Bridges’s Josefa, a Mexican woman who receives a death sentence from a kangaroo court, is fiercely dignified, and entrancing in the lullaby “Ven esta noche amado, querido. Tines sings before being walked offstage with a gun to his back. With a penetrating bite, he delivers the setting of text from Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: “The Fourth of July is yours not mine,” Mr. The opera was premiered in San Francisco on November 21, 2017. The San Francisco Opera commissioned the work jointly with Dallas Opera, the Dutch National Opera and Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The most bitter music of the evening is reserved for the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, as the doomed former slave Ned Peters. Girls of the Golden West is an opera in two acts with music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars. The libretto texts are drawn from first hand accounts by Mark Twain, newspaper articles, letters, journals, original Gold Rush song lyrics and political speeches and slogans. (Genuinely tender is the baritone Elliot Madore, as Ramón.) Ryan McKinny’s bass-baritone is terrifyingly masculine, and Hye Jung Lee, as the sympathetic prostitute Ah Sing, has an enchantingly delicate soprano voice capable of shocking power. Girls of the Golden West takes place in mining camps in the Sierra Mountains during the California Gold Rush of the early 1850’s. The tenor Paul Appleby, smooth and tender in fare like Mozart, has immersed himself in the role of Joe Cannon with a Missouri twang and desperate fury. Sellars’s staging and John Heginbotham’s choreography.)īut elsewhere, this score brings out some of the most inspired performances you’ll find among its cast of young stars. (It’s not promising, though, that it was also limp and lazy in acting out Mr. The Dutch National Opera chorus, which sang with unfortunate imprecision all night, may still be settling into these passages. Adams has written some of the most sophisticated and stirring choral music in modern opera here, he most often saves it for new settings of old folk songs that take a chilling turn from boisterous to sinister. Adams also suggests Weill and Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” a similar opera about money, rowdiness and savagery. But, with an accordion and a delightful taste of the lowbrow, Mr. Girls of the Golden West takes place in mining camps in the Sierra Mountains during the California Gold Rush of the early 1850’s. It has the propulsive momentum that runs through most of his music, and playful touches of Americana like galloping rhythms and expansive fifths. Adams’s score, played with exactitude and enthusiasm by the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Backstage workings are clearly visible period costumes are juxtaposed with red Solo cups inside a bar with the appearance of a roadside dive somewhere in the Sierra Nevada.Ĭlose listeners may also hear some Brecht in Mr. But by turning to naturalism, he undercuts his original, still-present concept of a California history pageant à la Brecht - especially because the Brechtian set design, by David Gropman, is nearly unchanged. Sellars’s solution, with a slightly altered staging in this revival, is to put more bodies onstage, to have characters spend less time addressing the audience and more time interacting with one another. Sellars's previous collaborations with Adams have included premiere productions of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic (for which Sellars also wrote the libretto).Mr. According to Sellars, "These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American." Adams wrote, "To be able to set to music the authentic voices of these people, whether from their letters or their songs or from newspaper accounts from their time, is a great privilege for me." Sellars, who also directed the opera, conceived the libretto while doing research for a production of Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (based on David Belasco's 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West), which also deals with the gold rush period. The libretto is also sourced from other literature of the period, including newspaper articles and the writings of Mark Twain. Clappe published the letters under the pen name Dame Shirley. The opera is inspired by the 1851/1852 letters of Louise Clappe, who lived for a year and a half in the mining settlement of Rich Bar (now Diamondville, California) during the California Gold Rush.
0 kommentar(er)
