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This year’s edition of the adventurous showcase includes an intimate double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and a dazzling, uncategorizable work by Gelsey Bell that spans geologic time

A scene from ‘Morning//Mourning’

PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 10, 2023 7:18 pm ET

With the 10th anniversary season of the Prototype Festival under way, it’s hard to imagine artistic life without this annual January showcase for adventurous opera/music theater. Launched in 2013, this collaboration between Beth Morrison Projects and HERE has given a wide range of young composers a New York stage on which to experiment with subjects and forms. Over the years, Prototype has birthed two Pulitzer winners (Du Yun’s “Angel’s Bone” and Ellen Reid’s “p r i s m”), welcomed unusual European fare like the choral “Toxic Psalms” and the savage “4:48 Psychosis,” and presented breakthrough works like David T. Little’s “Dog Days,” David Lang’s “anatomy theater,” Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the Waves” and Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers.” Forced into the digital sphere by the pandemic in 2021, Prototype came up with the ingenious multicomposer work “Modulation”; and although the live 2022 festival was canceled at the last minute due to a resurgence of the virus, the producers got Taylor Mac’s “The Hang” and Huang Ruo’s “Book of Mountains and Seas,” both gems, onstage.

This year, one of Prototype’s discoveries is the Irish composer Emma O’Halloran, whose double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead” had its world premiere on Saturday at the Abrons Arts Center. Ms. O’Halloran’s distinctive musical style meshes acoustic and electronic sound in a way that makes it hard to separate one from the other. The effect—brutal and gentle by turns—suited her subject matter, two short plays by her uncle Mark O’Halloran that explore the inner lives of some damaged, frustrated people. 

Naomi Louisa O’Connell as the title character in ‘Mary Motorhead’PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

Mary Motorhead (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) is serving an 18-year prison sentence for murdering her husband; in “Trade,” the Older Man (Marc Kudisch) and the Younger Man (Kyle Bielfield), both of whom are in heterosexual relationships, meet for paid sex. All are Irish working class, and one gathers from their halting speech that they are unused to articulating their feelings. Yet Ms. O’Halloran’s vocal settings, and especially her orchestral accompaniments, help push those feelings to the surface in all their awkwardness. It’s 21st-century verismo, using psychological revelations instead of physical violence as dramatic catalysts. 

“Mary Motorhead,” a 30-minute monologue, is the slighter piece, and Ms. O’Connell, with her rich mezzo, seemed a bit too polished for the tough young woman whose desperate need for connection is expressed as anger: She explains that she stabbed her husband in the head “to see if he’s in there.” Unlike Italian verismo, the musical setting doesn’t afford the listener distance from the stark rawness of emotions and deeds. Rather, the rock ’n’ roll thrust of the electronics pushes the story’s sense of brutal inevitability. 

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“Trade,” twice as long, delves deeper into the inner lives of the two men, their feelings about being both fathers and sons, and for each other. In their slow, uncomfortable process of self-explanation, fueled by many cans of “shite” beer, Ms. O’Halloran’s music fills in the blanks, finding both the brittle aggressiveness of the Younger Man, who discovered at age 14 that he could make easy money having sex with “auld fellers,” and the tentative but luminous tenderness that the Older Man feels for him. Skillfully directed by Tom Creed, Mr. Bielfield’s haunting tenor created an enormously poignant character, his monosyllabic profanity just a cover for his terror, while Mr. Kudisch’s slow burn gradually revealed a superficially macho man longing to be understood. 

Marc Kudisch and Kyle Bielfield in ‘Trade’

PHOTO: MARIA BARANOVA

Jim Findlay’s simple sets—a wall with a central door that never opens for “Mary,” a faceless room with only a bed and chair for “Trade”—acted as canvases for Christopher Kuhl’s lighting: a violent spotlight for “Mary”; giant shadows and pastel colors in “Trade.” Montana Levi Blanco did the evocative costumes, though one wondered why Mary got to wear goth gear in prison. In the pit, NOVUS NY, conducted by Elaine Kelly, created a vivacious sound world. 

“Morning//Mourning,” which had its premiere on Friday at HERE, exemplifies what makes Prototype essential: It’s a home for the uncategorizable. This alluring work by the polymath artist Gelsey Bell—she wrote the music and the libretto, served as music director, and created the arrangements in association with her four singer/player fellow performers—is a 90-minute meditation on what would happen if humans suddenly disappeared from Earth. Part scientific exposition, part imaginative flight of fancy, “Morning//Mourning” plays with time, flipping our knowledge of geologic eras into the future, beginning with tiny spans—“Within the first hours”—and ending with vast ones, “At 42 million years.” 

The musical flow sweeps the listener into those stretches of time, whether it’s a haunting, five-voice canon about bristlecone pines on a windy ridge (5,000 years); a joyous explosion of bells, xylophone and harp as new life forms begin their journey at 241,000 years; or a sweet, accordion-accompanied reminiscence about odd things that humans did. Sonorities can be unexpected. Ms. Bell and her fellow performers—Ashley Pérez Flanagan, Justin Hicks, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto—play a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, and vocalize in speech, syllabic noises, ululations, choral settings, and the occasional operatic flight. The text, set clearly and evocatively, has plenty of wit: Listeners can track the evolution of a new intelligent species, the Blooklungs, from their origin as octopuses making their way onto land into beings capable of traveling into outer space and living there. 

The message is serious, but not tragic. One late section is titled “Nothing Lasts Forever,” and at 1.6 billion years the last bacteria on Earth die. The wordless “Mourning,” which begins the piece, is a short-term affair; “Morning,” which ends it, suggests the infinite possibilities of galactic time and space. 

Simply and powerfully staged by Tara Ahmadinejad, with scenic design by Afsoon Pajoufar and lighting by Masha Tsimring in a semicircular space, the five storytellers move among the sculpted stations that hold their instruments. Marbles, symbolizing years, are added to a bowl at the center; in one long section, played in an almost complete blackout, the performers face upstage, watching lanterns behind a scrim blink on and off. The piece could be trimmed slightly, but overall, its clarity accentuates its emotional impact.

A scene from ‘Undine’

PHOTO: UNDINE TEAM

The same cannot be said for “Undine,” a 30-minute animated opera film, with music by Stefanie Janssen, Michaël Brijs and Richard van Kruysdijk and directed by Sjaron Minailo, available as a stream for free. It’s the story of a mermaid addicted to plastic who interferes with the lives of three humans, but the piece is bewildering unless you read the synopsis first, and even then. Ms. Janssen’s high vocals are intriguing, as is the visual depiction of the multi-tentacled mermaid, but the anti-plastic message went over my head. Still, that’s the beauty of Prototype—it takes opera experimentation seriously, even if not every experiment is a success.

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). 

Appeared in the January 11, 2023, print 

Umberto Giordano’s 1898 verismo work has a creaky plot but an engaging score, beautifully delivered by soprano Sonya Yoncheva in a handsome new production at the Metropolitan Opera

Sonya Yoncheva

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 4, 2023 5:26 pm ET

Umberto Giordano’s “Fedora” (1898) proved to be perfect New Year’s Eve fare at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday night. It’s relatively short; the creaky plot is melodrama rather than tragedy; there’s a party scene; and it’s a splendid verismo showcase for the right soprano—in this case, Sonya Yoncheva. David McVicar’s handsome new production offered plenty of eye candy and kept the entertainment level high without cheesy overreach. With the early (6:30 p.m.) curtain, the crowd could head out at 9 for their own festive dinners and Champagne toasts after the heroine expired. 

