The New York premiere of “Music for New Bodies” at Lincoln Center as part of the Run AMOC* Festival at Summer for the City. (Lawrence Sumulong / Courtesy of Lincoln Center)
On November 1, Meany Center for the Performing Arts presents Matthew Aucoin’sMusic for New Bodies, a “vocal symphony” based on the poetry of Jorie Graham and staged by Peter Sellars — in other words, not to be missed. I spoke with Aucoin about New Bodies for The Seattle Times:
“The voice of the bottom of the ocean. The voice of the medicines moving through your veins. The voice of the core of the Earth.”
Composer Matthew Aucoin names them like a spell — presences that inhabit “Music for New Bodies,” his 70-minute vocal symphony that will receive its West Coast premiere at the University of Washington’s Meany Center on Nov. 1. ..
Some thoughts on the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams, published by Opera Now:
With its arrival on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, Antony and Cleopatra reaches its most convincing form to date. John Adams’s newest opera has already had productions by co-commissioners San Francisco Opera (2022) and Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu (2023). As is customary with Adams, each outing has brought revisions — most conspicuously in trimming the score, a process he has continued for the Met version….
This weekend, Mary D. Watkins‘s new opera Is This America?receives its premiere at Dorchester’s The Strand Theatre in a production presented by the activist performing arts company White Snake Projects(WSP), which was founded by Cerise Lim Jacobs. The 85-year-old Watkins has blazed the trail for other Black women composers in the field of opera.
This new, 90-minute-long, fully-staged opera celebrates the life and legacy of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and features performances by the Massachusetts-based Victory Players chamber orchestra alongside a small ensemble of singers; mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel (Met Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago) will create the lead role of Hamer. Haitian American queer woman Pascale Florestal stage directs. Tickets available here.
(Content Warning: Is This America? contains very strong, racially-loaded language, and references to violence.)
Is This America? brings to life one of the most turbulent periods in American history to tell the story of Hamer, the great Mississippi activist who galvanized the registration of Black voters in her home state despite overwhelming odds, including death threats, beatings, and rejections by her own constituency.
The title of the work is taken from the iconic speech that Hamer made 60 years ago before the 1964 Democratic National Convention, when she petitioned the Convention to give her newly formed political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), seats at the Convention and to recognize the MFDP as the legitimate representative of the people of Mississippi. A year later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices.
Is This America? is 15 years in the making. A chamber orchestra version was workshopped by the Oakland Opera Company in 2009. The first concert version was performed by the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts in 2014. This WSP production marks the second Watkins premiere with the company; it commissioned her virtual opera I Am A Lifer, which is part of Death by Life (2021), the Company’s musical response to the death of George Floyd.
“My goal is to show the dignity and strength with which Fannie Lou Hamer and her fellow civil rights workers carried themselves in spite of the terror and dehumanizing treatment they were subjected to and to convey the great spirit of love that bound them together,” says Watkins. “Their story deserves to be told in a grand way – a way befitting the souls of the people who marched in the streets in the hot sun with such determination, singing through their fears while their opponents spat upon them, beat them, kicked them, called them vile names, terrorized their families, and imprisoned them. Is This America? is my salute to these beautiful, courageous people. I chose to tell Fannie Lou Hamer’s story as an opera because I wanted to use an art form that would capture the power and sweep of her life. I wanted to give full voice to this amazing African-American female political leader.”
Michael Mayes (David), Brenton Ryan (CM), and Greer Grimsley (Paul) in The Righteous; photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
I reviewed Santa Fe Opera’s The Righteous for Musical America. The latest in the company’s distinguished history of commissions, The Righteous is an ambitious collaboration between composer Gregory Spears and poet-librettist Tracy K. Smith. The opera unfolds across the span of the Reagan era and features a large cast to tell the story of a charismatic Southwestern preacher who gets elected as state governor:
Damien Geter’s much-anticipated new opera American Apollo will be unveiled this weekend at Des Moines Metro Opera. The librettist is Lila Palmer and revolves around Thomas Eugene McKeller, a Black hotel worker who became a model for the painter John Singer Sargent.
“As a work of historical fiction, the opera imagines the story behind Sargent’s spare, nude portrait and sensual sketches of McKeller, whose image was transformed by Sargent into white-skinned Greek gods featured prominently in murals throughout Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Themes of erasure, the white gaze, and the intimate relationship between the two men are explored in this powerful new work,” according to DMMO’s website.
In the cast are baritone Justin Austin as McKeller, tenor William Burden as John Singer Sargent, soprano Mary Dunleavy as Isabella Stewart Gardner, with David Neely conducting and Shaun Patrick Tubbs directing.
Writes Geter in his composer’s note: “As a composer, one of my goals is to help bring to life stories that have long been ignored in the traditional canon, and more largely, across the spectrum of human experience. It is safe to say that many of these unknown or forgotten stories belong to Black people and other folks of color who, because of white supremacy, have not been represented to the fullest extent with regards to the vast array of personalities, emotions, and multi-dimensions that we see in real-life people. Stereotypes tend to run amok in opera when it comes to people of color. ..”
The European premiere of John Adams’s most recent opera at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona marked the debut of soprano Julia Bullock in the role specifically written for her. I reviewed this remarkable production for Classical Voice North America:
BARCELONA — Though this is a city known for its proud celebration of culture, it still came as a delightful surprise to be greeted at the Barcelona-El Prat Airport by posters announcing the Gran Teatre del Liceu production of John Adams’Antony and Cleopatra.…
This week the Nashville Symphony and Giancarlo Guerrero present the world premiere of Hannibal Lokumbe‘s boundary-breaking The Jonah People: A Legacy of Struggle and Triumph. This bold and uncompromising opera draws on Hannibal’s own family history and the biblical parable of Jonah and the Whale to tell and epic, visionary story that honors the countless Africans stolen from their homeland as well as their descendants through the generations.
You can find my program guide to this extraordinary collaborative work here:
At 2pm ET, Juilliard Opera is presenting the amazing opera Proving Up, with music by Missy Mazzoli and a libretto by Royce Vavrek based on the short story by Karen Russell. Mary Birnbaum is the director, and Steven Osgood conducts.
Guadalupe Paz as Frida Kahlo and Alfredo Daza as Diego Rivera; photo credit: Karli Cadel
My review of the world premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank’s new opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which sets a libretto by Nilo Cruz, is available here at Musical America (no paywall through the weekend):
SAN DIEGO — At the center of El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego), Frida Kahlo decides to cross over from the underworld and return to the realm of the living. It’s a conceit that cries out for operatic treatment, and composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz oblige with an inspired fusion of music and poetry.
Here’s another premiere that was forced to cancel: Awakenings, the latest opera from Tobias Picker, which has been scheduled to open at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Its source is the fascinating book by Oliver Sacks — who had been a good friend of Picker — about those who survived an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica in the 1920s.
Sacks drew on his work with this patients in the 1960s for Awakenings, originally published in 1973, which prompted W.H. Auden’s verdict that the book is a masterpiece. Harold Pinter was inspired by Awakenings to write his play A Kind of Alaska; a movie of the Sacks book was made in 1990, starring Robin Williams.
The writer and physician Aryeh Lev Stollman, who is Picker’s husband, wrote the libretto. The world premiere production was to have been directed by James Robinson and conducted by Roberto Kalb, with Jarrett Porter creating the role of Dr. Oliver Sacks.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 