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Arts writing by Thomas May

September 19, 2024 • 1:23 am Comments Off on New Opera by Mary D. Watkins: “Is This America?”

New Opera by Mary D. Watkins: “Is This America?”

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.”  

Filed under: American opera, music news, new opera

September 7, 2024 • 4:39 am Comments Off on “Last Days” by Oliver Leith

“Last Days” by Oliver Leith

For Gramophone‘s September issue, I reviewed Oliver Leith’s Last Days, based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film riffing on Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

‘A place where flecks of magic are chipped or hacked from mundanity – where the familiar and domestic are heightened or warped’ is how Oliver Leith sums up what he wanted to convey with Last Days, his debut opera…

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, new opera

July 23, 2024 • 9:35 am Comments Off on How “Jubilee” Is Bringing Spirituals to the Opera Stage

How “Jubilee” Is Bringing Spirituals to the Opera Stage

Tazewell Thompson (photo: Jeffrey Henson Scales)

My preview of Seattle Opera’s world premiere of Jubilee, created and directed by the extraordinary Tazewell Thompson, has been posted at Opera Now. Jubilee will run on 12-26 October 2024 at McCaw Hall in Seattle.

In 1903, in his classic The Souls of Black Folk, the influential sociologist and activist W E B Du Bois famously declared that the African American spiritual ‘stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas’. Du Bois singled out a group of performers for their role in bringing widespread attention to this legacy: ‘The Fisk Jubilee Singers sang the slave songs so deeply into the world’s heart that it can never wholly forget them again’….
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Filed under: American artists, commissions, new opera, Seattle Opera

May 16, 2024 • 8:32 am Comments Off on “Before It All Goes Dark”

“Before It All Goes Dark”

Jake Heggie, composer of “Before It All Goes Dark,” a one-act opera based on the real-life story of an American veteran who learns he is heir to artworks looted by the Nazis. (James Niebuhr)

My Seattle Times preview of Jake Heggie’s latest stagework, a one-act chamber opera commissioned by Music of Remembrance that will be premiered this Sunday 18 May:

Jake Heggie can never predict where he will find the topic for his next opera. But the American composer has an instinct for recognizing when he has alighted on a story that will send his imagination into overdrive. ..

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Filed under: Jake Heggie, Music of Remembrance, new opera

May 26, 2023 • 12:06 pm Comments Off on Salvatore Sciarrino’s Venere e Adone

Salvatore Sciarrino’s Venere e Adone

Staatsoper Hamburg is presenting the world premiere production of Salvatore Sciarrino‘s 15th opera, Venere e Adone, 28 May-8 June.

Drawn from Ovid’s retelling of the myth of Venus and Adonis in Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Sciarrino’s new opera is a meditation on love and death. The cast features American countertenor Randall Scotting in the role of Adonis, who is pursued by Venus, the goddess of love, sung by soprano Layla Claire.  Staatsoper Hamburg’s General Music Director, Kent Nagano, conducts and Georges Delnon directs.

“Adonis is probably the liveliest character in the whole opera,” says Scotting. “He is youthful, boisterous, and concerned only with hunting and making love. The music Sciarrino composed for him really embodies these qualities, especially in his big hunting scene. There are aspects of the opera everyone will recognize, but it also feels new and relevant today.”

an atmospheric and inventive opera that often surrounds the audience in the nuanced sounds of the natural world.  Mimicking the cycle of life and death, sounds arise from nothing and just as quickly disappear, leaving the listener engaged, interested, and waiting on the edge of their seats for the next surprise.  ‘Adonis is probably the liveliest character in the whole opera.  He is youthful, boisterous, and concerned only with hunting and making love.  The music Sciarrino composed for him really embodies these qualities, especially in his big hunting scene.  There are aspects of the opera everyone will recognize, but it also feels new and relevant today,’ said Scotting of his role in the opera.

From the Staatsoper Hamburg site:

“Sounds from the silence. They come closer, move and dissolve into darkness. Their nature is being and non-being, coming into being and passing away – the same as all living beings in the eternal illusion of life and death. They are sounds as they surround people, a music close to nature. They tell of mythical figures: Venus and Mars, who once begat Cupid. Cupid, who is now to avenge his betrayed father. The beautiful Adonis, whose love for Venus is his undoing. And above all: the monster who knows no affection, no love, no hate, least of all himself. It waits, unknown and deadly, maltreated by the voices of the world. An ancient story winds through the thicket of mythological entanglements and finds new paths. Who will triumph, love or death?”

Filed under: music news, new opera

May 16, 2023 • 7:45 am Comments Off on Music of Remembrance at 25

Music of Remembrance at 25

Mina Miller, Music of Remembrance founder and artistic director. (Ben VanHouten)

My story for the Seattle Times about Music of Remembrance at 25, which will present a double bill of one-act operas by Jake Heggie this weekend:

Mina Miller is convinced that music can make a difference in the world.