Arturo Colautti’s libretto is based on a play by Victorien Sardou, who also provided the source material for Puccini’s “Tosca.” “Fedora” makes less sense. The title character is a Russian princess. In Act 1, which takes place in St. Petersburg, her fiancé, Vladimir, is murdered, supposedly by Nihilists (a violent political group of the period), and she swears to avenge him. In Act 2, at a grand party in Paris, she seduces the accused killer, Count Loris Ipanoff, into a confession. While Loris is off getting proof of justifiable homicide, Fedora dispatches a letter to St. Petersburg condemning him. Loris returns with a different letter (the opera has quite a few) that proves that Vladimir was having an affair with Loris’s wife and was marrying Fedora for her money. Shocked at these revelations, Fedora transfers her affections to Loris. Alas, that letter to St. Petersburg will return to haunt the lovers in Act 3, in which they have decamped to Switzerland. Things don’t end well. 

Ms. Yoncheva, elegantly swathed in sumptuous period gowns by Brigitte 
Reiffenstuel, managed to make Fedora’s questionable choices persuasive. In Act I, she was every inch the imperious aristocrat, her imposing soprano declaring rapturous adoration of a man who, it is clear, she barely knows. (We’ve already heard his servants briskly discussing his unsavory habits.) The seduction scene of Act 2 was perfectly manipulative, and her headlong tumble into passion, vigorously and idiomatically paced by conductor Marco Armiliato, made for a complete—and exciting—reversal. In Act 3, her voice turned lush and imploring as she begged for forgiveness, a convincing prelude to her inevitable suicide. 

As Loris, tenor Piotr Beczała had less to do—he doesn’t even appear until Act 2. His delivery was more stentorian than lyrical, which was particularly noticeable in the opera’s brief hit tune, “Amor ti vieta,” but he made a fine dramatic foil for Ms. Yoncheva. There were numerous other engaging musical moments as well, since Giordano and Colautti laced the melodrama with fun and novelty. The Act 2 party took off with a merry waltz; later, the French diplomat Giovanni De Siriex (Lucas Meachem) and Fedora’s flirtatious cousin Olga (Rosa Feola) traded teasing arias—he describes Russian women as tough Cossacks; she declares that French men are as ephemeral and headache-inducing as Veuve Clicquot Champagne. Both singers imbued their spotlight moments with élan. 

The party also features a Chopin-esque piano solo (performed by Bryan Wagorn, resplendent in a long blond wig, as Olga’s current paramour), which cleverly accompanies the Fedora-Loris seduction. Other notable soloists were Jeongcheol Cha, as Vladimir’s coachman Cirillo, offering halting, poignant testimony about the shooting, and Luka Zylik, as a peasant boy, who sang a hauntingly dissonant folk tune, accompanied by concertina, making a striking contrast to the volcanic emotional explosions of Act 3. 

Mr. McVicar skillfully balanced playfulness and histrionics. Charles Edwards’s detailed set designs combined grandeur with sleight-of-hand: Elements of each act’s set remained in the subsequent ones, reminders that the past is never gone. The ghost of Vladimir also haunted the production, both in his portrait, hanging on a wall at stage left, and in person. That physical ghost made for an effective staging of the dreamy Act 2 Intermezzo, giving Fedora and Vladimir—whom we never see together alive—a mimed love scene; Fedora’s subsequent switch to Loris was thus all the more startling. 

Adam Silverman’s atmospheric lighting emphasized the different tones of the acts: The gloomy, heavy reds of Vladimir’s sitting room in Russia; the breezy white curtains in Paris; the bleached-out mountain in Switzerland that faded into blackness for the denouement. Ms. Reiffenstuel’s costumes were always perfectly apt to the moment, be it somber or silly, from the coachman’s huge fur coat and hat to Olga’s blue silk lounging pajamas and the bloomers in which she sets off on a bicycling adventure. 

“Fedora” was last staged at the Met in the 1996-97 season as a vehicle for soprano Mirella Freni. It is symbolic of another age of opera production and attendance, when an unfamiliar title, featuring many of the favorite musical and dramatic hallmarks of better-known turn-of-the-century Italian operas, could be slotted into the subscription season and please the audience. Today, this production, even with its splendid cast and staging, seems like something of a dinosaur.

The Met recently announced that it will increase the percentage of contemporary titles in future seasons, since new works like “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” have actually been outselling warhorses. Novelty matters, particularly now that the company depends heavily on single-ticket sales—subscriptions have dropped to less than half of what they were two decades ago. The Met’s brand has always been grand traditional operatic entertainment, performed for an audience that returned every year to see many of the same spectacles or related ones, and willingly paid premium prices. With that business model under heavy pressure, a pure diversion like this “Fedora”—if revived when it is no longer New Year’s Eve and with a less starry cast—might well show its C-list cracks. And in a repertory house that needs a lot of titles—23 this season—it’s hard to predict what might take its place. 

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 REVIEW

Kelli O’Hara, Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato in ‘The Hours’

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 29, 2022 at 1:05 pm

New York

‘The Hours,” by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, which had its world-premiere staged production at the Metropolitan Opera last Tuesday, is clever in concept. Its sources—the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham and the 2002 all-star film by Stephen Daldry—supply juicy roles for three women playing characters experiencing traumas in three separate eras, related through Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway.” The structure of opera permits techniques of simultaneity and overlap that exist in no other medium. From a marketing standpoint, the creation of “The Hours” was driven by soprano Renée Fleming, once the Met’s most beloved diva, whose 2017 “Der Rosenkavalier” at the house supposedly marked her retirement from staged opera. On Tuesday, she returned in the role of Clarissa Vaughan, custom tailored for her voice. 

But “The Hours,” though skillfully constructed and imaginatively staged by Phelim McDermott, proved agreeable rather than transcendent. Mr. Pierce’s libretto, a model of clarity with touches of poetry, deftly weaves the three stories together. In 1923, Virginia Woolf (mezzo Joyce DiDonato), marooned in Richmond, a suburb of London, is trying to write “Mrs. Dalloway.” Clarissa Vaughan (Ms. Fleming), a late-20th-century version of Mrs. Dalloway, is preparing a party for Richard, her beloved friend and long-ago lover, a poet who is dying of AIDS. In 1949, Laura Brown (soprano Kelli O’Hara), a housewife in Los Angeles, is reading “Mrs. Dalloway” and contemplating suicide. The parallels resonate: Both Virginia and Laura appear to be clinically depressed, and they simultaneously hallucinate Virginia’s 1941 suicide. Clarissa, a blithe spirit who believes she can will ugly realities away, turns out to be no match for Richard’s despair. As Virginia keeps saying, as she plots out her novel, “Someone will die at the end of the day.” 

The opera’s most persuasive sections probe the three characters’ inner lives rather than their actions. A dreamlike chorus helps, amplifying and echoing their deepest thoughts, the words they can’t say to others, while the wordless countertenor of the Man Under the Arch (John Holiday), a mysterious intermittent presence, lures them toward death. The richest inner life belongs to Virginia, and Ms. DiDonato is a magnetic presence, seizing our attention with her struggle to create and to keep her demons at bay. Her music is spare and twining, seeming to follow her thoughts in whatever directions they lead. We experience her conflicted feelings about her husband, Leonard, who is both her support and her jailer; her yearnings for the busy streets of London become grist for her novel.

This eloquent dreaminess carries over to the character of Laura, sung with piercing anguish by Ms. O’Hara; the transitional moments when Virginia and Laura sing together are some of the most striking in the piece. Laura is introduced with a big-band sound that goes with her bright kitchen and her cheery husband (think Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti”). It dissipates quickly as we realize that Laura would rather be reading “Mrs. Dalloway.” When she tries to interact with her husband, Dan (whose birthday it is), and her young son, the chorus surrounds her in a kind of fog.

