Brandy McDonnell, also known by her initials BAM, writes stories and reviews on movies, music, the arts and other aspects of entertainment. Tines sings before being walked offstage with a gun to his back. Girls of the Golden West is a new exhibit at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. 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 most bitter music of the evening is reserved for the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, as the doomed former slave Ned Peters. In their latest opera, Girls of the Golden West, John Adams and Peter Sellars demand that their audience take a cold, hard look at the dark side of the founding of California as a US state.
(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. White Americans are turning on everyone else violently forcing out blacks, Chinese and Latinos (the extermination of the native peoples would follow). 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. The inclusion of multiple storylines and ideas in a single operatic work, however, comes at a cost of lengthening the work, impacting its dramatic flow and decreasing the time. But, with an accordion and a delightful taste of the lowbrow, Mr. Girls of the Golden West is an idea opera that raises issues about greed, nativism and racial and ethnic strife, that continue to be relevant in contemporary times. 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. "Girls of the Golden West, The." Discography of American Historical Recordings. A hard-bitten saloon girl falls for a dashing outlaw, and tries to keep the local sheriff from catching him and sending him to prison. With Ann Harding, James Rennie, Harry Bannister, Ben Hendricks Jr. Composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars discusstheir newest collaboration with San Francisco Opera GeneralDirector Matthew Shilvock. The Girl of the Golden West: Directed by John Francis Dillon. In Discography of American Historical Recordings. Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents San Francisco Opera: Girls of the Golden West on Thursday and Friday, September 21 at 7:30pm. "Girls of the Golden West, The," accessed January 26, 2022. There's an empty cot in the bunk house tonightĭiscography of American Historical Recordings, s.v. Roles Represented in DAHR: Vocal group Recordings Company
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