The much shorter Act Two improved in focus and depth of feeling but by then it was really a case of too little too late. Rather than showing us operatic scaled calamitous doings wrought by perilous choices, we are merely “told” how bad they were. In spite of some handsome writing, wrenching musical effects, and powerful performances, Act One was particularly two-dimensional.Īn overused device of reciting/reading long passages from news stories, diaries, a ship’s log, and other documents works against engagement of the characters, with us, or with each other. In reality, the resulting opera bypassed a number of opportunities for emotional resonance and for this viewer at least, contented itself with rather cerebral musings. If this sounds like the grist for passionate conflicts and outsized sentiments, you would get no argument here. The opera explores the dire consequences when characters give in to buried feelings and fail to acknowledge forces (evil or good) larger than themselves. Seward suppresses his feelings for Lucy Harker, who is married to his best friend Jonathan Harker, who is in fact institutionalized in Seward’s asylum. I this mash-up, Dionysus concentrates his attention on the straight-as-an-arrow Jon Seward, a doctor who heads a mental hospital. Photo Credit: Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera, 2021
Jarrett Ott (John Seward) and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus. In The Lord of Cries, the vengeful god descends on Victorian London, intent on doing the same. In it, Dionysus utterly destroys Thebes for not acknowledging him as a deity. While we are at least passing familiar with the first, Euripides’ masterpiece is far less widely known. The pair chose as their inspiration a Gothic novel (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and a Greek tragedy (Euripides’ The Bacchae). Adamo numbers among his successful compositions, a well-traveled and much-admired version of Little Women.
Corigliano is highly celebrated for his first (and only other) opera, The Ghosts of Versailles while Mr. Together with many stellar compositions Mr. SFO commissioned this new piece from composer John Corigliano and librettist Mark Adamo, ensuring it would have a laudable high-profile pedigree. Beginning in 1957, the venerable Santa Fe Opera festival embarked on an ambitious journey that included presenting world premieres, in which series this summer’s The Lord of Cries is the seventeenth.
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