The meditative internality doesn’t work for Clarissa, however. Her lyrical vocal line with its short, deliberate phrases and delicate orchestration suits Ms. Fleming’s instrument, but makes the character shallow; its Coplandesque accompaniment insists on her oblivious innocence. Scenes involving her often fall flat. Her interactions with Richard (Kyle Ketelsen, surprisingly robust for a dying man) are talky; an extended flashback to their youth, which included a brief romantic triangle with Richard’s ex-lover Louis (William Burden), has no punch. 

Ms. Fleming and Kyle Ketelsen

PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

Most of the opera’s action scenes revolve around Clarissa, and their lack of musical momentum reveals the opera’s principal flaw: It has well-crafted episodes and deft, imaginative transitions, but the story arc, particularly in Act 2, is carried by the libretto rather than the music. When Mr. Puts tries for dramatic impact, as at the end of Act 1, when all three women decide to act on their feelings, and later, following Richard’s suicide, the music is just noisy. The opera’s finale, a delicate trio for the three women, is a clear nod to the end of “Der Rosenkavalier,” but has none of its predecessor’s mix of anguish, resignation and serene bliss that tells you everything has changed. 

The orchestra, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, did its best with the lushly pretty score. The strong supporting singers included Denyce Graves, lively as Clarissa’s partner, Sally, and Eve Gigliotti as Virginia’s faithful servant, Nelly. Sylvia D’Eramo had a poignant moment as Laura’s neighbor Kitty; Kathleen Kim’s adroit coloratura cameo as the florist Barbara read like an opera in-joke. The men—Sean Panikkar as Leonard Woolf, Brandon Cedel as Dan Brown, Tony Stevenson as Clarissa’s friend Walter—ably served as foils for the women. 

Mr. McDermott’s production eloquently capitalized on the opera’s dreaminess and overlap of worlds, its strongest elements. Set and costume designer Tom Pye created simple rooms for each of the principal characters—Virginia’s study, Laura’s kitchen—that rolled on and off stage, but the characters also ventured outside their own spaces and into each other’s. Bruno Poet’s lighting and Finn Ross’s projections limned the differences between eras, and between interior and exterior existences. Annie-B Parson’s choreography turned dancers into extensions of the characters and the set—draped over furniture in Richard’s apartment, holding books against the wall of Virginia’s study, carrying pillows and pills into the hotel room where Laura contemplates suicide. Ms. Fleming looked dazzling in a tailored white skirt suit; Ms. O’Hara carried off the housewife’s bathrobe and perky nipped-waisted floral frock. Virginia’s drab makeup and shapeless, rust-colored 1920s dress could have been deadly, but Ms. DiDonato’s commanding life force overcame them both.

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

A magical world premiere at San Diego Opera imagines Frida Kahlo reuniting with her husband, Diego Rivera, from beyond the grave; composer Ethel Smyth’s 1906 work, in a fusty revival at Houston Grand Opera, depicts English villagers who plunder shipwrecks and kill the survivors.

Guadalupe Paz and Alfredo Daza

PHOTO: KARLI CADEL

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 1, 2022 4:16 pm ET

San Diego.

Opera is an ideal medium for fusing magic and reality, and “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), which had its world premiere at the San Diego Opera on Saturday, does just that with sensitivity and charm. Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz have created a twist on the Orpheus and Eurydice story, this time in Spanish, set on the Mexican holiday El Día de los Muertos, and featuring Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the two great Mexican painters whose tempestuous romantic partnership ended only with Frida’s death in 1954. Or didn’t end: The opera opens in 1957 with Diego begging Frida to return, a possibility on this day in November when the border between worlds is opened, and the souls of the departed can rejoin their loved ones for 24 hours.

There’s no Halloween terror or mourning gloom to the piece. Like the holiday, it is about love, remembering and forgiveness. And comedy: Catrina, Keeper of the Dead, who controls the passage between worlds, is funny. As in the traditional Orpheus story, art is the passport across the border. Frida, who remembers only the physical and emotional pain of her life—she was profoundly injured in a tram accident and her two marriages to Diego were laced with infidelity—doesn’t want to go but changes her mind at the prospect of being able to paint once more. Yet Mr. Cruz’s poignant libretto keeps us in the realm of dreams rather than nightmares. Even the moment that Frida feels pain again—when, disobeying Catrina’s command to keep her distance, she embraces Diego—is brief.

Ms. Frank’s alluring music also shuttles eloquently between the worlds. After the somber opening scene as Diego and others visit shrines to their dead, the textures in the underworld, led by the cackling Catrina, are brighter and livelier. The chorus of departed souls teases Frida, turning the words “sin ti” (without you) into polyphonic playfulness. When Diego and Frida reunite in the world of the living, the rhythms dance and so does Frida. Instrumental choices are potent: The celesta and piccolo phrase that accompanies Frida’s impassioned first aria about her life of pain suggests haunting, distant memories. Tellingly, that orchestral color returns in the final scene, as Frida accompanies the dying Diego on his own journey to the underworld. Like the libretto, the music evokes a magical atmosphere of dreams.

Mezzo Guadalupe Paz was a passionate Frida; as Diego, baritone Alfredo Daza was touching as a man nearing his end. As Catrina, soprano Maria Katzarava was impressive in the melismas and cackles of the evening’s most arresting vocal music. Countertenor Key’mon W. Murrah was affecting as Leonardo, a departed soul who returns to the world of the living for the thrill of being an actor again—he plays Greta Garbo for a devoted fan. Roberto Kalb’s conducting had both clarity and richness.

The striking production was central to the opera’s impact. Set designer Jorge Ballina and lighting designer Victor Zapatero conjured up an enchanting, artistic Mexico: The opening scene was staged on a tiered Día de los Muertos altar, banked with marigolds and candles that flew upward to hover over the underworld. Later, one of Rivera’s murals came to life inside a giant picture frame, and Frida and Diego visited Frida’s house, Casa Azul, furnished with cutout elements from her paintings—a bed, a shelf, a garden. Eloise Kazan’s costumes enhanced the effect. In the underworld, they matched the orange hues of the holiday marigolds in a variety of historical styles—there was even an armored soldier. When the dead visited the living, they changed into a wider array of colors, and Frida donned her familiar Tehuana-inspired dress and flower crown. Catrina’s skeleton-festooned regalia reflected depictions of pre-Columbian gods. Against this background of riotous color and detail, Lorena Maza’s minimal direction made the scenes into tableaux, static rather than active. The production goes to the San Francisco Opera, a co-commissioner, with a mostly different cast, in June 2023.

***

Sasha Cooke and Norman Reinhardt PHOTO: MICHAEL BISHOP

Houston

Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers” (1906) has benefited from the current effort to exhume forgotten works by BIPOC and women composers. Glyndebourne staged it last summer, and Houston Grand Opera opened a new production of it on Friday. In an earlier outing, at the Bard Festival in 2015, the opera came across as ferocious; here, it just seemed old-fashioned. 

The story is promising: The villagers in an isolated 18th-century Cornwall community plunder ships that founder on their rocky coast and kill the survivors, justifying their actions as ordained by God. An unknown traitor is threatening their livelihood by lighting a warning beacon on the clifftop. The libretto, by Smyth’s lover Henry Brewster, deftly lays out the character conflicts: Thirza, the pastor Pascoe’s young wife, is an outsider who despises the wreckers’ work and is having a secret affair with Mark, a fisherman. Avis, Mark’s ex-girlfriend, hates Thirza and leads the hunt to pin the beacon-lighting on Pascoe to punish her; Pascoe, venerated by the community, is having strange visions. 

