Sharon, Yuval (1979- )

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Rhiannon Giddens’s ‘Omar’ Premieres at the Spoleto Festival

      by

      Three productions, including the premiere of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’s “Omar,” distort time in approachable yet provocative ways.CHARLESTON, S.C. — Wander the streets of this Southern city, and you might notice a warping of time and place: a Porsche parked in the driveway of a fastidiously preserved antebellum mansion; a memorial to the American Revolution neighboring one to the secession that spurred the Civil War; a horse-drawn carriage taking tourists past cobblestone streets on their way back to a Carnival cruise ship.Time is no more stable among the three opera productions at the Spoleto Festival USA, which continues here through June 12. A world premiere, “Omar,” is both specific to history and freely anachronistic; while, on another stage, a classic love story, “La Bohème,” is told in reverse; and, nearby, the Crusades are given a modern critique by way of the Baroque in “Unholy Wars.”In all, opera is treated as an act of liberation — a fitting debut for Mena Mark Hanna, the festival’s new general director, who comes from a scholarly background that involved interrogating colonialism’s legacy in classical music. He inherited “Omar,” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, but he made it this year’s centerpiece, and surrounded it with works that, like it, are approachable yet refuse to accept or adhere to convention.“Omar” is a homecoming of sorts for Giddens, a conservatory-trained singer who made her reputation as a folk musician of omnivorous inspiration. This project, she recently told The New York Times, is “a return to opera, but on my own terms.”She wasn’t kidding. Only a musician like Giddens could have created “Omar,” for which she wrote the libretto and composed in recorded drafts — she sang and accompanied herself — that were then orchestrated by Abels, with an ear for subtle connections and propulsive drama. Their score, nimbly handled by the conductor John Kennedy and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, is a melting pot inspired by bluegrass, hymns, spirituals and more, with nods to traditions from Africa and Islam. It’s an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.Giddens and Abels’s sweeping achievement is all the more remarkable because of the intimate story it tells: of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in what is now Senegal and sold into slavery at a market in Charleston — a history he later documented in an autobiographical essay while living in North Carolina, still as property but with relative peace.A rich American portrait emerges from Said’s life, in Giddens’s interpretation of that essay. He bore witness to the dangerous Middle Passage of the slave trade and represented a largely unacknowledged community of Muslims brought to the United States. Giddens imagines him on the sidelines of a family being torn apart at the slave market. And, in a tribute to a pillar of Black American life, he is often surrounded by a chorus.That ensemble — tireless members of the Spoleto Festival USA Chorus — carries this opera, in a way that inevitably recalls Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” which is set in Charleston and is often spoken of as the Great American Opera, despite its complicated legacy as the work of white men who long provided crucial work for Black singers. Works like “Omar” — such as Anthony Davis’s recently revived “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — offer an alternative: fresher, more honest depictions of Black life on an operatic scale.Although “Porgy” is firmly in the repertory, “Omar” at least has the opportunity to stake a claim alongside it: Next season, the opera will travel to Los Angeles and Boston, then San Francisco, Chicago and, appropriately, North Carolina. Moving, joyous and in its final moments intensely spiritual, it should not have trouble winning over audiences, as it did on Friday.Kaneza Schaal’s production is as plain-spoken as the libretto, yet absorbingly vivid in Christopher Myers’s scenic design, for which he made prints from Said’s manuscripts in English and Arabic, as well as from woodcuts of slavery documents and runaway ads. Characters wear language on their clothing, and words cover walls; the look of the show propels the story as much as the score does toward the climax of Said’s burning need to write.Language is crucial to the plot as well. Said, sung by the tenor Jamez McCorkle with delicate lyricism in prayer and steely power in adversity, arrives in Charleston unable to understand anyone. Giddens cleverly renders his first owner’s text as Said would have heard it; he and the slaver, Johnson, sing discrete lines in counterpoint, never in the same language, until, under the threat of violence, Said lets out an acquiescent phrase, his first words in English.Johnson is sung by the baritone Malcolm MacKenzie, who returns — after Said escapes his cruel plantation — in Act II as the more benevolent owner Owens. He respects Said’s passionate faith but all but forces him to convert to Christianity. This casting decision makes a clear point: Kind or not, a slaver is still a slaver.Those two men may be in control of Said’s life, but he is more guided by dreams of his mother, Fatima (the mezzo-soprano Cheryse McLeod Lewis), who was killed in the raid that led to his kidnapping; and Julie (the soprano Laquita Mitchell, a smooth-voiced and soothing presence), who escapes from the slave market in Charleston but urges Said to meet her in Fayetteville, N.C., at Owen’s property. When they reunite there, she explains why she was helping him to begin with, in the opera’s finest aria, which begins with the line “My daddy wore a cap like yours.”When she gives Said a new head wrap, to replace the one that had been ripped off his head at the slave market, he realizes that he must reconcile his religious devotion with the existence he is bound to, and tell his story in writing. The opera then ends with a long choral meditation, with singers spread throughout the auditorium, conducted by McCorkle from the stage. When the curtain — which before the show had been decorated with a projection of Said’s face — comes down, his likeness is joined by a dense collage reflecting the accumulation of his experience, with images that resonate across time to the present.George Shirley was the Wanderer, a new character created for Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème.”Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USAIf “Omar” looks forward, then Yuval Sharon’s staging of “La Bohème,” which opened on Saturday, does the opposite, presenting the opera’s four acts in reverse. (The production, which premiered at Detroit Opera last month, will travel next to Boston and Philadelphia.) With no intermission and small cuts to streamline it for a brisk hour and 45 minutes, it was moved along by Kensho Watanabe’s lush yet flowing music direction and John Conklin’s minimal, quickly adaptive set design.To help situate the audience, Sharon introduces the Wanderer, a spoken role played by the 88-year-old George Shirley, the first Black tenor to perform in a leading role with the Metropolitan Opera. As the acts rewind, he stops the action to ask questions that make Puccini’s tragedy more about the why than the what of it all. Rodolfo could have gone back inside in Act III; Musetta could have remained silent at Café Momus; Mimì could have just left Rodolfo’s apartment. This is a production of decisive moments.More than ever, “La Bohème” was also an opera of objects. A bonnet, a muff, a coat — these things are so crucial to the tragic climax that when they are introduced earlier in the story, they too begin to feel like turning points. And, in Sharon’s reading, amid the stormy lovers — Rodolfo (Matthew White) and Mimì (an aching Lauren Michelle); Marcello (Troy Cook) and Musetta (Brandie Sutton) — there is one steady relationship: Colline (Calvin Griffin) and Schaunard (Benjamin Taylor), playful companions who here might be a little something more.Raha Mirzadegan, Coral Dolphin, Karim Sulayman and John Taylor Ward in “Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by Sulayman. Leigh Webber/Spoleto Festival USA“Unholy Wars,” a staged program created by the tenor Karim Sulayman that opened on Sunday, also recasts the familiar. A child of Lebanese immigrants, Sulayman is interested in how Europe has historically decided what constitutes the Middle East, and how it is depicted in Western art. To examine the Crusades, he has turned to Baroque music, with new, mostly prerecorded interludes composed by Mary Kouyoumdjian.The production — directed by Kevin Newbury, and incorporating dance (performed by Coral Dolphin and choreographed by Ebony Williams) and animated projections (by the artist Kevork Mourad) — unfolds in effectively three parts: an exploration of the Middle Eastern “other” in Western works; a dramatic account of Monteverdi’s “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda”; and a mournful denouement that attempts to make peace with a musical tradition both violent and sublime.Sulayman performs throughout, joined by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward and the soprano Raha Mirzadegan, who embody the doomed lovers in “Combattimento,” a story Sulayman recounted with gripping fervor and expressivity that rendered surtitles unnecessary. He ends the evening — at just 70 minutes, still a song too long — with what seem a tired choice: Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga.” But here, at the end of a personal journey through lyrics like “She is Black but beautiful,” the aria feels like an urgent plea from Sulayman to be left alone to reflect.Reflect and, perhaps, break free from the long, knotty tendrils of history. It’s a struggle that would have been familiar to Omar Ibn Said, one that plays out in the streets of this city — even throughout this country, in our or any time. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      To Lure Back Audiences, Spoleto Festival Plans an Ambitious Season

