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The composer’s second opera at the New York institution is a visceral, jazz-influenced work about the closeted bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, who killed his opponent in a 1962 fight.

Ryan Speedo Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

April 12, 2023 5:55 pm ET

New York

After its huge success with the New York premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2021, the Metropolitan Opera moved quickly to get Mr. Blanchard’s first opera, “Champion,” on the schedule; it opened on Monday. “Champion,” which had its premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013, is tighter and less abstract than “Fire”; it is a propulsive and percussive score firmly rooted in the composer’s jazz idiom. The production has been expanded to fill the Met’s much larger stage, and the orchestra, under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, supplies some lush effects, but it’s the rhythm quartet, led by drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, that drives the evening.

“Champion” is based on the true story of Emile Griffith, a champion boxer in the 1960s from the Virgin Islands and a closeted bisexual. In a 1962 title bout in New York, he killed his opponent, Benny Paret, who had taunted him at the weigh-in with homophobic slurs. Michael Cristofer’s libretto deftly outlines and deepens the tale: The elderly Emile (Eric Owens), who suffers from dementia and is still haunted by both the killing and guilt about his sexual identity, conjures up the turbulent odyssey of his younger self (Ryan Speedo Green). Structural fragmentation and repetition in the piece poignantly reflect Emile’s dementia—the clipped, often rhyming, text, insistently set; the flashes of clarity; the punctuation by the boxing announcer and the bell; and Emile’s frequently repeated line: “In my head, it happens fast. / Something good / Turns into something that don’t last.” 

Mr. Blanchard’s music gives the story’s episodes a visceral intensity. A Caribbean carnival call-and-response chorus, accompanied only by drums, dispatches Emile from his island home to make his fortune in New York; an ensemble of overlapping voices urges Emile to “stay in the game” during the Paret fight. Sometimes the vocal parts are more rhythmic than melodic, as when Emile’s ambitious mother, Emelda (Latonia Moore), narrates his transformation from gentle hat-maker to prizefighter in a speedy, rap-like extravaganza, “Tarzan knows which tree to climb.” 

Latonia Moore

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

When he does write melodies, Mr. Blanchard’s style is unpredictable. The line of Young Emile’s musing aria, “What makes a man a man,” is questioning and inconclusive, appropriate for his unresolved question of whether love makes a man strong or weak. The skillful dramaturgy alternates these types of scenes. In Act 2, a fast-paced sequence has reporters badgering Emile with the same banal questions—how does it feel to win the fight? To be the champ? To kill a man?—after each win. Then the chaos retreats, and Howie Albert (Paul Groves), Emile’s manager, expansively explains that “the truth don’t fit in a three-inch column.” 

Mr. Green (center), Paul Groves (purple jacket) and Ms. Moore (right)

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

James Robinson and Allen Moyer, who directed and designed the original production in St. Louis, have effectively scaled up the show for the Met with a large boxing ring and a big chorus. Montana Levi Blanco’s eye-catching costumes encompass St. Thomas carnival stilt-walkers, New York drag queens and flashy 1960s nightclub denizens; Greg Emetaz’s scene-setting projections and videos establish the crowd of Madison Square Garden fight fans and Emile’s Long Island apartment complex; Donald Holder’s sensitive lighting limns the difference between splashy public moments and solo musings. Camille A. Brown, who created the show-stopping step dance for “Fire,” supplies compact cameos here, like a group of boxers warming up and sparring at a gym. The fatal fight itself was staged with heart-stopping verve.

Mr. Green and Mr. Owens, in splendid voice, made a powerful team; one could discern the deep-seated insecurity both in the vibrant excitement of the younger Emile and in the pathos of the older one. The roots of that insecurity are disturbingly explained by a child Emile (Ethan Joseph), who appears in a still more distant flashback, forced by his strap-wielding, fundamentalist cousin Blanche (Krysty Swann) to hold cinder blocks above his head in order to drive out the devil. As Emelda, Ms. Moore was game, if not entirely secure, in her rhythmic numbers in Act 1; she sounded more comfortable in her dreamily lyrical Act 2 aria, accompanied only by plucked string bass, about her sad past. 