But Smyth’s music has too many stylistic references: It aspires to Wagnerian sweep and there are hints of Debussy, particularly in a “La Mer”-like interlude before Act 3. The vigorous choral writing—both hymn-singing and mob frenzy—is static, and many of the arias are tuneful but shapeless. Sasha Cooke made the most of Thirza’s music with her luxuriant mezzo and impassioned delivery; soprano Mané Galoyan was also terrific, bringing a spiteful energy and high, flirty ease to Avis’s music, which sounds like it could be from “Carmen.” Despite his big baritone, Reginald Smith Jr.’s Pascoe was a cipher, and his mutton-chop facial hair was distracting. Tenor Norman Reinhardtsounded constrained as Mark. Of the supporting singers, mezzo Sun-Ly Pierce stood out in a brief appearance as Jack, the teenager with a crush on Avis. 

Conductor Patrick Summers didn’t find either the frenzy or the brooding menace that can make the score work. Louisa Muller’s pedestrian directing and the literalness of Christopher Oram’s sets—the giant cross, the stone houses—along with Marcus Doshi’s lighting had the same problem. The show felt obvious and antiquated, right down to the lovers chained in a cave with the tide coming in (a nod to “Aida”). The libretto, originally in French, is usually performed in Smyth’s own English translation; in Houston, the company used an English version by Amanda Holden, which removes the archaic language and strives for a more contemporary flavor, but to little avail. Compared to Benjamin Britten’s brilliant “Peter Grimes,” an opera—now playing with a superb cast at the Metropolitan Opera—about an outsider in an insular coastal community, “The Wreckers” is a historical curiosity rather than a buried treasure.

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 opera, which premiered at Penn State, depicts the fierce conflict between urban planner Robert Moses and journalist Jane Jacobs.

Rinde Eckert as Robert Moses (right), with Tomas Cruz

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

By Heidi Waleson

Length (6 minutes)Queue

State College, Pa.

It’s odd that “A Marvelous Order,” an opera depicting the epic Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs battle over the fate of New York City and the future of urbanism, had its world premiere last Thursday not in New York, but at Penn State University during Homecoming Week. New York is getting a starry version of the tale—David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” imported from London with Ralph Fiennes as Moses, opening this week at the Shed for a sold-out run—but the opera deserves a hometown hearing, and wider circulation, for its thoughtful depiction of the conflict and its unusually imaginative, multimedia form. 

Moses, the unelected king of New York public works, who spent four decades building bridges and highways to funnel cars into, out of and through New York City, met his match in Jane Jacobs, a journalist and the author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961). The opera zeroes in on two battles: Moses’s 1953 effort to build a four-lane highway—a continuation of Fifth Avenue—through Washington Square Park and, several years later, his Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have allowed cars to proceed unimpeded from New Jersey to Long Island. Moses lost both those battles when Jacobs rallied neighborhood and political support on behalf of the people who lived in the paths of those proposed juggernauts. 

The opera, a collaboration of composer Judd Greenstein, librettist Tracy K. Smith and director/animation creator Joshua Frankel, unfolds in 11 sharp vignettes that explore the conflict on multiple levels. Mr. Greenstein’s minimalist music can evoke the elegant chaos of daily life in Jacobs’s Greenwich Village in the opening section, “The Ballet of the Streets,” with the voices of the ensemble members flowing over and around each other, as well as the lockstep meters of a meeting in Moses’s office. Ms. Smith’s libretto is spare, letting repeated single words (“Obstacle!”) tell the story, rather than insisting on a detailed narrative, and her poetic turns of phrase fit beautifully. Mr. Frankel’s stunning animations, moving in rhythm with the music, are an equal storytelling element. Some are abstract—the polygon patterns that mirror the crazy-quilt blocks of the Village; others—like the line drawings of walking figures or the blood-red ribbon that steamrolls over Washington Square Park—are explicit. 

Megan Schubert as Jane Jacobs, with Blythe Gaissert and Kamala Sankaram

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

Amplification made the libretto intelligible—some text sections were projected as part of the animation design, but there were no supertitles, and for the most part, none were needed. (Greg Allen did the sound design.) Megan Schubert’s vivid high soprano colored Jacobs’s obsessiveness and obstinate determination; tenor Rinde Eckert’s distinctive stage persona and the jittery, anxious quality of his music made for a fascinating Moses, who shouts everyone down. The piece humanized them both: When Moses has a meltdown over being beaten by “a bunch of mothers,” his aria suggests a man who got conflicting messages about life and manhood from his own mother. And in the final scene, when the two have an imaginary, perhaps posthumous, encounter, Jacobs sings wearily, “I thought I had a voice. . . . Was it nothing more than a faint stirring? A dog barking and barking and barking, making nothing but a far-off wordless wind?”

The many varied ensembles—a polyphonic streetscape, a protest chant— made for a consistently energetic atmosphere, and the seven supporting singers, all playing multiple roles, were excellent. Kamala Sankaram had a hilarious moment as a Villager personally offended by the Washington Square plan, repeating the words “just sick!”; Christopher Herbert was a splendidly self-important Moses mouthpiece at a public hearing; Tomás Cruz’s falsetto gave a poignant edge to a Villager’s testimony about the importance of Washington Square Park in his life. Blythe Gaissert brought a rich mezzo to the Displaced Woman, though the purpose of her character was unclear; Melisa Bonetti, Kelvin Chan and Tesia Kwarteng made strong contributions. In the pit, the NOW Ensemble (piano, guitar, clarinet, double bass, flute), conducted by David Bloom, supplied distinctive individual timbres combined with rhythmic precision and dynamic forward motion. 

The animations were the main visual event. They were projected on a rear screen and on the simple movable cubes and columns that made up most of David Ogle’s set design, coordinating well with Robert Bloom’s lighting. Patrick McCollum’s movement direction and choreography synchronized the human characters with the images.

The opera strives for a nuanced view. It avoids any sense of triumphalism over Jacobs’s victories. “Jones Beach (1927),” which opens Act II, is about how some of Moses’s efforts to create amenities—access to the sea, public parks, swimming pools—for New Yorkers were applauded and appreciated at the time. It was only later that the basic incompatibility of urban life with lots of cars, along with the racist connotations of “urban renewal,” became clear. For a contemporary context, the celebrations of the opening of the newly renovated Geffen Hall included a paean to San Juan Hill, the racially diverse neighborhood that Moses tore down to build Lincoln Center. 

The larger problem has not been solved. The struggle between a top-down planning strategy and one that embraces how people actually live, along with the question of who gets to make the decisions about how change happens, remains a pertinent concern today, and not just in New York City. Still, one couldn’t help feeling relieved when the huge red shapes, representing dehumanizing housing-project buildings, that hovered over Manhattan in Mr. Frankel’s animation, ready to replace blocks of vibrant existing neighborhoods, suddenly dissolved into bits and floated away, like butterflies.

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).

Davóne Tines collaborates with Jennifer Koh at BAM in a performance that delves into both artists’ life stories, and with Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory commemorating the 50th anniversary of Morton Feldman’s tribute to Rothko Chapel.