      by

      The performing arts group in Charleston, S.C., will host 120 events in May and June, its first full season since the start of the pandemic.After two years of disruptions brought on by the coronavirus, Spoleto Festival USA, the renowned arts group in Charleston, S.C, announced on Friday an ambitious season that it hopes will bring audiences back to live performances.The season, the first under Spoleto’s new general director, Mena Mark Hanna, will feature more than 120 opera, theater, dance and music performances across 17 days in May and June. The highlights include the world premiere of “Omar,” an opera by the musician Rhiannon Giddens about a Muslim man from West Africa who was enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807.Hanna, the first person of color to lead Spoleto in its 45-year history, said the group hoped to offer a platform to overlooked artists.“We want art to be more than something that expresses received traditions, or something that is a reinforcement of a received canon,” Hanna, the son of Egyptian immigrants, said in an interview. “We want art to have this potential to bridge differences through its transformational power.”Other highlights include the premiere of “Unholy Wars,” an opera by Karim Sulayman, the Lebanese American tenor, which tells the story of the Crusades from a contemporary Arab American perspective, drawing on music by early Baroque composers. “The Street,” a new work for harp by the composer Nico Muhly will have its American premiere at the festival, featuring text by the librettist Alice Goodman.The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Spoleto Festival in 2020. Last year, the festival returned with a pared-down season; ticket sales were down 70 percent compared with before the pandemic amid lingering concerns about the virus.Hanna said he was optimistic audiences would return in force this year as the Omicron variant recedes. The festival plans to require audience members to show proof of vaccination, including booster shots, and to wear masks.“This is truly about us saying to the world, ‘We have wanted this, we have needed this,’” he said. “That sense of collective catharsis is something that we missed and, even more now than ever, need because of the virus.”He noted that one of the planned works this season is a new production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” led by the director Yuval Sharon, that unfolds in reverse, with one if its main characters, Mimì, dying of tuberculosis at the outset of the opera. The reordered opera ends with cheerier scenes of friendship and revelry from the first act.“The first act is really about renewal and love and youthfulness,” Hanna said. “I see that as a metaphor of moving away from the darkness of the pandemic.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      A Malcolm X Opera Will Get a Rare Revival in Detroit

