.

By 

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).

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).

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.

By 

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).

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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.

By 

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).

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.

By 

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).

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.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 17, 2023 at 5:31 pm ET

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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).

With Ivo van Hove’s new staging of Jake Heggie’s opera about Sister Helen Prejean’s role as an adviser to a man condemned to die, the Met continues to embrace contemporary works. 

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 3, 2023 at 5:06 pm ET

Wendy Bryn Harmer, Rod Gilfry, Joyce DiDonato, Krysty Swann and Chauncey Packer

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND

Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 season on Sept. 26, a Met premiere that was symbolic on many levels. When the piece had its world premiere in San Francisco in 2000, new works were occasional events in American opera houses, sprinkled delicately, even apologetically, into seasons of standard repertory for fear of rebellion from traditional audiences. Yet this season, extrapolating from the sellout crowds that attended its productions of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2021 and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours” in 2022, the Met is banking on a whopping six contemporary works, one-third of the total number of productions, to bolster its generally flagging box office.

Things have clearly changed over 23 years. The rate of creation and production of new works at American houses has accelerated, particularly in the past decade, with plucky companies like Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Opera Philadelphia along with smaller, experimental outfits like the Prototype Festival and the Industry leading the way. In 2016, the first year that the Music Critics Association of North America gave a “Best New Opera” award, Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves” was selected from a rich field of 18 North American world premieres. 

“Dead Man Walking” also normalized the idea that opera could and should tackle contemporary subjects and stories. Earlier works like John Adams’s “Nixon in China” (1987) were once derisively called “CNN Operas.” By contrast, the success of “Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book (also a 1995 film) about her experiences as spiritual adviser to prisoners on death row, made the controversial topic of capital punishment a fit subject for the opera house. It is the most frequently produced new opera of this century, with a remarkable 75 productions, often accompanied, with Sister Helen’s participation, by symposia and panel discussions. Its many successors include works on such up-to-the-minute topics as LGBTQ issues (Laura Kaminisky’s “As One,” Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers”); police killings of black men (Jeanine Tesori’s “Blue”); and Alzheimer’s disease (Lembit Beecher’s “Sky on Swings”). In June, San Francisco Opera will present the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which deals with the fallout from a school shooting. 

Ryan McKinny

PHOTO: KAREN ALMOND

Terrence McNally’s libretto traces Sister Helen’s relationship with Joseph De Rocher, a prisoner convicted of the rape and murder of a high-school-age couple, as his last appeals fail and his execution date approaches. Much of the opera takes place within the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, and the Met’s marquee production team, headed by Ivo van Hove with set and lighting design by Jan Versweyveld, created a strikingly austere environment: a blank-walled box, with a smaller cube suspended above the stage. 

No bars or shackles are visible; An D’Huys’s drab costumes blend in; and Christopher Ash’s scene-establishing projections are reserved for the outside world—a blurry but still explicit video of the crime, which is played several times, and the road that unfurls as Sister Helen makes her first long drive from New Orleans to Angola. In the prison, subtle lighting color changes and precise directing evoke the lonely horror of imprisonment and impending death that affects both principal characters. In a few of scenes, two onstage camera operators film their faces in close-up, projecting their expressions onto the upper cube and offering an additional window into their feelings. The camera also zoomed in as the lethal injection needle was inserted into De Rocher’s arm, and on the sudden widening of his eyes as the poison took effect, bookending the shock of the opening killing with a concluding one.

The production supplied some of the weight and interiority that the opera itself lacks. The libretto carries the story; Mr. Heggie’s music doesn’t create or develop characters, relying instead on a noisy, propulsive orchestra and multiple climaxes. Scenes are often too long. The insipid earworm hymn associated with Sister Helen seems at odds with her dynamic personality, as do her meandering arias; it’s hard to find De Rocher’s mix of fear and aggression in his music. When Mr. Heggie does provide a lyric tune, the moment often comes across as manipulative rather than authentic.

The top-flight cast made the most of the piece. Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who first sang Sister Helen at the New York City Opera in 2002, was all coiled intensity, visibly and audibly grappling with her determination to hate the sin but love the sinner. Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, buff and tattooed, poignantly captured some of the insecurity underlying De Rocher’s macho posturing and bravado. As Sister Rose, Helen’s confidante, soprano Latonia Moore shone with Ms. DiDonato in one of the opera’s best moments, a duet about forgiveness. Susan Graham, who sang Sister Helen at the San Francisco world premiere, took on the role of Joseph’s mother, Mrs. De Rocher. Her plea for his life at the pardon hearing was acutely characterized with deliberate fumbling; even better was the final meeting of mother and son, just before his execution, when she refused to let him apologize or confess. 

