Last May, I covered the launch of Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony’s concert presentation of Wagner’s Ring cycle with performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. I returned recently to attend the continuation of their bold adventure with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Here’s my report for Classical Voice North America:
DALLAS — Having left Brünnhilde deep in slumber at the end of Die Walküre last May, Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony returned to awaken her this month with their continuation of the Ring in concert at their Meyerson Symphony Center home. They presented Siegfried on Oct. 5 and Götterdämmerung on Oct. 8, thereby scaling an Everest normally considered the domain of opera companies. Between Oct. 13 and 20, the adventure will be repeated — this time with the usual interval of just a few days separating the four operas.
I reported for Musical America on the much-anticipated return to San Diego Symphony’s downtown home in a former cinema palace. Acoustical and architectural renovations have yielded a game-changing space for the orchestra — and the city — according to music director Rafael Payare:
SAN DIEGO—The San Diego Symphony’s concert on September 28 wasn’t just another opening….
Seattle Symphony violinist Elisa Barston (l) and soprano Ellaina Lewis (r), featured soloists in Philharmonia Northwest’s inaugural concert of the season
Seattle-based Philharmonia Northwest opens its season — and introduces its new music director, Michael Wheatley — on Sunday 13 October with a program titled Origin Story. The concert takes place at 2pm at the Shorecrest Performing Arts Center.
Wheatley has chosen four works central to his musical identity, beginning with Wojciech Kilar’s celebration of the folk traditions of Poland’s Tatra Mountains in Orawa. Seattle Symphony violinist Elisa Barston will be the soloist in Dvořák’s Romance in F minor and Ravel’s dazzling Tzigane.
The second half of the program will present soprano Ellaina Lewis in her Philharmonia Northwest debut as the soloist in Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, the last of the so-called Wunderhorn symphonies. Lewis, who is known locally for her appearances in Seattle Opera’s Blue and Porgy and Bess.
Following the concert, Michael Wheatley will appear in a Q&A talk-back with the audience.
SAN FRANCISCO—It was at the turn of the millennium that composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley adapted The Handmaid’s Tale into an opera. These days, however, their version of the dystopian novel Margaret Atwood published in 1985 seems ominously closer to an opera ripped from the headlines than a cautionary tale …
Julia Bullock is the 2024–25 season Artist in Residence at Cal Performances. Her first appearance in that capacity is in a collaboration with her colleagues in the American Modern Opera Company (also known as AMOC*, of which she is a founding member) for a boldly original staged production of Messiaen’s Harawi, which was premiered in the summer of 2022 at the Festival Aix-en-Provence and subsequently toured across Europe. The performance takes place on 27 September at Zellerbach Hall.
I wrote about this extraordinary artist and her fascination with Harawi for Cal Performances:
The first time Julia Bullock heard Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle from 1945, she recalls that both the poetry and the music “shook me to a fundamental core … even though I didn’t fully grasp the depths of the content and the references on first listen….”
In the years since Garth Greenwell published his 2016 debut novel, What Belongs to You, the 46-year-old novelist, poet, critic, and teacher has established himself as one of the most distinguished American writers at work today.
Garthwell, who at one point studied voice at the Eastman School of Music, is deeply knowledgable about opera and also writes fascinating and highly worthwhile music criticism. His own work will now be the subject of literary and music criticism alike, thanks to composer David T. Little’s adaptation of What Belongs to You to the opera stage.
Little adapted his own libretto from Garthwell’s text and has collaborated with the legendary choreographer Mark Morris as stage director and conductor Alan Pierson to reframe the novel for the opera medium.
What Belongs to Me “tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know,” says Garthwell. Adds Little: “The story is specific and personal, but the experience Greenwell describes is universal: the search for self and the desire to belong amidst loneliness and enduring heartbreak.”
In his New York Timespreview, Joshua Barone describes Little’s musical response to the material: “There are flashes of rock, but it is largely inspired by Monteverdi and Schubert, as well as John Dowland, Giovanni Valentini and Gérard Grisey, taking cues from the Renaissance through the 20th century. There is even some Britten. Little called it all ‘a constellation of influences’ shaped by the material.”
“At its most shocking, Little’s music calls on the instrumentalists of Alarm Will Sound to sing, acting as a chorus to embody the hustler Mitko and the protagonist’s father during two pivotal, terrifying moments.”
Simone Menezes and her adventurous Ensemble K have created a concert project using a new chamber arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade music, into which are woven excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights, ancient love poetry, and newly written dialogue to provide a contemporary look at the legendary character.
Boulez Saal in Berlin is presenting the live performance premiere on 26 September, in cooperation with Cartier.
I interviewed Simone Menezes and translator Yasmine Searlefor the program book. The project has also been released as an album — more info here.
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.”
In Vienna’s Leopoldstadt, 150 years ago today, was born one of the 20th century’s defining figures, Arnold Schoenberg. The Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin is paying homage with an all-Schoenberg program this evening by the Boulez Ensemble, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, and Pierre lunaire (with Mojca Erdmann as the “reciter”) — the latter having been first performed in 1912 just a few km from the Boulez Saal.
Here’s my program essay (you can find my colleague Wolfgang Stähr’s excellent contribution in German here):
It was exactly 150 years ago, on September 13, that Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born in Vienna. (His birthday fell on a Sunday in 1874, though the triskaidekaphobia-stricken composer did die on Friday 13th nearly 77 years later.) Yet even from this distance in time, Schoenberg’s name continues to strike its own superstitious fear among those conditioned to reject his music even without listening to it.
Tazewell Thompson’s “Jubilee,” about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, will have its world premiere at Seattle Opera Oct. 12-26. (Jeffrey Henson Scales)
My picks for classical events in Seattle in the fall:
No matter how many other leisure-time options compete for our attention, there really is nothing to replace the connection that happens at a live performance. Fortunately for classical music lovers, local organizations are busting out a new season of enticing variety, from early music innovators to contemporary composers inspired by the findings of science. continue
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 