Eric Owens and Mr. Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Mr. Groves brought humanity to Howie, especially in the scene where Emile’s early dementia becomes apparent. Stephanie Blythe had an all-too-brief bluesy cameo as Kathy Hagen, the foul-mouthed proprietor of the gay bar where Young Emile goes looking for company and solace. A distinctive moment for Brittany Renee, as Emile’s wife, is an imploring duet with Emelda, begging Young Emile to come home as he goes to Kathy’s bar for the last time (he is assaulted by gay-bashing thugs outside). Other notables in the cast included Chauncey Packer as the kind Luis, Emile’s adopted son and caretaker; and Eric Greene, playing both Benny Paret, who haunts Emile, and Paret’s son, who helps Emile find peace at the end of the opera. 

As was the case with “Fire,” the capacity opening-night crowd seemed unusually young, diverse and enthusiastic. The Met, noting how well pieces like “Fire” and “The Hours” did at the box office, has declared its intention to devote a substantial percentage of its season to contemporary works, starting with 2023-24. With original voices like Mr. Blanchard’s to draw from, that should be no hardship for its audience. 

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 April 13, 2023, print edition as ‘A Composer’s One-Two Punch’.

A performance comprising three works by artists including Anna Deavere Smith and John Luther Adams received a technically spectacular production at Lyric Opera of Chicago; at Chicago Opera Theater, an opera about the brilliant British mathematician proved a labored telling of a tragic story.

Gordon Hawkins as Preacher Man, Issachah Savage as Curtis Toler, and Jeff Parker as Arne Duncan

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

By Heidi Waleson

March 27, 2023 5:29 pm ET

Chicago

For the world premiere of “Proximity,” a suite of three new American operas, which opened Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago boldly enlisted a group of creators who were almost all new to opera and the visionary director Yuval Sharon, known for his unconventional approach to the form, who was charged with wrangling their work onto the stage. Each piece tackles a hot-button contemporary subject. “The Walkers” by Daniel Bernard Roumain and Anna Deavere Smith explores gun violence; “Four Portraits” by Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke looks at loneliness exacerbated by technology; “Night” by John Luther Adamsand John Haines is about climate change. 

To emphasize the operas’ interrelationships, Mr. Sharon alternated scenes of the first two pieces throughout the evening and concluded the first act with the single scene of “Night.” The juxtaposition of different musical languages was surprisingly smooth—conductor Kazem Abdullah had a lot to do with that—but it was the polished, high-tech production, designed by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras, that unified the operas and kept the piece afloat as a theatrical evening even as its component parts varied in their effectiveness. 

As she does in her plays, Ms. Smith fashioned her libretto from interviews, often used verbatim. For “The Walkers,” she started with Chicago CRED, an organization that works with young people to reduce gun violence: Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, one of its founders, and Curtis Toler, a former gang leader who is part of its team, are characters in the opera. She deftly weaves their words and feelings into a fictional story of gang confrontation, while Mr. Roumain’s music, with its hip-hop rhythms and a trap set in the orchestra, vividly evokes the powder keg created by groups of posturing teenagers feeding on historical animosities and easy access to weapons. In this unsentimental, up-to-the-minute urban scenario, the liveliest posse leader is Chief’s Daughter #1 (Kearstin Piper Brown), fierce in a long pink wig and bright, skin-tight attire (Carlos J. Soto did the costumes), who gets wrongly accused by a rival group of shooting a child. 

Zoie Reams as Sibyl

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

Other standout performers included Issachah Savage as Toler—his aria wondering if his methods are really working was especially poignant; Norman Garrett as Bilal, a gang member newly released from prison; Ron Dukes as Chief’s Son #1; and young members of Uniting Voices Chicago. The most powerful performance came in the final scene, with Whitney Morrison as Yasmine Miller, a real person, recounting the killing of her toddler son, Sincere, shot through their car window as they were driving to a laundromat. Mr. Roumain’s setting of her colloquial speech is operatic but without artifice; the repeated words “he didn’t, he didn’t . . . make it” become the mantra that any mother might hear over and over in her memory.