Rod Gilfry, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer and Chauncey Packer were affecting as the parents of the murder victims. Raymond Aceto, Chad Shelton and Justin Austin had lively cameos as the prison’s warden, its condescending priest, and the motorcycle cop who stops Sister Helen for speeding and then lets her go. Yannick Nézet-Séguin let the orchestra loose with all its noise and bombast. 

The three other Met premieres this season are all vintage: Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” (1986) in a newly revised version, co-produced with four other companies; Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas,” a well-traveled Spanish-language work from 1996; and John Adams’s “El Niño” (2000), which will feature notable Met debuts by singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines, conductor Marin Alsop, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz. “Fire” and “The Hours” are being revived. The initiative will continue: A new $10 million gift from the Neubauer Family Foundation has been earmarked to subsidize 17 Met premieres from 2023-24 through 2027-28. Some will no doubt be brand new; others selected from the enormous wealth of new opera that has emerged over the past two decades. The Met has finally caught up, and is going all in. Rightly so. New work is the future of opera.

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).

Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O featured a triumphant world premiere about Nellie Bly’s work exposing the conditions at a 19th-century asylum, as well as a production of Verdi’s convoluted love story; director Claus Guth and tenor Jonas Kaufmann staged a gripping performance of Schubert’s ‘Schwanengesang’ (‘Swan Song’) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Heidi Waleson 

Sept. 25, 2023 at 5:48 pm ET

Kiera Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking Festival O notched another triumph on Thursday with the world premiere of Rene Orth’s “10 Days in a Madhouse,”staged at the Wilma Theater. Using reporter Nellie Bly’s 1887 exposé of the conditions at the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) as a source, Ms. Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch trenchantly explore how female insanity has been used both as an operatic trope and as a way to label and control non-compliant women.

Ingeniously, the opera’s narrative runs backward, starting with Day 10: A haze of choral fragments embedded in an acoustic and electronic orchestral texture evokes the disordered mind of The Madwoman/Nellie (Kiera Duffy) until she cries “Let me out!” Over the next 90 minutes, we see and hear, in reverse, how she got to that point, with the music and text gradually reassembling into a recognizable story. Incomprehensible bits of text come together as “What time’s the boat?” This is the repeated plea of Lizzie (Raehann Bryce-Davis), locked up because of her grief over the death of her child, not insane but delirious from untreated typhus. Dr. Blackwell (Will Liverman) keeps asking Nellie the same series of questions; early in the opera, her vocal slides make us doubt her sanity, but as the evening progresses, and her delivery grows more confident, we see how he has been gaslighting her from the beginning. Electronic effects and beats are skillfully used throughout to unmoor the narrative from rationality. During Day 1, the “madwomen” stage a subtle acoustic rebellion, interrupting a forced hymn-singing session with “Let my people go”—by Day 10, such agency is impossible. 

Raehann Bryce-Davis and Ms. Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Director Joanna Settle and set and lighting designer Andrew Lieberman created a sinister, claustrophobic environment: The set was a wide column with a hallway through its center, the orchestra arrayed on top of it, and the characters appearing and disappearing around its shadowy edges. Faustin Linyekula’s choreography helped situate the action in the realm of the disturbed; Ásta Hostetter and Avery Reed’s drab gingham dresses for the women added to their sense of hopeless confinement. Ms. Duffy’s pure soprano, trying in vain to cut through the confusion, was a vital contrast to Ms. Bryce-Davis’s opulent, anguished mezzo; Mr. Liverman gave Dr. Blackwell a subtle, predatory edge; his leaps from baritone into falsetto and the scenes in which he waltzed with Nellie “to soothe” her were especially creepy. As the Nurse/Matron, Lauren Pearlphysically embodied the institution’s sadism; the nine-voice women’s chorus and the 12-member orchestra shone under the leadership of conductor Daniela Candillari. 

Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” has a bewildering plot—a stew of political strife and a 25-year time gap on top of the usual operatic devices of false identity, jealousy, curses and revenge—but it boils down to the love of two fierce men for a long-lost child. Opera Philadelphia’s production, which was imported from the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Belgium and opened on Friday at the Academy of Music, unfortunately emphasized the opera’s chaos and macho elements instead of its heart. Gary McCann’s set, an arrangement of concrete pillars, a glass ceiling, and monumental sculptures, had a Fascist Art Deco look, shifting the period from the 14th century to the 1930s. Fernand Ruiz’s costumes tried to have it both ways, with the men sporting Renaissance-style cloaks over their 20th-century suits and the Doge’s soldiers clad in metal armor. Laurence Dale’s static direction, along with John Bishop’s colored lighting and the aimless revolutions of the set, created uninformative stage pictures rather than illuminating the story. 

