Abdullah, Kazem (1979- )

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    Review: In Chicago, an Opera Triptych Reaches for Connection

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    Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

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      Review: ‘Castor and Patience’ Premieres at Cincinnati Opera

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      “Castor and Patience,” a work by Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith with an intense yet relaxed score, premieres at Cincinnati Opera.CINCINNATI — Brett Dean’s tumultuous adaptation of “Hamlet” played at the Metropolitan Opera two months ago, but it is still ringing in my ears.Almost literally: It is a loud, chaotic score, mustering warring batteries of percussion and audience-encircling electronic effects, complex polyrhythms and virtuosic extended techniques. In all these qualities, it stands for a large swath of contemporary operas (some good, some bad) defined by being overwhelming. They are hurricanes of shock-and-awe sound, anarchic and bewildering.The music of Gregory Spears — whose sensitive “Castor and Patience” was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and premiered here on Thursday evening — is the opposite.Warm, steady, restrained, securely tonal, the orchestras in his works tend to serenely repeat small cells of material, without strange instruments or strange uses of conventional ones.So self-effacing is Spears’s style that the somber drone at the beginning of this new piece emerges without pause from the ensemble’s tuning, as if by accident. The overall effect is of a smoothly unfurling carpet — reminiscent of Philip Glass in its unhurried yet wrenching harmonic progressions — atop which voices soar.And soar, and soar. The agonies and pleasures of “Castor and Patience,” running through July 30 at the Corbett Theater at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, are like those of a less densely orchestrated Puccini. As in “Tosca,” “La Bohème” or “Madama Butterfly,” unabashedly, even shamelessly effusive vocal lines draw us poignantly close to characters in a rending situation: here, a Black family riven by disagreement over whether to sell part of a precious plot of land.Precious, because purchased with hard-won freedom. The action takes place on an unnamed island off the coast of the American South that was settled by former slaves after the Civil War. Among their descendants, Castor left and moved north with his parents; his cousin, Patience, stayed put with hers.Decades later, both are adults with children of their own. It is 2008, and Castor — like so many people in the years leading up to the Great Recession — has borrowed far beyond his means. The only way he sees out of financial ruin is to return to the island and sell part of his inherited stake, likely to a white buyer intent on building seaside condos; that is an outcome that the tradition-minded Patience cannot abide.It is a battle between old ways and new, past and future, leaving and staying, overseen by the ghosts of ancestors and the lasting reverberations of their oppression. (“Living means remembering,” as one character sings.) This narrative ground is familiar — gentrification versus preservation, with echoes of “A Raisin in the Sun” — and it could have been simply overwrought.But Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, has produced a libretto as unshowy as Spears’s score. An original story rather than one of the transformations of existing material that currently clog the opera world, her text is largely prose, and never purple; modest arias arise naturally out of the dialogue. Inflamed by aching music — the orchestra of 38 is conducted with calm confidence by Kazem Abdullah — the result is passionate, but also clear, focused and humble.Spears’s two most prominent earlier operas were both accomplished. “Paul’s Case” (2013), based on a Willa Cather story about a restless, dandyish young man, had the pertly stylized formality of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” That neoclassical (even neo-medieval) feel extended to the more naturalistic “Fellow Travelers” (2016), set amid the anti-gay witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the lyricism that was tautly, almost unbearably