“Four Portraits” is more abstract, depicting a couple—A (countertenor John Holiday) and B (baritone Lucia Lucas)—divided by technology. Ms. Shaw writes most persuasively for chorus, and here eight singers created a haunting cacophony of overlapping words, most of which were incomprehensible without the supertitles. In the best scene, “The Train,” they are B’s fellow passengers on public transportation, separate yet sometimes mysteriously coalescing into an ensemble. Mr. Holiday’s distinctive timbre was often drowned out in the chaos; Ms. Lucas’s voice sounded harsh in her Scene 3 aria about loneliness, as she drives a car accompanied only by a GPS (Corinne Wallace-Crane, processed to sound like multiple voices). The principals’ ill-fitting gray costumes did them no favors.

The company of ‘Proximity’

PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

“Night” was just obscure. Both the opaque text, in which a Sibyl sees the end of the world, and Mr. Adams’s music, for a soloist (Katherine DeYoung) and chorus, built on a repeating downward pattern, were oracular rather than gripping. 

The ingenious production rescued “Night” and helped weld the other two pieces together. The arced, quarter pipe-shaped set was illuminated from within by a changing panoply of brilliantly conceived LED images, ranging from Google Earth views of Chicago to streaks of colored light that resolved into landscapes, and, for “Night,” a glittering starscape. Along with this visual opulence, its tempos expertly calibrated to match the music, we got occasional closeups of singers, and the larger-than-life view of Ms. Morrison’s face made Yasmine Miller’s bleak anguish personal. 

***

On the same weekend, at the Harris Theater, Chicago Opera Theater presented the world premiere of “The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing” by Justine F. Chen and David Simpatico, the tale of the brilliant mathematician who broke the Nazis’ Enigma code during World War II, was prosecuted, convicted and subjected to chemical castration under Britain’s draconian anti-homosexual laws in 1952, and died, by suicide, at the age of 41 in 1954. It’s a tragic subject, but labored storytelling and pedestrian vocal writing make the opera’s dramaturgy sag, particularly in the interminable final scene, which insists, unpersuasively, that Turing has performed some kind of mathematical soul transmigration. 

The most interesting musical moments include what the creators term “chat clouds”—transition episodes in which chorus members recite random words, some of which eventually rise to the aural surface. The Bletchley Park scene features a lively ensemble, with Turing as a kind of lounge singer backed up by a music-hall sextet of cryptographers working to break the code.

The opera was solidly cast and produced, although the hard-working baritone Jonathan Michie could not quite make us feel for Turing and his insistence on being himself, no matter the cost. Tenor Joseph Leppek was lyrical as Turing’s great love, Christopher, who died at age 18; Taylor Raven’s sonorous mezzo and Teresa Castillo’s high soprano supplied some vocal contrast as Joan Clarke (Turing’s cryptographer colleague who is game for a marriage of convenience) and Sara, his mother. Lidiya Yankovskaya ably led the chamber orchestra. Benjamin Olsen’s clever design placed the chorus in an aerie above the playing area, masked by a scrim that provided a projection surface for the “chat cloud” words; below, director Peter Rothstein marshaled his cast amid changing set elements like Turing’s code-breaking machine, his bed, and his poison-littered kitchen table. Nora Marlow Smith’s costumes evoked the period; Paul Whitaker’s lighting enhanced the story’s ominous mood. 

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 Seattle Opera, filmmaker Roya Sadat directs a timely but trite adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, with music by Sheila Silver and a libretto by Stephen Kitsakos.

Maureen McKay and Karin Mushegain

PHOTO: SUNNY MARTINI

By Heidi Waleson

March 6, 2023 5:27 pm ET

Seattle

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns,” by composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitsakos, which had its world premiere at the Seattle Opera recently, turned out to be more timely than its creators anticipated. Set in modern Afghanistan and based on the 2007 novel by Khaled Hosseini, the opera unfolds against the backdrop of several tumultuous decades of Afghan history, beginning in 1974, five years before the Soviet invasion, and ending in July 2001 with the country firmly in the grip of the Taliban. The story is about two women brutally subjected to Afghanistan’s patriarchal religious tradition, but both the book and the opera were written during the two decades of U.S. military presence in the country, when women were allowed to be educated and hold jobs. As the opera’s first production meetings were under way in 2021, however, the Taliban reasserted control, making the work’s themes immediate rather than historical. 

