The most bitter music of the evening is reserved for the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, as the doomed former slave Ned Peters. (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. 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. 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.
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