“I am the child of parents whose entire families were annihilated in the Holocaust, so I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory — of the stories that need to be told…”

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Filed under: commissions, Jake Heggie, Music of Remembrance, new opera, Seattle Times

March 21, 2023 • 1:09 pm Comments Off on Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit with Seattle Modern Orchestra

Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit with Seattle Modern Orchestra

Following the triumph of her opera The Romance of the Rose, which received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera in February, Seattle Modern Orchestra presents Kate Soper’s evening-long chamber music theater work Ipsa Dixit (“She, herself, said it…”) at Cornish College of the Arts’ Raisbeck Auditorium this weekend: Friday, March 24 and Saturday, March 25, both at 8PM.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Soper explores the intersections of language and music and has been described by Alex Ross as “a 21-century masterpiece … a ninety-minute tour de force …call it philosophy-opera.” Zachary Wolfe praised The Romance of the Rose‘s “ability to stick in the mind and soul.”

SMO’s performances will feature local soprano Maria Männistö alongside musicians Sarah Pyle (flute), Eric Rynes (violin), and Bonnie Whiting (percussion). This dramatic showcase will be directed by C. Neil Parsons and includes immersive lighting design. 

Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and by The New Yorker for her “limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style.” A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Koussevitzky Foundation, and has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, and Yarn/Wire. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Camargo Foundation, the Macdowell Colony, Tanglewood, and Royaumont, among others.

Praised by the New York Times for her “lithe voice and riveting presence,” Soper performs frequently as a new music soprano. She has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the New York City-based MATA festival and Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series. As a non-fiction and creative writer, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly, PAJ, the Massachusetts Review, Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies.

Soper is a co-director and performer for Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of Music at Smith College. http://www.katesoper.com

Founded in 2010, Seattle Modern Orchestra (SMO) is the only large ensemble in the Pacific Northwest solely dedicated to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Led by co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley, SMO commissions and premieres new works from an international lineup of composers, in addition to presenting important pieces from the contemporary repertoire that are rarely if ever heard by Seattle audiences. The ensemble “operates at that exciting cusp between old and new, between tradition and innovation” (Vanguard Seattle) curating new sounds and experiences for concert goers in the region.

SMO provides audiences with performances of the best in contemporary chamber and orchestral music, and develops radio talks, lectures, and other forms of outreach in an accessible and inviting format all designed to expand the listener’s appreciation and awareness of the music of today. https://www.seattlemodernorchestra.org

Filed under: Kate Soper, new opera, Seattle Modern Orchestra

March 6, 2023 • 10:08 pm Comments Off on Tod Machover’s Overstory Overture

Tod Machover’s Overstory Overture

The composer Tod Machover and ths soprano Joyce DiDonato. Machover’s chamber opera, “Overstory Overture,” stars DiDonato and is an adaptation of Richard Powers’s novel.Credit…Alex Hodor-Lee for The New York Times

Here’s my latest New York Times story on the latest adventure of tech-forward composer Tod Machover, which receives its world premiere Tuesday evening at Alice Tully Hall and features Joyce DiDonato and the Sejong Soloists under Earl Lee:

Musical themes abound in the work of the novelist Richard Powers, often intertwined with science and social issues. The parallel decoding of Bach and DNA (“The Gold Bug Variations”), the saga of an interracial family of classical performers unfolding against the events of the Civil Rights era (“The Time of Our Singing”): A signature of Powers’s novels is the virtuosity with which he weaves these strands into narratives that seem both surprising and inevitable….

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Filed under: new opera, New York Times, Tod Machover

March 1, 2023 • 8:38 am Comments Off on A Thousand Splendid Suns Dawns at Seattle Opera

A Thousand Splendid Suns Dawns at Seattle Opera


Cast members in A Thousand Splendid Suns at Seattle Opera. Photo credit: Sunny Martini

The moving operatic transformation of Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitvakos had its world premiere over the weekend at Seattle Opera in a powerful production directed by Roya Sadat. I reviewed the opening night performance for Musical America:

Soon after reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, Sheila Silver sensed that the story’s combination of tragedy and endurance has an archetypal, larger-than-life quality — exactly what opera excels at expressing. It’s a terrible irony that the work’s lengthy genesis has actually made this story of the oppression of women even timelier than when Silver first considered the idea over a decade ago….[see below]

a-thousand-splendid-suns-march-2023-review-as-printedDownload

Filed under: Musical America, new opera, review, Seattle Opera

January 31, 2023 • 10:34 am Comments Off on A Thousand Splendid Suns at Seattle Opera

A Thousand Splendid Suns at Seattle Opera

In just a few weeks, Seattle Opera will unveil a new opera that has been many years in the making: an adaptation of Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini‘s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the American composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitsakos. Hossein’s fiction has inspired adaptations for the screen and the spoken stage — and even a graphic novel. But this marks the first time an opera has been made from his work. Seattle Opera’s production also presents the pioneering Afghan filmmaker Roya Sadat’s debut as an opera director. 

I wrote a preview feature for Opera Now, which appears in the January 2023 issue:

The fate of Afghanistan and oppression of women are two phenomena that have acquired a topical urgency in today’s world. Sheila Silver has been immersed in these subjects since 2009, when she first encountered Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns. She was struck by the overwhelming power of Hosseini’s narrative, which unfolds in Afghanistan between the 1960s and 2002. Above all, she sensed an operatic intensity in the bond that develops between the two protagonists, Mariam and Laila, as they struggle to cope in a milieu of abuse and domestic violence. The strength of that bond is what makes the shattering sacrifice at the opera’s climax possible. 

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Filed under: commissions, new opera, Seattle Opera

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