Mr. Kitsakos’s text deals efficiently with the complicated tale. Act 1 introduces Mariam, the illegitimate, uneducated daughter of a wealthy businessman, who at age 15 is forced to marry Rasheed, a much-older shoemaker, after her mother dies by suicide. Unable to bear the child her husband wants, she becomes his abused drudge, obliged to wear a burqa outside the house though many other women do not. 

In Act 2, many years later, she crosses paths with Laila, the 14-year-old daughter of her neighbor Hakim, a teacher. Laila, modern and educated, is romantically involved with Tariq, another teenager. It is 1992, and Kabul is now under constant bombardment by warring factions. Tariq and his family flee, and when Laila’s house is destroyed and her parents killed by a bomb, she is rescued by Rasheed, who sees her as another potential mother for his much-desired son. Secretly pregnant and persuaded that Tariq is dead, she agrees to marry Rasheed, despite Mariam’s fury. But when she gives birth to a girl, and becomes a new target for Rasheed, the two women develop a mother-daughter bond. In 1996, with the Taliban in control, their escape attempt is thwarted. Five years later, when Rasheed murderously attacks Laila, Mariam kills him with a shovel; instead of running, she stays behind and confesses to the crime so that Laila and her children can flee with Tariq, who is not dead after all. 

With so much time, plot, and the separate trajectories of the two central protagonists to cover, the opera’s dramaturgy starts to sag over its two 80-minute acts and the all-important emotional bonding of the two women, arriving late in the game, is more told than felt. There are plenty of arias, especially for the lonely, unhappy Mariam, and some lively ensembles—one for the three spiteful wives of Mariam’s father, another for women gossiping in the marketplace—but the music, though tuneful and vocally adept, is illustrative rather than gripping. 

Ms. Silver, who studied Hindustani music intensively in India, says that sections of the score are rooted in the scalar patterns of individual ragas; a nonspecialist ear can hear some of that influence in the vocal parts, particularly the occasional passages of repeated alternating notes. The inspiration is more obvious in the orchestration, with its drone underlays and the addition of some traditional instruments: The bansuri, a bamboo flute with a hauntingly breathy sound, sometimes paired with the celesta here, offers a distinctive color in mournful sections; tablas (hand drums) supply vigorous energy. 

Roya Sadat, the director, is an Afghan filmmaker best known for her 2017 feature “A Letter to the President,” which depicts a woman who kills her abusive husband in self-defense. Her adroit staging, with sets by Misha Kachman, costumes by Deborah Trout, and lighting by Jen Schriever, reflects some of the complexity of Afghan society and its changes over the years, including Western, cosmopolitan attire coexisting with headscarves and burqas in an outdoor marketplace. Dress is no predictor of liberalism, however: Both Rasheed and Mariam’s father wear business suits at her hasty wedding. The sets are on a turntable, allowing for easy alternation between Hakim’s house, with its bookshelves and sofa, and Rasheed’s more traditional interior, with its floor pillows. Cutouts of the mountains surrounding Kabul hang above, and the lighting stresses the city’s earth tones. 

Mezzo Karin Mushegain brought a grounded expressivity to Mariam; Maureen McKay’s soprano supplied a brighter timbre for Laila, though the vocal part occasionally verged into shrieky terrain. John Moore’s honey-tinged baritone slipped easily into appropriate roughness for the brutal Rasheed; tenor Rafael Moras was a passionate Tariq. Standouts among the supporting singers included Tess Altiveros, doubling as Mariam’s mother and a market woman; Ashraf Sewailamas a sympathetic Hakim; and Andrew Potter, whose distinctive height and booming bass made him instantly notable as a mullah, a soldier and Sharif, who deceives Laila about Tariq’s death. Viswa Subbaramanwas the astute conductor. 

The timing of this world premiere has certainly called attention to current conditions in Afghanistan, particularly as they relate to women and girls, yet the piece itself finally feels artificial and old fashioned, with all the complexities inherent in the region stripped away. Mariam gets her apotheosis—bathed in brilliant white light, she sings an aria rejoicing in her sacrifice as she awaits her execution—but she’s a throwback to the traditional tragic opera heroine who has to die. I was struck by the contrast with Ms. Sadat’s film, in which a professional woman’s effort to stand up to the entrenched web of patriarchal interests ends in her execution—in a way, the killing of her husband is just an excuse to punish her. The film is a serious examination of what it means for a woman in Afghanistan to actually be seen; the opera is basically a sentimental love story that doesn’t push the art form to its limits. 