Davóne Tines and Jennifer Koh in ‘Everything Rises’ at BAM

PHOTO: ELLEN QBERTPLAYA/BAM

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 18, 2022 5:17 pm

Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Everything Rises,” a 70 minute-long work presented at BAM Fisher recently, tackles complex issues in an extremely personal way. Opera singer Davóne Tines, who is black, and violinist Jennifer Koh, who is Korean-American, both highly successful performers of Western classical music, bonded over their feelings of estrangement from its historically white culture. Efforts to diversify notwithstanding, that whiteness remains dominant—in the repertoire, the performers, the presenting institutions, and, perhaps most critically, the audience that buys the tickets. To survive within it, Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh feel pressure to mask their true selves, or “code-switch.” In “Everything Rises,” they shed the masks while still embracing the music that they love.

The piece has an all-BIPOC creative team—Ken Ueno, music and libretto; Kee-Yoon Nahm, narrative structure and dramaturgy; Alexander Gedeon, director; Hana S. Kim, projection and set designer; Carolina Ortiz Herrera, lighting designer; Lena Sands, costume designer—and much of the text is adapted from interviews with the two performers about their feelings and experiences. The tightly structured and thoughtfully produced show begins with an archival video: the 17-year-old Ms. Koh in her triumphant 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition concerto performance, embodying the stereotype of the over-achieving young Asian musician. Then Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh enter. They seem trussed in their formal concert wear, and Mr. Tines, in the lowest, gravelly depths of his voice, accompanied only by a recorded drone, addresses the “dear white people” for whom “I’m just a thing / a Ming vase, a Picasso / you bought and sold me,” as well as his self-hatred for wanting that “money, access, fame.” This disturbingly frank and naked moment is followed by Ms. Koh’s violin solo, which scratches and shrieks her inner anguish behind the mask.

The rest of “Everything Rises” explores the two artists’ family histories, deftly alternating live performance and recorded audio recollections from Alma Lee Gibbs Tines (Mr. Tines’s grandmother) and Gertrude Soonja Lee Koh (Ms. Koh’s mother), who also appear on silent video. The matriarchs speak with the toughness of survivors—one a descendant of enslaved people, recounting stories of lynchings and violence; the other a Korean War refugee and solitary young immigrant to the U.S., driven to succeed through assimilation. Mr. Tines and Ms. Koh, having changed into elegant matching long black skirts, riff seamlessly on these narratives. In “Fluttering Heart,” for example, Mr. Tines transforms Soonja’s words into a meditative lullaby about loneliness—she laughs, but he sings the painful subtext, and then Ms. Koh plays it.

Trees—“the tree of humanity”—are a pervasive symbol. Broken branches in the video, an arched piece of driftwood carried by Mr. Tines, even Ms. Koh’s wooden violin—reaching their apogee in the penultimate song, the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit.” Mr. Tines sings that harrowing depiction of lynched bodies in a new version, with its text and melody rearranged and stretched, as Ms. Koh plays while lying flat on her back on the floor, against a background of abstract but ominous video images. The final song, “Better Angels,” offers a positive answer to the earlier question, “To whom does the music belong?”—suggesting it as “a language in which you and I are the same.”

The most moving aspect of the piece is the potent musical connection of these two superb performers: It gives them the strength to express their buried histories and traumas, using their artistic virtuosity, for an audience that is accustomed to seeing them in a different guise. Both are practiced at breaking new ground within the classical world: Ms. Koh is spearheading The New American Concerto, a commissioning project; Mr. Tines will perform his “Recital No. 1: Mass,” a program that weaves movements of a Latin Mass by Caroline Shaw together with music by Bach, Julius Eastman and others, at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 3, in Baltimore on Nov. 6 and in Philadelphia on Nov. 30. Mr. Tines will also be artist-in-residence at BAM in 2023. Yet the explicitly personal nature of “Everything Rises” demands that we see them unmasked and welcome their full experience as part of the canon.

***

New York 

Davóne Tines played a central role in another unconventional music event earlier this month: “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at the Park Avenue Armory. The piece, by Tyshawn Sorey, was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. Inspired by Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel” (1971), it is an eloquently spare work, with questioning fragments of melody left hanging in the air, the spaces between them as important as the notes themselves, inviting the listener to find their own meaning.

The Armory version, staged by Peter Sellars, was given a grander and gaudier vibe than the octagon of black Rothko canvases could possibly provide. On a raised platform, eight giant images of abstract paintings by Julie Mehretu encircled the audience; Mr. Sorey and the instrumental ensemble (Kim Kashkashian, viola; Sarah Rothenberg, piano/celesta; Steven Schick, percussion) were placed at the center. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, singing wordless syllables, was barely visible, and when Mr. Tines, who sat in the audience for the beginning of the work, stood and sang his booming first notes, the people just in front of him were clearly startled. Mark Urselli’s sound design made this all seem perfectly natural.

Mr. Tines’s fragments were from the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and Mr. Sellars had him journey slowly around the space, first to the musicians, then up and around the platform. The paintings seemed alive, their smudged backgrounds and flicked lines of color transformed over time by James F. Ingalls’s protean lighting. Each painting had a human animator as well: a dancer performing flexn choreography by Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray. Their contortions could be distracting—the dancer with seemingly double-jointed shoulders was hard to watch. But as Mr. Tines made his way back to the musicians and hummed the end of his melody along with the viola, the meditative, lost-in-the-darkness atmosphere of the piece seemed to resolve into a welcome homecoming.

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

This season brings genre-pushing variety, from the premiere of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’ to Rossini’s rarely seen ‘Otello.’ 

Timur and the Dime Museum perform live with the film of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 4, 2022 5:47 pm ET

Philadelphia

After two years of pandemic-imposed hiatus, Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking festival returned this fall with some new twists. The festival has always looked to the future, and the medium of opera on film has exploded recently as producers searched for alternatives to live performance. Festival O22’s marquee event was thus the premiere of David T. Little’s opera film “Black Lodge.” O22 also presented “Opera on Film,” 12 screenings encompassing several dozen wildly different takes on the intersection of those two mediums.

“Black Lodge” demands some advance work: Last November, I saw a preview screening cold and was baffled. This time, I was prepared for the piece’s literary, filmic and theatrical inspirations in the work of the surrealists William S. Burroughs, David Lynch, and Antonin Artaud. Mr. Little’s score, Anne Waldman’s libretto and director Michael Joseph McQuilken’s screenplay depict a man trapped in the Bardo—here a nightmarish space between death and rebirth—endlessly reliving the worst thing he has ever done. That event is based on Burrough’s accidental 1951 killing of his wife, whom, in one version, he shot while drunk as part of a William Tell stunt.

With context, you can appreciate the project’s artistry. Timur Bekbosunov, frontman of the glam rock band Timur and the Dime Museum, is an operatic tenor with a remarkably protean instrument—in “Black Lodge,” he sounds alternately like a baroque countertenor, a baritone, a rocker and a crooner. The piece is scored for string quartet, rock band and electronics; Timur, his band, and the Opera Philadelphia String Quartet performed it live at the Philadelphia Film Center, which was exciting, if extremely loud. (Ear plugs were provided.)

“Black Lodge” is a dark, unredemptive vision. It ends basically where it begins, in a large industrial space with Timur (the Man) in a swinging chair next to a 1950s-era TV with his face on it. In between, he undergoes shock treatment, gets covered in clay, and visits both a forest with a string quartet and a desert with a thrashing rock band. A dancer (Jennifer Harrison Newman) portrays, among others, a sinisterly masked medical technician, a bartender who splits in two, and the victim of the killing in a suburban living room. 

