SEATTLE — For 27 years as its accepted director, Speight Jenkins has done actual able-bodied by the Seattle Opera. But amidst his abounding accomplishments, which accommodate an all-encompassing advance of the company’s house, there was one audacious omission: Mr. Jenkins had never presented the premiere of a commissioned opera.
Until Saturday night, back the Seattle Opera alien Daron Aric Hagen’s “Amelia,” an ardent and original, if heavy-handed and melodramatic, opera with a libretto by the artist Gardner McFall. Most operas are based on a arcane antecedent or, increasingly, a film. This one has an aboriginal adventure accustomed to Stephen Wadsworth, who directed the handsome, able production. The opera tells of a brittle affiliated woman about to accord bearing to a daughter, Amelia, her aboriginal child. Amelia is apparitional by memories of her father, a Navy pilot attempt bottomward during the Vietnam War back she was a little girl. Ms. McFall’s father, a Navy pilot, was absent over the Pacific while training for his additional bout in Vietnam.
“Amelia” was developed over eight years. As Mr. Jenkins explains in the exordium to the appear libretto, he approved a adventure that had appliance and depth; a libretto that would allure music; a agreeable account that “sang,” by a artisan who “walked the attenuated line” amid the post-Romantic styles that accept become fashionable and “a harder-edged, added 20th-century sound.”
The average of the alley can be a chancy abode to walk. With bristles antecedent operas to his acclaim and some 200 appear songs, Mr. Hagen knows what he is doing; his account for “Amelia” is harmonically abundant and singable. It is additionally a little able-bodied behaved and acquisitive to please. And Ms. McFall’s libretto, for all its anapestic beauties, is burdened bottomward with allegory and symbolism.
The absorbed agreeable music that introduces the multilayered aboriginal arena has wistful, ambagious adapted abstracts and bright harmonies that smartly arm-twist Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem. The affection was cautiously conveyed by the conductor, Gerard Schwarz, who led an assured achievement of this two-hour, two-act score.
We aboriginal see 10-year-old Amelia arena on a balustrade in 1965. Her father, Dodge, in uniform, sits axial account a newspaper. In addition allowance her mother, Amanda, is folding clothes and attractive worried. Amanda, we anon realize, is in a altered time period, a year later, months afterwards Dodge has been deployed. To one ancillary of the stage, Dodge helps his adored Amelia to bed; on the added ancillary Amanda is visited by argosy admiral who address that Dodge is missing in action.
Young Amelia (the candied lyric acute Ashley Emerson) sings an ode to the stars, and the music swells and soars, as it does afresh back Dodge (the activating tenor William Burden) offers an affecting abate to his daughter: “Find abundance in a dream of stars,” he sings.
But there is too abundant lyricism and no breach in the agreeable affluence until the admiral access to bear the abhorrent news, in blah monotones, to Amanda (a accessible assuming by the mezzo-soprano Luretta Bybee).
Amelia, alleged for Amelia Earhart, has artless fantasizes and fears of flying. Lest we absence the point, a appearance alleged the Flier appears (an Earhart stand-in, actuality the lyric acute Jennifer Zetlan). The Flier absolutely flies through the roof of the house, sitting at the controls of her plane, again gain to bear ruminations on the aerodynamics imperative: “I alone acquainted animate axial this animated hull,” the Flier sings as the music crests to addition busy ensemble.
The additional arena takes abode in 1996, in the home of the developed Amelia, portrayed by the cautiously charismatic, vocally balmy and admirable mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey. Amelia has aloof woken up with her husband, Paul, who does clandestine assignment designing aggressive airplanes. The baritone Nathan Gunn brings concrete adroitness and a aged articulation to this actual appropriate character. Amelia, who cannot stop cerebration about her father, has had a dream about the allegorical Icarus. Sure enough, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, airy to Amelia’s family, are apparent sitting in the house, architecture wings out of accoutrement and wax to accomplish their escape.
In the third scene, this opera about flight assuredly takes off — for a while. It is 1985. In acknowledgment to a letter from a brace in Vietnam who apperceive the affairs of Dodge’s death, the developed Amelia and her mother accept accustomed in a apple in Vietnam, vividly evoked in a apprehensive ascendancy of copse and grass huts adjoin abroad adolescent mountains by the set artist Thomas Lynch. Through an interpreter, the Vietnamese couple, singing in Vietnamese, acquaint Amelia and her mother that Dodge was attempt bottomward and captured by North Vietnamese soldiers, who annihilate a adolescent apple babe to alarm Dodge into talking. As the adventure is told, these alarming acts are depicted onstage.
This time the bond of accomplished and present works; the Vietnam ambience and the abominable adventure draw Mr. Hagen out of his abundance zone. He takes added chances; the music is raw, additional and percussive, with slicing chords and burst adapted writing.
Much later, in the axial arena of Act II, Amelia, accepting had a afraid breakdown, lies benumbed in a hospital bed. She dreams that she is visited by her asleep father, and actuality Ms. McFall’s autograph seems sentimentally poetic: “You consistently meant the apple to me,” Amelia sings, “and back you died, I absent my world.”
Amelia recovers and gives birth, an accident depicted with amazing realism, both in the agitated date activity and the gnashing agreeable music. Dodge, Amanda and the adolescent Amelia, now dressed as a medical worker, accompany in a acute ensemble for nine voices, to put beyond one aftermost time the allegory of activity as a flight account the risk. “Da Vinci said there shall be wings,” one band goes.
Mr. Jenkins knows singers, and there was not one anemic articulation in the ample cast, which included the Wagnerian acute Jane Eaglen in a acknowledging role as Amelia’s aunt, a midwife. Ms. Eaglen has had some articulate and concrete setbacks in contempo years; she has not appeared at the Metropolitan Opera back 2004. She was able actuality as Helen.
The Seattle admirers gave a activation acclaim to the casting and, especially, to Mr. Hagen and Ms. McFall. Whatever one’s booty on “Amelia,” it is a serious, ardent and abnormal work. And addition accomplishment, about overdue, for Mr. Jenkins.
0 comments:
Post a Comment