Quinn Kelsey and Ana María Martínez PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

The singers worked hard to infuse the evening with Verdian feeling. Baritone Quinn Kelsey captured the ambivalence of the titular corsair-turned-Doge, displaying both power and lyric tenderness toward his newly discovered daughter, Maria (she is known as Amelia), and even an inclination toward peace-making. As his antagonist Jacopo Fiesco, Amelia’s grandfather, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn proved a potent match for him—bearing a grudge, but honorable in his way. The evening’s best scene was a duet in the final act, when the dying Boccanegra revealed Amelia’s identity to Fiesco, and the two old men clung to each other, suddenly finding their common humanity.

The rest of the characters felt like pawns in the game. As Maria/Amelia, Ana María Martínez’s soprano was loud and metallic, without warmth; Richard Trey Smagur’s beefy tenor stressed the aggressive tendencies of Gabriele Adorno, her lover and Boccanegra’s enemy. Baritone Benjamin Taylor brought subtlety to the villainous Paolo Albiani, who betrays and poisons Boccanegra. Corrado Rovaris’s conducting was lovingly textured rather than propulsive, and the final scene, which had Amelia, Fiesco and Adorno standing motionless as the dying Boccanegra was slowly towed offstage by the ghost of his long-dead lover (Amelia’s mother) felt interminable instead of cathartic. 

***

New York

“Doppelgänger,” which opened at the Park Avenue Armory last weekend, is a gripping work of site-specific theater. Director Claus Guth, working with tenor Jonas Kaufmann, staged Schubert’s “Schwanengesang” (“Swan Song”), a collection of the composer’s final lieder, as the last meditations of a wounded soldier dying in a World War I army hospital. Set designer Michael Levinetransformed the Armory’s vast drill hall into a multi-bed ward. The military patients and their six nurses, in uniforms by Constance Hoffman, became part of the story through movement—alternately organized and chaotic—directed by Sommer Ulrickson. Mathis Nitschke created interstitial music for Helmut Deutsch, the evening’s superlative pianist, as well as a soundscape of drones, crashes and explosions that unified the 90-minute performance. 

The production of ‘Doppelgänger’ at the Park Avenue Armory PHOTO: MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Over the course of 14 songs, Mr. Kaufmann sang and acted the soldier’s inner journey toward his impending death. In the bleak “Kriegers Ahnung” (“Warrior’s Foreboding”) he seemed solitary and invisible to the nurses; as the cycle progressed, and his character sang of love, desire, alienation, and the loss of hope, the other performers became expressions of his interior world—whether menacing him, admiring him, or carrying his bier in a funeral procession. Urs Schönebaum’s expressive lighting was a crucial part of the environment: At the conclusion of “Abschied” (“Farewell”), a seemingly jaunty song of departure, a bank of floodlights blazed out from the end wall, stopping the singer in his march to the exit. Mr. Kaufmann’s eloquent singing didn’t shy away from roughness when it was warranted; even his tight high notes conveyed a man in extremis, making the pure lyricism he brought to “Ständchen” (“Serenade”) all the more touching. With Mark Grey’s sensitive sound design, one forgot about the necessary amplification, and this march to the grave felt surprisingly, and harrowingly, intimate.

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

Boston Lyric Opera’s production, the result of a yearslong effort to reconsider Puccini’s classic in the wake of anti-Asian violence, is thoughtful but low on passion; in New York, recitals by Julia Bullock and Lise Davidsen included obscure songs and classic repertoire alike.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 19, 2023 at 5:46 pm ET

Karen Chia-Ling Ho, center 

PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

Boston

The stereotypes inherent in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”—a story built around the white imperialist male fantasy of the submissive Asian woman—have become increasingly problematic in recent years, leading several opera companies to invite all-Asian creative teams to rethink this canonic work. Following the spate of anti-Asian violence in 2021, Boston Lyric Opera convened a series of conversations, “The Butterfly Process,” to examine the piece and its ambivalent legacy; a new production of the opera, unveiled last week at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, is one result.

Directed by choreographer and activist Phil Chan, this “Butterfly” is set in the U.S. during World War II. Cio-Cio-San works as a singer in an underground nightclub in San Francisco’s Chinatown; her “wedding” to Pinkerton, a naval officer, is part of a nightly stunt at the club. Between Acts I and II, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Pinkerton goes off to war, and the pregnant Butterfly is sent to an incarceration camp (as BLO refers to it) in Arizona, sharing the fate of thousands of Japanese-Americans during that time.

This thoughtful effort, aided by some changes in the text, makes certain aspects of the story more palatable for contemporary audiences. Butterfly is an adult woman with agency, not a helpless 15-year-old being sold to the highest bidder. The lines questioning her about her age are directed to Pinkerton, who says he is 21. In the love duet at the end of Act 1, Butterfly puts on a coat rather than sheds her clothes. In the camp, she longs for Pinkerton’s return not out of hopeless love but because their son is dying of tuberculosis and she has no resources to care for him. There’s no suicide; the opera is framed as the recollections of the adult Butterfly in 1983 looking back on this traumatic period of her life.