Projected titles were essential to understanding Ms. Waldman’s gnomic text; they were, alas, small and hard to follow at the same time as the fast-moving images. Yet this time, I could feel the human anguish under the noise and horror. The climactic killing scene was interrupted by a howling interlude in the desert: As the screen was splashed with comic book-style gun explosions and blood, and the music recalled the infernal electronic drone at the end of Mr. Little’s “Dog Days,” the text that rose to the surface was, hopelessly, “The answer is no.” A recording will be released next spring; the film streams on the Opera Philadelphia Channel beginning Oct. 21.

“Black Lodge,” which was developed and produced by Beth MorrisonProjects, was reimagined as a film due to the pandemic, and seems made for the medium. Of the three Opera on Film screenings I saw, Arizona Opera’s “The Copper Queen,” which had a traditional operatic structure and score (by Clint Borzoni) and was shot entirely on one set, was the most conventional. Still, director Crystal Manich used the immediacy of film closeup to showcase soprano Vanessa Becerra in an impressive performance as Julia, the passionate ghost of a mining town whore. I was intrigued by “After/Glow,” directed by Ryan McKinny, which imposed a more complicated narrative—a ménage à trois with a tragic ending—on Schumann’s song cycle “Dichterliebe.” The film was layered with additional poetry by Marc Bamuthi Joseph; the Schumann was sung and played by the splendid countertenor John Holiday. Director E. Elias Merhige’s “Polia & Blastema” was a cipher, more film than opera with its sci-fi visuals, a pair of clay-encrusted women, and soprano ululations in the background. 

Kristen Choi with dancer Muyu Ruba in ‘The Raven’

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

Festival O22 also brought back live theater. “The Raven” (2012) Toshio Hosokawa’s monodrama for mezzo-soprano and 12 players, probes deeply into the terror and loss of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem through a jagged, atonal setting that stretches the scansion out of its familiar rhythm. Directed by Aria Umezawa, featuring mezzo Kristen Choi, and conducted by Eiki Isomura, it was ingeniously mounted at the Miller Theater with the audience surrounding the action on bleachers, runway-style, on the stage. Overhead, scenic designer Jennifer Hiyama’s hanging sculpture looked like an undulating drift of white paper that had been chewed by termites; discarded manuscript papers and photographs were strewn on the floor.

Ms. Choi embraced the piece’s wide range of pitch and dynamics, shifting from whispers and Sprechstimme to full-throated song (the first time on the word “Lenore,” the name of speaker’s dead love). She was equally intense in her movement, interacting with a dancer (Muyu Ruba) wearing a bird mask and a black robe with giant sleeves. Ariel Wang designed the Japanese-influenced costumes, hair and make-up. 

In a pre-show opener by the theater collective Obvious Agency, half a dozen performers, in white costumes draped with red cords, all claimed to be “Lenore” and engaged the audience in groups. It was not illuminating. These Lenores also turned up midway through the main part of the show, stripped off the dancer’s robe and mask, and revealed that she was also Lenore.

Tenor Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello

PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

O22’s most traditional offering was Rossini’s “Otello” (1816), a diva showcase, though not exactly the expected one. Unlike Verdi’s version, the plot unfolds entirely in Venice (here called Adria) and the hatred/jealousy angle is spread more widely, incorporating Elmiro (Desdemona’s father) and Rodrigo, Elmiro’s preferred candidate for her hand, as well as Otello and Iago. Other than Elmiro (bass-baritone Christian Pursell), they are all tenors, and Rodrigo (Lawrence Brownlee) has the flashiest music. Mr. Brownlee had the notes and the agility for the role, but his delivery throughout felt effortful—impressive, but not comfortable.

His colleagues were less exposed, with more recitative and ensemble writing than stand-alone arias. Khanyiso Gwenxane’s softer-edged tenor made for an ardent, expressive Otello, though the Rodrigo-Otello antagonism felt less potent than it could have. Alek Shrader was a nicely toxic Iago; Mr. Pursell a properly stiff Elmiro. 

The star of the show was mezzo Daniela Mack, who gave a rich-voiced, poignant performance as the unfortunate Desdemona, fought over by men and heard by none of them. Only her confidante, Emilia (an affecting Sun-Ly Pierce), pays any attention to her. The murder scene, which has Otello chasing Desdemona around the room and insisting that she’s unfaithful, was regrettably more comic than tragic. Although conductor Corrado Rovaris tended toward grand gestures rather than transparency, the deft Rossinian construction of the opera’s trios, quartets and the like made the piece worth hearing. 

The production, from Belgium, had traffic-cop direction by Emilio Sagi. The post-World War I design, with a single set by Daniel Bianco, costumes by Gabriela Salaverri and lighting by Eduardo Bravo, placed the action in the vestibule of a stately home with a dispiritingly gray color scheme. Numerous liveried servants kept moving the furniture around during Act 1; by Act 2, the furniture was, curiously, draped in dust sheets. The show could have used some of the visual energy of “Black Lodge.”

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 Metropolitan Opera is mounting this diva vehicle (in Italian) for the first time in a new David McVicar starring Sondra Radvanovsky.

Sondra Radvanovsky as Medea

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Sept. 28, 2022 5:11 pm

Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” (1797) is a diva vehicle, which should have made it a perfect choice for the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season on Tuesday. Originally written in French with spoken dialogue and subsequently translated into Italian with recitatives, it was embraced by Maria Callas, the consummate diva, in 1953. The Met is mounting it (in Italian) for the first time to showcase soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who has the vocal goods and stage presence for the role of the revenge-crazed sorceress. However, the opera itself, even in this eye-catching new production directed and designed by David McVicar, is a creaky thing. Midway through Act 2, during Giasone and Medea’s heated exchange about their children, I started wondering idly if a good divorce lawyer could have solved their problem. That’s not the desired reaction; rather, one should be transfixed by Medea and the extreme exaggeration of her character. She wants Giasone back. If she can’t have him, there will be hell to pay.

Medea

The Metropolitan Opera, 30 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York 
$32.50-$302.50, 212-362-600, closes Oct. 28 

As you may recall from Greek myth, Medea helped Giasone (Jason in the original) acquire the Golden Fleece, murdering several of her own family members in the process. Giasone has now abandoned her, taking their two sons, and is planning to marry Glauce, daughter of Creonte, King of Corinth. At the start of the opera, wedding preparations are in progress and Glauce is understandably concerned that Medea will turn up and cause trouble. She does. When we first see her, she’s lurking in a tattered black dress, with smeared eye makeup and snaky hair, outside the palace, a hulking fortress-like wall whose bronze patinaed doors slide open to reveal life going on without her. To ensure that we get the full view, Mr. McVicar made the rear interior wall a giant, tilted mirror that reflects the stage picture, disorientingly, from above and in reverse. 

Once Medea finally arrives—there’s half an hour of introductory material—it’s all about her. Ms. Radvanovsky started off well, demonstrating Medea’s cunning: her slow, incisive vocal delivery and movement were deliberate contrasts with the hysteria provoked by her appearance in all the other characters. Even her pleading with Giasone (a forthright, self-important Matthew Polenzani) had a duplicitous edge, and when she dropped her pretense to call on hell to punish him, her tone narrowed tellingly. However, the metallic character of Ms. Radvanovsky’s potent, disciplined soprano became monochromatic after a while, so by the middle of Act 2—and certainly Act 3, when Medea is in full cry—there wasn’t enough variety in it to sustain interest, let alone sympathy. Even her vacillations about whether to kill the children in order to punish her perfidious husband were not very convincing. She’s nuts, and we know where this is going.