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 director François Girard’s production of the operatic fairy tale, powerful turns from Piotr Beczała and Christine Goerke compete with a series of questionable design choices.

A scene from Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’

PHOTO: MARTY SOHL/METROPOLITAN OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

New York

The Metropolitan Opera returned from its monthlong hiatus on Sunday afternoon with Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” last seen at the house 17 years ago. Director François Girard conceived this new production as a sequel to his revelatory 2013 “Parsifal”—the connection being that Lohengrin is Parsifal’s son—but while there were visual links, it lacked the consistent vision and devastating impact of the earlier show. Instead, Tim Yip’s sets and costumes rendered the opera dark, claustrophobic and occasionally cheesy.

Based on medieval sources, “Lohengrin” is a fairy tale and a morality play. The virtuous Elsa has been falsely accused by Telramund and his wife, Ortrud, of murdering Elsa’s young brother, the heir to the Duchy of Brabant. King Heinrich orders a trial by combat, and a mysterious knight arrives to fight for Elsa and marry her. She agrees to his condition—she must never ask his name. But after the knight’s victory, the malevolent Ortrud successfully sows doubts, pushing Elsa to ask the forbidden question. His identity as a knight of the Holy Grail revealed, Lohengrin must depart, though the supposedly murdered brother is magically restored.

Other production choices are similarly questionable. Lohengrin first appears at the lip of the oval, with the chorus in the dark below him. It’s a dramatic pose, but dressed in the white shirt and black pants that the Grail knights wore in “Parsifal,” he looks like a bistro waiter. Designer David Finn bathes both Lohengrin and Elsa in blazing white light, which at least provides a contrast with the otherwise sepulchral illumination. For Act 2, we see the cave as if from above—the root-twined ground is now a vertical wall, with the cave behind it—and all the action takes place outside it. Again, the initial image is arresting, but the cave interior is soon blacked out, and the wall is placed so far forward that the stage becomes uncomfortably cramped once the enormous chorus files in. The dispiritingly gloomy bridal chamber of Act 3 is two downstage rock walls; a small vertical opening between them offers only a glimpse of dancing starry galaxies behind. (Peter Flaherty’s projections are one of the show’s better visual elements.) Eight female dancers, awkwardly choreographed by Serge Bennathan, accompany Elsa.

As Lohengrin, Piotr Beczała does not have Heldentenor ping and power, but his delivery was dramatic, eloquent and, most of all, humane—one felt his pity for Elsa in Act 3. As Elsa, Tamara Wilson’s ample soprano alternated effectively between innocent spaciness, steely resolve, and moments of radiance, such as her expressions of absolute trust in her rescuer. The biggest, plushest voice onstage belonged to Christine Goerke, who turned Ortrud’s poisonous manipulations into the opera’s main event. Evgeny Nikitin(Telramund) was vocally colorless; Günther Groissböck (King Heinrich) sounded harsh and edgy; baritone Brian Mulligan brought a fluent ease to the Herald. The chorus often lacked cohesion, a serious flaw in this chorus-heavy opera; perhaps they were too focused on their complex color-switching. Four onstage trumpeters added flourish, while in the pit Yannick Nézet-Séguin was a sensitive accompanist—no drowning out of the singers—and effective orchestral sculptor. The ethereal pianissimos were a special pleasure.

Mr. Girard’s minimalist directing for the most part left the storytelling to the set and the music. He did, however, have Ms. Goerke skulk around the stage during Act 1 and, during the prelude to Act 3, perform some extra sorcery to make sure that Elsa would get the job done. Perhaps this was a way to mitigate the opera’s essentially sexist premise (Elsa’s weakness wrecks everything), and it certainly set up the bridal-chamber scene, which Ms. Wilson played like a zombie propelled by outside forces. However, neither the political motivations nor the Christian vs. pagan themes of the opera coalesced into a coherent narrative, and the treatment of the human story remained cursory at best, with only Mr. Beczała’s compassion and Ms. Goerke’s venom shining through the gloom.

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). 

Composer and librettist Kate Soper’s inventive, uneven adaptation of a 13th-century French poem at Long Beach Opera explores the messiness of romantic love.

