Two compelling singers, the baritone Elliot Madore and the mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, bring poignant intensity to the roles of Ramón and Josefa, a young Mexican couple who work at the bar. Joe finds comfort with a Chinese prostitute, Ah Sing (the brilliant coloratura soprano Hye Jung Lee), who decides that Joe, a client, would also make an ideal mate.
Adams girls of the golden west full#
The tenor Paul Appleby gives a dynamic performance as Joe Cannon, a miner who leaves behind a girl in Missouri, who then abandons him to marry a butcher back home, as Joe learns during a boisterous scene in a bar full of drunken miners. The rugged miners sing words taken from actual miners’ songs, set to rhythmically fractured music, enlivened with accordion and cow bells. Some exciting stretches, conducted with crackling energy and color by Grant Gershon, certainly convey the teeming wildness, racial animosity and lawless violence that roiled the West. But her story gets lost amid what comes across as a bold attempt to write the great California opera - a sweeping tale of the mad quest for fortune that was the mostly disastrous Gold Rush. The historical Dame Shirley was a fascinating woman with a pioneering spirit. Sellars’s patched-together approach doesn’t work as well for “Girls,” a work that cavalierly invites comparisons with Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the West”), an Italian’s take on the Gold Rush. Though the results had awkward aspects, that opera maintained a strong narrative impetus: Its plot was driven by a countdown to the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Sellars also assembled a libretto from poetry, journals and original documents. Sellars, which had its premiere here in 2005, Mr. Most of Ned’s words come from the journals of fugitive slaves.įor “Doctor Atomic,” the previous collaboration between Mr. When Ned (the charismatic young bass-baritone Davóne Tines) first appears, he describes himself in the third person: “Ned Peters was a hustler from Independence town,” Mr. “Not dainty, simpering kid-gloved weaklings, but muscular, stalwart, dauntless young braves.” (The words come from Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.”) McKinny sings lustily over skittish, pointillist music in the orchestra. “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population,” Mr. Sellars's previous collaborations with Adams have included premiere productions of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic (for which Sellars also wrote the libretto).The opera opens with Clarence, a hearty miner (the exuberant bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), who sets up the story almost as if giving a lecture. According to Sellars, "These true stories of the Forty-Niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty, telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American." Adams wrote, "To be able to set to music the authentic voices of these people, whether from their letters or their songs or from newspaper accounts from their time, is a great privilege for me." Sellars, who also directed the opera, conceived the libretto while doing research for a production of Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West (based on David Belasco's 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West), which also deals with the gold rush period. The libretto is also sourced from other literature of the period, including newspaper articles and the writings of Mark Twain. Clappe published the letters under the pen name Dame Shirley. The opera is inspired by the 1851/1852 letters of Louise Clappe, who lived for a year and a half in the mining settlement of Rich Bar (now Diamondville, California) during the California Gold Rush.
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