That was a problem since the opera’s drama is all internal. Cherubini and his librettist—François-Benoît Hoffman; Italian translation by Carlo Zangarini—supplied only flimsy antagonists and background action. Glauce (delicately sung by Janai Brugger) basically disappeared after her opening scene and aria. Creonte (a bluff Michele Pertusi) and Giasone made brief, unsuccessful attempts to bully, corral and patronize Medea; chorus scenes like the plodding wedding march and the lengthy act preludes had little musical profile despite the efforts of conductor Carlo Rizzi. Only mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova as Neris, Medea’s confidante, stood out with her lyrical lament “Solo un pianto,” gorgeously accompanied by a solo bassoon. The aria is about how Neris feels Medea’s grief and for a moment, we had a visceral sense of where all the fury began. 

Janai Brugger and Michele Pertusi

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/THE METROPOLITAN OPERA

Yet even during Neris’s aria, Mr. McVicar made sure that the fury was still present: During its final section, Medea opened a trunk and examined the poisoned robe and diadem that she will give to Glauce as a wedding gift. There were many such directorial touches. Giasone’s crew, the Argonauts, were dressed as pirates and did a jaunty dance as they presented Creonte with the Golden Fleece and a chest full of treasure. This outlaw garb, like Medea’s, differentiated them from the Corinth courtiers, who were elegantly dressed in French neoclassical style. (Doey Lüthi designed the costumes; Jo Meredith the movement; Paule Constable the lighting). 

The tilted mirror’s best function was to visually amplify certain staging elements at different moments. The image of the banquet table stuffed with glowing candelabra in Act 1, and the bride’s enormous veil, covering much of the floor in Act 2 were combined to grisly effect in Act 3, when Glauce, in her poisoned robe, writhed in mortal agony on her belly atop the blood-stained tablecloth. The murder of the children, thankfully, took place offstage. The final mirrored image of Medea lying with her sons in a ring of fire (the projections were designed by S. Katy Tucker) was oddly serene, since her final words to Giasone are basically, “See you in hell!” It seemed like a last-ditch plea for sympathy, like the lovers’ suicide tableau in the movie of “Sophie’s Choice.” Something closer to the original 1797 staging, in which Medea flew off in a fiery chariot, would probably have been more suited to this performance. 

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).

Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the U.S. premiere of a new staging of the classic Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick/Joseph Stein musical, as well as a traditional production of Verdi’s tale of three high-born men in the 16th century competing to marry one woman. 

Steven Skybell as Tevye

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 20, 2022 4:40 pm ET

Chicago

Making standard repertory feel new and immediate is the eternal challenge of the opera house; now Lyric Opera of Chicago has accomplished that with an unexpected work: “Fiddler on the Roof.” The story and tunes of the 1964 Joseph Stein (book)/Jerry Bock(music)/Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) musical—Tevye the milkman, his marriageable daughters, the shtetl, “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset”—are as baked into American culture as the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But this gripping production by Barrie Kosky, the Australian-born director who spent 10 years as head of the Komische Oper Berlin, gives the show an edgy, anxious darkness. It’s still set in 1905, in Anatevka, a poor, tightly knit Jewish community not far from Kyiv in imperial Russia, yet one can’t miss the contemporary relevance in a world teeming with refugees. The production had its premiere in Berlin in 2017; who would have known that five years later, present-day Ukrainians—albeit mostly non-Jews this time—would be fleeing their homes once again.

Instability and poverty are signaled by Rufus Didwiszus’s Act 1 set, a towering construction of old wardrobes that rotates on a turntable in front of a fuzzy photographic backdrop of bare trees, and Klaus Bruns’s costumes, all in drab shades of brown and gray. Wardrobes are used for comic effect—characters crawl through their doors to enter and leave the stage; Tevye and his wife, Golde, sleep in one. Yet the village built from them is makeshift. In Act 2, the construction is gone and snow is falling. Tevye’s family fragments and the community members, heading into exile, stack a few remaining bits of furniture in a pile and leave it behind to be pilfered by the locals.

The company of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

PHOTO: LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

In this production, the strength of the community is its people, powerfully depicted in the many big chorus numbers. For “Tradition,” villagers flood the stage, waving their arms with manic intensity; in “To Life,” 12 male dancers are stunningly choreographed by Otto Pichler (original) and Silvano Marraffa (revival) with an almost brutal physicality. Comedy also gets its big moment: Tevye’s nightmare, which he invents to get out of his agreement to marry Tzeitel, his eldest daughter, to the butcher Lazar Wolf, is hilariously packed with skull-headed dancing demons.

The lighting (by Diego Leetz; re-created for the Chicago by Marco Philipp) also plays a vital role: In the wedding of Tzeitel and Motel, so easy to stage as an outpouring of sentimental kitsch, the bride and groom stand isolated in light, as if in an old photograph, while the shadowed ensemble sings “Sunrise, Sunset,” here sounding like a memory of perpetual loss. Lyric fielded a potent 40-member chorus; with the dancers, and numerous actors and supernumeraries, in addition to the 18 principal singers, this was a very big show.

Maya Jacobson as Chava, Lauren Marcus as Tzeitel and Austen Bohmer as Hodel

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

Paced astutely by Mr. Kosky, the principal performers, all music-theater specialists rather than opera singers, made the book scenes, with their hoary jokes, sound fresh. As Tevye, Steven Skybell (who also starred in the landmark Joel Grey production in Yiddish) wrestled sincerely with the changing world, especially his daughters’ insistence on choosing their own husbands; his refrain, “On the one hand . . . on the other hand” felt genuine, as did his conversations with God. “Do You Love Me?” sung with Golde, had the hesitant approach of a man coming to grips with something new; in “Chavaleh (Little Bird),” his despair over his daughter Chava, who has married a Christian, felt bottomless.

Debbie Gravitte was a sensible Golde; as Hodel, Austen Danielle Bohmer brought a pure, heartrending soprano to the devastating ballad “Far From the Home I Love.” Lauren Marcus (Tzeitel) and Maya Jacobson (Chava) were lively, as were the three suitors (Drew Redington, Adam Kaplan, Michael Nigro), with Mr. Redington (Motel) turning in an exuberant “Miracle of Miracles” as the timid tailor suddenly finds his voice. Joy Hermalyn was a classic, kibbitzing Yente; Melody Betts, a hilarious, cleaver-wielding ghost of Fruma Sarah in Tevye’s nightmare. Drake Wunderlich, a fifth-grader, was the endearing link to today—in a green hoodie and jeans, he rode onstage on a scooter, pulled a violin out of a wardrobe and played the eponymous fiddler’s tune, summoning Tevye, Anatevka and the story.

Omi Lichtenstein as Bielke, Liliana Renteria as Shprintze, Steven Skybell as Tevye and Debbie Gravitte as Golde

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

Conductor Kimberly Grigsby kept the show percolating; the 33-member orchestra, larger than most Broadway pit bands and enhanced with mandolin, accordion and drum set, sometimes sounded scrappy but rose to the occasion in the extended klezmer-inspired sections, especially the Bottle Dance at the wedding. Peter Wiejaczka’s sound design was tinny and unnecessarily loud. And while the final scene suggests a happy ending for the wanderers—Tevye, Golde and their two youngest daughters are headed for America, perhaps to be the ancestors of the boy in the green hoodie—the memory of their forced displacement remains.

***

Russell Thomas in ‘Ernani’

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER

Lyric’s production of Verdi’s “Ernani” (1844) was pure tradition, but in a good way. The buoyant conducting of Enrique Mazzola, the company’s music director, demonstrated his profound understanding of the opera’s bel canto roots, and Louisa Muller, the director, embraced the absurdities of the plot and managed to make its conflicting debts of honor plausible. 