The sets by Yu Shibagaki, costumes by Sara Ryung Clement, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew ably evoke the nightclub (Butterfly’s wedding attendants are leggy showgirls) and the camp with its makeshift wooden barracks and watchtower. Some of the photographs that depict Butterfly’s history are family pictures belonging to BLO’s artistic adviser and dramaturg Nina Yoshida Nelsen; three historical dramaturgs are also credited.

But making Butterfly’s relationship with Pinkerton more transactional than romantic coexists awkwardly with Puccini’s swoony music. The opera is tightly constructed as a weepie, and if Butterfly’s heart isn’t broken by love, the tragedy doesn’t really land.

Karen Chia-Ling Ho and Dominick Chenes

 PHOTO: KEN YOTSUKURA

As Butterfly, Karen Chia-Ling Ho carefully walked the line between knowingness and feeling, but there was little sense of passionate abandon and her “Un bel di” was sturdy rather than soaring. One of the best moments in the evening was the “Flower Duet,” in which Butterfly and Suzuki (the imposing Alice Chung) decorated the camp with handmade paper flowers in anticipation of Pinkerton’s arrival; the relationship between the two women felt the most real in the opera. The men were properly unappealing: As Pinkerton, Dominick Chenes’s tenor seemed muted; Troy Cook was an efficient Sharpless, more a tool than a sympathizer with Butterfly, as is usual; Rodell Rosel was a sleazy Goro (here the owner of the nightclub). Dancer Cassie Wang, depicting Butterfly between Acts 2 and 3, performed some ambiguous choreography by Michael Sakamoto. The theater has no pit, so the orchestra, led by David Angus, seemed unusually loud and brassy.

***

New York

Julia Bullock’s recital in the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room on Sept. 11 was typically unconventional—she is far more likely to headline a piece like Michel van der Aa’s multidisciplinary opera “Upload” than to sing “La Traviata.” Here, she made a strong case for widening the definition of the art song to include the work of Nina Simone along with Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf. Every song and interpretive choice in the program was intentional, focused on building that larger structure. Ms. Bullock, who supplies her own translations of lyrics, is never just focused on making pretty sounds. Rather, her distinctive, velvety lower register, her crystalline text articulation, and her commitment to her material make her a magnetic performer.

That command held sway as she constructed musical arcs. Two quiet, folk-tinged songs by the obscure singer-songwriter Connie Converse segued seamlessly into a Kurt Weill group: his mournful “Lost in the Stars” followed by a sparky, rhythmically free spoken-and-sung version of “Denn wie man sich bettet,” and then an intense “Wie lange noch?” full of suppressed fury. In John Cage’s “She is Asleep,” no. 2, her wordless vocalise paired with John Arida’s damped piano made a sleeper’s inner world feel vital. In a selection of songs written by black Americans, some of them women, ably arranged by Jeremy Siskind, her complex portrayals persuasively rejected the narrative of the helpless female so prevalent in traditional art songs. Her stylings of Cora “Lovie” Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues,” which turned the betrayed woman’s lament on its head, and Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” a chilling depiction of stereotypes of black women, created characters as powerful as any written by Schubert.

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Lise Davidsen got a bigger stage for her Sept. 14 recital—the Metropolitan Opera House. The young Norwegian soprano has made a splash at the Met, starting with her 2019 debut as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and followed by a trio of Strauss roles: Ariadne, Chrysothemis, and the Marschallin. Her spectacular instrument recalls Birgit Nilsson’s—producing a blazing, metallic sound with effortless power and total control, one seemingly able to carry out the back of the auditorium and across Central Park.

Recitals are a different beast from opera, however. While Ms. Davidsen’s voice still sounded glorious and house-filling, the Grieg and Sibelius songs on the first half of the program were pretty but generic. On the second half, a quartet of Schubert hits came off better, with Ms. Davidsen capturing the dramatic pacing and scene-painting of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Erlkönig” and the serenity of “An die Musik” and “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen”—in the last, she sang softly and still filled the space. The expansive operatic potential of a Strauss group also worked to her advantage, though “Befreit” could have been more intimate. James Baillieu was the sensitive pianist.

Opera arias were also sprinkled throughout. Ms. Davidsen will sing Leonora in Verdi’s “La forza del destino” at the Met next February, but her selections from “Un ballo in maschera” and “Otello” felt undercooked. She shone, however, in Lisa’s final aria from “Queen of Spades,” and in Wagner’s grand salute “Dich, teure Halle” from “Tannhauser,” summoning the spirit of Nilsson once again.

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).