heightened in “Paul’s Case” felt a bit repetitive and listless over the broader canvas that followed.Phillip Bullock, foreground, with, clockwise from top left, Zoie Reams, Victor Ryan Robertson, Amber Monroe and Earl Hazell, in the Cincinnati Opera’s commission, by Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith.Philip GroshongSix years in the making — and two years after the pandemic forced the cancellation of its planned premiere, in honor of Cincinnati Opera’s centennial — “Castor and Patience” is more intense yet more relaxed than either of those. “Paul’s Case” was 80 minutes long, “Fellow Travelers” an hour and 50. The new opera is more than half an hour past that, but it feels less protracted than unhurried, unruffled. You get to know the characters, and to sit with them.That these figures are so vivid is also thanks to a committed cast, led by the baritone Reginald Smith Jr., an anguished Castor, and the soprano Talise Trevigne, delicate but potent as the implacable Patience.Singing with mellow power, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano brought humanity and nuance to Castor’s wife, Celeste, who starts the opera pressuring him to sell but ends up in as much agonized ambivalence as anyone. Raven McMillon and, especially, Frederick Ballentine, bristled — convincing teenagers — as their daughter and son, Ruthie and Judah. Patience’s children, West (Benjamin Taylor) and Wilhelmina (Victoria Okafor), were gentle but stirring guides to the satisfactions of island and family life.Their outpourings are so fervent, the melodies so sweet, that you can find yourself moved nearly to tears by more or less random lines — an accomplishment both impressive and, sometimes, overkill, particularly in the first act. But by the second act, the tension inexorably rising, resistance to a work so openhearted, tender and plain-spoken seems futile. If it’s emotionally manipulative — in the distinguished tradition of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Carlisle Floyd — it’s expertly so.Vita Tzykun’s set stretches the facade of a house across the stage, but leaves the bottom half jagged and cut off, revealing the beams of the foundation and marshy grasses. This is a dreamy netherworld in which characters from the 1860s and 1960s mingle with the 21st century. Kevin Newbury’s production uses some furniture and a few suggestions of shacks to conjure a range of locations on the island. If it’s not entirely evocative — with projections that tend to be murky — it’s at least efficient and straightforward.As are the mechanics of the plot. The conflicts here are as sturdily old-fashioned as in an Arthur Miller play — but, as in Miller’s work, they knot your stomach anyway. Probably unlike the version of this libretto he would have written, however, true tragedy does not strike in Spears and Smith’s telling. Everyone is alive at the end.And the secret that gets revealed near that point isn’t quite a barnburner. But it does offer the real explanation for why Castor’s parents went north — a telling reminder that migrations aren’t just abstract sociological phenomena, but also happen family by family, for individual reasons.There isn’t a clear resolution to the plot. In the last scene we see Castor, Celeste and Ruthie on the ferry back to the mainland. (Judah has decided to stay.) The implication seems to be that they’ll be back on the island for good before too long, but we can’t be sure. In a final aria — an oasis of expressive, elegant poetry from Smith, after so much expository prose — Patience dismisses the possibility of choosing either past or future. We’re always in between.For all the ambiguous peace this ending offers, a bitter undercurrent tugs: In America, especially Black America, ownership is fundamentally tenuous. You can never run fast enough or far enough to escape the forces determined to dispossess you, or worse: “Sometimes I feel like something’s trying to erase me,” Castor sings. If he does eventually return to Patience’s island, it’ll be a homecoming, but also an admission of defeat — for a man and a country.“What more,” the opera asks in its quiet final moments, “must I give away before I get free?”Castor and PatienceThrough July 30 at the Corbett Theater at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, Cincinnati; cincinnatiopera.org. More