      by

      Michigan Opera Theater announced the return of indoor performances and named an associate artistic director: the star soprano Christine Goerke.When Anthony Davis’s sprawling, genre-blending biographical opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera, it drew a notably diverse audience and was considered a commercial success. Yet it has rarely been revived.A new production is coming, though, as part of Michigan Opera Theater’s 2021-22 season — the first under its new artistic director, Yuval Sharon. Opening in May 2022, “X” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”) and star the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who will also be the season’s artist in residence.“My first interview for this job was shortly after the murder of George Floyd,” Sharon, who is also an innovative stage director, said in an interview. “I thought: This is a moment for change. Casting singers of color is really easy, but my focus has been on composers, librettists, conductors. I’m thinking about this season as a statement of principles, and that’s what I hope for going forward.”As part of the season announcement, on Tuesday, Michigan Opera Theater also said that Christine Goerke, a reigning Wagnerian soprano who sang the role of Brünnhilde last fall in “Twilight: Gods” — Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage — would join next season as associate artistic director.In an interview, Goerke said that her family would be moving from New Jersey to Detroit, where she has relatives. But, aware that the news of her appointment might surprise fans of her performances, she clarified that she didn’t plan to reduce her performance schedule any time soon.“I’m not stepping away from singing,” she said. “I’m stepping toward what’s going to come eventually.”“I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” she added. “We’re always thinking about what’s next. And I want to be on the other side of the desk. My relationship to opera is not going to end when I’m done singing.”The soprano Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde in “Twilight: Gods” last fall at Michigan Opera Theater, which has named her its associate artistic director.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesAll of the productions next season come with backup plans, as the course of the coronavirus pandemic appears hopeful yet is still uncertain. But what Michigan Opera Theater unveiled on Tuesday puts off a return to live indoor performances at the Detroit Opera House until at least April 2022.Until then, productions will be staged outdoors, or at unconventional venues. The season will open on May 15 with a concert performance of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” with Goerke making her role debut as Santuzza. It will be presented at the Meadow Brook Amphitheater in Rochester Hills, Mich., and conducted by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Jader Bignamini.In September, Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s opera “Blue,” about a family in Harlem navigating the American Black experience, will receive a new production, by Kaneza Schaal, following its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019; Daniela Candillari will conduct. The location and timing have not yet been determined, but the following production, staged by Sharon, will be “Bliss,” Ragnar Kjartansson’s marathon performance piece that loops the same three minutes from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for 12 hours.Michigan Opera Theater will return indoors on Feb. 26 for Robert Xavier Rodríguez and Migdalia Cruz’s “Frida,” conducted by Suzanne Mallare Acton, the company’s assistant music director. It will be a revival of Jose Maria Condemi’s 2015 staging, performed at Music Hall in downtown Detroit.Then the company will return to its theater, the Detroit Opera House, on April 2, for Sharon’s production of “La Bohème,” conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni. The concept is something Sharon has discussed in interviews before: He will present the four acts of Puccini’s opera in reverse.“The reverse order means that we’re starting with death, and ending with love and hope,” he said. “We’ll all be coming from a place of death — at least I hope that this will be post-Covid. And I love that this thing everyone is hearing, the first thing in the theater in two years, is something they’ve never heard.”“X,” in a newly revised score by Davis, will bring the season to a close in May, conducted by Kazem Abdullah. Writing for The New Yorker after Davis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music last year, the musicologist Ryan Ebright noted that the opera had received only one full revival, at Oakland Opera Theater, in 2006. San Francisco Opera once suggested that “X” be staged as part of its inner-city parks performances, and Davis countered by asking whether they would put on Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” in a park.“I tried to make them realize,” Davis told Ebright, “that it’s about time that America got over thinking of Black art as being what’s done in the playground, or what’s basically the social-service part of culture.” More