The shortish version: Ernani, a nobleman living as an outlaw after his father’s murder by the previous king of Spain, is in love with Elvira; Elvira’s elderly guardian, Don Ruy Gómez de Silva, and Don Carlo, the King of Spain, are also intent on marrying her. After various confrontations, disguises, and uncomfortable alliances made and broken among the three men, Ernani finally weds Elvira, only to be obliged to kill himself in fulfillment of an oath made to Silva.

Ms. Muller interpolated a nonsinging actor to play Ernani’s father—we saw the murder during the Prelude and he appeared sporadically as a reminder of his son’s noble heritage and desire for revenge. Scott Marr’s sets evoked early 16th-century aristocratic Spain with their Moorish-inspired decoration and air of chilly, empty grandeur, as did his dark-hued costumes and Duane Schuler’s moody lighting. (Lyric previously mounted this production in 2009 with a different director.)

Quinn Kelsey and Tamara Wilson in ‘Ernani’

PHOTO: LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

The principals were top-notch. Russell Thomas was a lyrically passionate Ernani, his tenor penetrating without being stentorian. As Elvira, the rich-voiced soprano Tamara Wilson brought youthful joy and hope to her opening aria, “Ernani, involami”; there’s little of that to be had in the opera, but Ms. Wilson managed to give her beleaguered character some sense of agency. Quinn Kelsey, his dark baritone exploding with rage and entitlement, created a Don Carlo mired in violence and brutality; his Act 3 decision to be a clement ruler was quite a surprise. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn gave Silva a coldly implacable authoritarian edge; his first costume, trimmed in what looked like wolf fur, suited him perfectly.

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

In San Francisco, the celebrated minimalist’s newest opera attempts to balance political drama with romantic tragedy but is held back by its reliance on traditional tropes

Amina Edris and Gerald Finley

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 13, 2022 5:44 pm ET

San Francisco

The San Francisco Opera, celebrating its centennial this season, is optimistically touting the future of opera as a living art form rather than simply recalling the glorious past. In keeping with that theme, it opened the season with “Antony and Cleopatra,” a world premiere by John Adams, who blazed a new operatic trail in 1987 with “Nixon in China.” Now 75 years old, he is one of America’s most celebrated composers. 

With “Antony,” Mr. Adams has embarked on yet another path. Rather than setting another pastiche libretto created by Peter Sellars, his longtime collaborator, he adapted his own text from the Shakespeare play. With a complex narrative and three strong characters built in, his “Antony” is paced more like a drama than his oratorio-style works “Girls of the Golden West” and “Doctor Atomic.” The orchestration is inventive and encyclopedic; the sprawling dramaturgy well-corralled; the text setting clear. But why this story? Mr. Adams may have thought to measure himself against Verdi’s final Shakespearean masterpieces, “Falstaff” and especially “Otello.” But his style doesn’t lend itself to the grand catharsis of romantic tragedy; as in his earlier operas, the effect is intellectual rather than emotional. The lovers die, but we don’t weep for them. 

In consultation with director Elkhanah Pulitzer and dramaturge Lucia Scheckner, Mr. Adams strategically narrowed the libretto’s focus to the political conflict between Antony, the great Roman warrior, and the young Caesar (Octavian). Once allies following the murder of Julius Caesar a decade earlier in 44 B.C., they are estranged due to Antony’s liaison with Cleopatra, the fascinating Queen of Egypt. Antony, the “old lion,” is dallying in the fleshpots of the East and neglecting his military obligations. Summoned to Rome and married off to Caesar’s sister Octavia, Antony soon returns to his lover. Caesar declares war on them; Cleopatra’s ships flee in the battle of Actium, and when Antony follows his humiliation is complete. That’s Act 1. Act 2 includes Caesar’s lengthy demagogic speech about his world-domination intentions (interpolated from Virgil’s “Aeneid”; Caesar would become Augustus, the first emperor of Rome) and the serial suicides of the defeated lovers. 

There should be a dramatic balance between Rome and Egypt, but in the opera the strength of Caesar’s calculating, ruthless character, communicated with ferocious directness by tenor Paul Appleby, means that the lovers don’t have a chance. Mr. Adams’s music evokes a languid, seductive atmosphere in the Egyptian scenes, but Cleopatra herself, sung by the eloquent soprano Amina Edris, seems more manipulatively petulant than magnetic in her “infinite variety.” Poor Antony, a despondent Gerald Finley, repeatedly tries to break free and reclaim his soldier’s honor but gets pulled back in again and again. Various male characters—including Antony—call Cleopatra a whore, and the production concept, which depicts her as a screen siren in 1930s Hollywood, plays up the performative nature of her mercurial personality. It’s hard to pull that off and be sympathetic, and Ms. Edris, who took over the part when Julia Bullock, for whom it was written, dropped out due to pregnancy, doesn’t have a big enough stage presence. 

A scene from ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

PHOTO: CORY WEAVER/SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Musically, there are splendid moments. The love scenes in which Cleopatra draws Antony back into her orbit have a magical serenity. The opening of Act 2, when they reconcile after the Actium disaster, has an elegant Stravinskian clarity, as the lovers first talk past each other and then kiss; Antony’s death is a poignant, long-breathed sigh, tuning out the world of the martial, brass-heavy Roman sequences. 

The orchestral writing is kaleidoscopically grand, particularly during the scene changes, and Mr. Adams drops in the occasional sly reference, like a quote from Wagner’s “Ring” as the set shifts from Rome to Egypt before Actium. One ingenious orchestral flourish is the use of the cimbalom, whose percussive twang gives the score an exotic color without making it ethnically stereotypical. The vocal writing is carefully tailored for textual intelligibility, and each of the principals has a distinct vocal character—Cleopatra’s undulating seductiveness, Antony’s struggle, Caesar’s implacability. Supporting roles are also notable: the smooth-tongued Roman general Agrippa (baritone Hadleigh Adams); the throaty Charmian, Cleopatra’s attendant (Taylor Raven); the upright Octavia (Elizabeth DeShong); Antony’s loyal lieutenant Enobarbus (Alfred Walker). The chorus goes from horrified observer (narrating the battle of Actium) to sycophantic echo of Caesar’s “rule the world” speech, making a long sequence seem even longer and scarier. Conductor Eun Sun Kim ably balanced grandeur with intimacy. 

Mimi Lien’s sets effectively used the device of a camera lens opening and closing to frame the scenes and transition seamlessly from Alexandria to Rome and Greece. Period (1930s) newsreels evoked the Roman crowds and Caesar’s political prowess; giant images of his face contorting as he delivered his oration suggested Mussolini; they contrasted with images of Cleopatra, the movie star, gazing impassively. (Bill Morrison designed the projections; David Finn the filmic lighting.) Constance Hoffman’s costumes—Cleopatra’s negligees and flowing jumpsuits, the suits and military uniforms of the Romans—also set up the dichotomy and ensured the eventual Roman triumph. Ms. Pulitzer’s directing worked best in the intimate scenes; the battle of Actium, with supernumeraries carrying sails and flashing lights, was hard to follow. 

Is “Antony and Cleopatra” representative of the future of opera? One could infer a contemporary political commentary about a republic giving way to an empire that crushes all in its path. But in choosing a Shakespearean text—and not deconstructing it, in the manner of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” for example—Mr. Adams hews to a traditional narrative, and the heroine dies in the end. At least she’s not a victim. For a more modern story, we’ll have to wait until June 2023, when San Francisco does Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” or for the 2023-24 season, when Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” about the aftermath of a school shooting, will be on the bill. 

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).