Laurel Irene and Lucas Steele

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 21, 2023 6:11 pm ET

San Pedro, Calif.

‘Le Roman de la Rose,” a 13th-century, 21,000-line poem written in Old French, is an allegorical anatomization of love, with forays into numerous other fields, including astronomy and predestination. The composer Kate Soper has cherry-picked elements from this exhaustive compendium, added new ones, and adapted the tale into her eccentric but basically operatic “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its world premiere by the Long Beach Opera at the Warner Grand Theatre on Saturday. Though wildly imaginative and studded with ingenious musical effects, “Rose” doesn’t jell into a coherent evening. 

The opera’s text is wide-ranging, including snippets of the original French version (mostly from the God of Love); Ms. Soper’s modern interpretations of the poem’s themes; and rose-centered verses by Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and others. Spoken dialogue is often used for zingers, such as Lady Reason’s “There is no such thing as ‘sad music’!” or the Lover’s bewildered “Wait . . . does that mean I want to have sex with a plant?” With nearly 2 1/2 hours of music and dialogue, the piece feels long and repetitive, overly reliant on words, particularly spoken ones, to make its points.

Bernardo Bermudez, Phillip Bullock, Tiffany Townsend and Tivoli Treloar (front)

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

This is ironic, given Ms. Soper’s fertile musical imagination and wit. The combatants have distinctive musical identities: The God of Love often veers into his falsetto range, and there is reverb on his singing (everyone is miked); while Lady Reason, prone to scientific jargon, is accompanied by a vocoder, which creates a robotic underlay for her voice. Shame spouts obscenities in a dizzyingly jagged vocal line against loud and chaotic distortions and instrumentals. The techniques aren’t gimmicky, and Ms. Soper can turn them into comic moments and alluring sequences, such as Lady Reason’s diatribe about how music and love are “twin sicknesses” and her list of alternatives to romantic love, a catchy tune backed by marimba and saxophone. 

Historical forms, such as madrigals, offer the audience a taste of familiarity, though never for long. Ballad duets sung by the Dreamer and the Lover—a sweet one to a text from Shakespeare (“O Mistress Mine”) and a more intense paean taken from Tennyson—are rudely interrupted by Lady Reason and Shame, respectively. Idleness (Tiffany Townsend) and Pleasure (Bernardo Bermudez), the God of Love’s henchmen, duet on a delectable torch song, which is both sincere and a sendup. The orchestral accompaniment, a nine-person ensemble ably led by Christopher Rountree, is also pointed, judiciously allotting string solos, harp riffs, heavy guitar licks, and the Rose Theme itself, an insistent ostinato. 

Anna Schubert and Tivoli Treloar

PHOTO: JORDAN GEIGER

The capable singers were game for the opera’s extended techniques; a standout was Ms. Schubert, who made Lady Reason’s robotic insistence affecting as well as comic, especially in Act 2, when she dresses up—and then strips down—to seduce the Lover into the camp of rationality. Mr. Steele made an appealing narrator, but his voice lacked the warmth that the opera singers could summon, so a lament like “A rose once blown must die,” which concludes Act 1, lost some poignancy. 

The set, designed by Prairie T. Trivuth, suggested minimal resources—white walls, a few plants, and doorframes hung with colored streamers could only hint at a dream pleasure garden. The rose itself, marooned on a platform in the middle of the audience, remained stubbornly out of reach until the Lover secured it in Act 2 and then dismembered its paper petals. Molly Irelan’s costumes relied heavily on bright colors and shimmery lamé; Pablo Santiago’s lighting was unsubtle, going from flat to lurid pink or orange in an instant. Director James Darrahworked hard to shape the opera into a narrative arc, but the form resisted his efforts. For all its invention, “Rose” came across as an exercise in cleverness. 

Ms. Soper ventures regularly into these waters. Her witty vaudeville chamber piece, “Here Be Sirens,” for female trio and tortured piano, produced in New York in 2014, similarly plumbed old texts and mythologies, but was tighter and more effective. Her new chamber opera, “The Hunt,” in which three virgins, passing time in a meadow, await the appearance of a unicorn, will have its premiere at New York’s Miller Theatre in October. But exhilarating as it is to channel archaic lore into modern dress, the operatic form itself demands theatrical consistency that goes beyond adroit amusement. 

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

This year’s 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).