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      Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future

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      Anthony Davis’s “X” has stretches of incantation that, in person, turn it into something like a sacred rite.DETROIT — “When a man is lost,” sings Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, “does the sky bleed for him, or does the sunset ignore his tears?”The start of a smoldering aria, these words may be the most poetic and poignant in Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Especially poignant because, for several decades, “X,” too, has been ignored.The work, with a libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin, from a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, premiered in the mid-1980s, first in Philadelphia and, officially, at New York City Opera. And then … largely silence.For the past 36 years, it has been more talked about than heard. (An excellent studio recording from 1992 is now out of print.) And it was obvious, at the opening of a new production on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, what “X” gains from being taken in live: Its stretches of incantation turn into something like a sacred rite.In these passages, over carpets of complex, repeating rhythms in the orchestra, the ensemble chants short lines — “Africa for Africans,” “Betrayal is on his lips,” “Freedom, justice, equality” — again and again, building and overlapping. The opera is at its best in these long swaths of music poised between churning intensity and stillness. Without copying the prayer practices of Malcolm’s Muslim faith, the work evokes them.Bringing “X” back to the stage is a coup for Detroit Opera, which has recently rebranded itself after 50 years as Michigan Opera Theater, inaugurating a new era under the artistic leadership of Yuval Sharon.Sharon came to prominence as the founder of the experimental Los Angeles company the Industry, and he is swiftly bringing ambitious, inventive programming to Detroit, like a “Götterdämmerung” in a parking garage and a “La Bohème” whose four acts are played in reverse. The field is noticing what he’s up to: As part of a widespread effort to belatedly present more works by Black composers and librettists, this “X” will travel to the Metropolitan Opera (in fall 2023), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera.In biopic style, the libretto sketches an outline of a short but eventful life: the murder of Malcolm’s father when Malcolm is a boy in Lansing, Mich.; his mother’s mental breakdown; his move to live with his half sister in Boston, where he falls in with a fast crowd and ends up in prison; his jailhouse conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; the success of his Black nationalist ministry; his rift with Muhammad over tactics; his pilgrimage to Mecca; and the glimmers of a more universalist ideology of peace and racial unity, which he barely gets a chance to expound before his assassination in 1965, at just 39.Clint Ramos’s set for Robert O’Hara’s production evokes the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where Malcolm was killed, while introducing an element of sci-fi Afrofuturism.Micah ShumakeAll this is conveyed in the heightened register of opera. Even the dialogue is pithy and exalted: “I come from a desert of pain and remorse.” The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score.It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness.An essay in the program describes how Davis’s original contract specified that “the word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece,” though an innovation here was to embed an improvising ensemble within a traditional orchestra. This works smoothly, as when a saxophone aptly depicts Malcolm’s new life in big-city Boston, or when a wailing, longing trumpet accompanies prayer in Mecca. The prisoners’ choral dirge is heated by squeals of brass, smoking underneath; along with Betty’s enigmatically tender aria, this is the most intriguing music of the opera.The new production, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), has a unit set, by Clint Ramos, that evokes the partly ruined Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where Malcolm was killed. (The mountain pass mural painted on the back wall of the ballroom’s stage depicts an idyll that seems like it’s almost taunting the opera’s characters.)Above hover some big, swooping curves, used as a projection screen for textures, animated designs and a scrolling list of names of victims of white violence, before and after Malcolm. The staging is inspired by Afrofuturism, the attempt to conceive new — often fanciful, sometimes celestial — circumstances for a people suffering under crushing oppression.“Imagine a world where Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line is a spaceship,” O’Hara writes in a program note, referring to the “Back to Africa” movement in which Malcolm’s parents participated. But it is when the curves take on the literal flashing lights of such a ship that things turn a bit risible, conjuring the vessel in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” more than noble dreams of escape and revision.More effective is the introduction of four male dancers — their sinuous choreography is by Rickey Tripp — who snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), sometimes as squiggly punctuation to scenes. The spare flexibility that O’Hara introduces mostly works, even if the libretto’s specificity of place and situation gets sacrificed in this more abstract vision. Malcolm’s basic progress is still clear — less so the particulars of where he is and to whom, exactly, he’s speaking. The result, not unpleasantly, is more dream ballet than CNN.In the production, four dancers — their sinuous choreography by Rickey Tripp — snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), here with his mother (Whitney Morrison).Micah ShumakeMalcolm, though, still wears his distinctive browline glasses. He is played here with superb control by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, steady, calm and committed in both his physical presence and grounded voice, with a fiery core that seethes in his main aria, “I would not tell you what I know,” at the end of Act I.As Malcolm’s mother and his wife, the soprano Whitney Morrison sings with mellow strength. Charming as Street, who spiffs up Malcolm in Boston, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson largely handles Elijah Muhammad’s muscular high lines but strains to convey his magnetism.“X” sometimes hypnotizes but sometimes sags. Like Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, the opera is conceived as a steadily progressing account of a historical figure’s ideological evolution, dispensing with traditional dramatic tension. The main human conflict, between Malcolm and Elijah, is only lightly touched on; it’s not the plot.“Satyagraha,” though, fully gives itself over to stylization, its Sanskrit text detached from the action, its scenes pageantlike. The music and libretto of “X,” by contrast, keep promising crackling drama without quite delivering; there can be a sense of falling between the stools of trance-like repetition and standard storytelling.Scattered throughout are interludes that musically feel like vamping and that offer little obvious pretext for action. After so many years, the creators seem to have perceived the need to do something with these expanses — “We have added a few lines of singing in places that were musical interludes,” Thulani Davis writes in the program — but they remain, and sap the energy.Still “X,” for all its obvious admiration for its subject, is admirably resistant to mawkishness or melodrama, particularly in avoiding an operatic death scene: At the end, Malcolm takes the podium in the Audubon Ballroom and briefly greets his audience in Arabic. Then there’s a blackout as gunfire rings out.For all the talk of spaceships and a better tomorrow, it is an inescapably stark conclusion. There will always be gifted, visionary boys and men, the work seems to say in this new staging, but their futures are hardly assured.X: The Life and Times of Malcolm XThrough May 22 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More