Seattle opera flight
Young Amelia (the sweet lyric soprano Ashley Emerson) sings an ode to the stars, and the music swells and soars, as it does again when Dodge (the dynamic tenor William Burden) offers an emotional lullaby to his daughter: “Find comfort in a dream of stars,” he sings.Īmelia, named for Amelia Earhart, has childlike fantasizes and fears of flying. To one side of the stage, Dodge helps his adored Amelia to bed on the other side Amanda is visited by naval officers who report that Dodge is missing in action. Amanda, we soon realize, is in a different time period, a year later, months after Dodge has been deployed. In another room her mother, Amanda, is folding clothes and looking worried. Her father, Dodge, in uniform, sits inside reading a newspaper. We first see 10-year-old Amelia playing on a porch in 1965. The mood was sensitively conveyed by the conductor, Gerard Schwarz, who led an assured performance of this two-hour, two-act score. The pensive orchestral music that introduces the multilayered first scene has wistful, winding melodic figures and chromatic harmonies that smartly evoke Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem. McFall’s libretto, for all its poetic beauties, is laden down with metaphor and symbolism. It is also a little well behaved and eager to please. Hagen knows what he is doing his score for “Amelia” is harmonically lush and singable. With five previous operas to his credit and some 200 published songs, Mr. The middle of the road can be a risky place to walk. Jenkins explains in the foreword to the published libretto, he sought a story that had relevance and depth a libretto that would invite music a musical score that “sang,” by a composer who “walked the narrow line” between the post-Romantic styles that have become fashionable and “a harder-edged, more 20th-century sound.” McFall’s father, a Navy pilot, was lost over the Pacific while training for his second tour in Vietnam. Amelia is haunted by memories of her father, a Navy pilot shot down during the Vietnam War when she was a little girl.
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The opera tells of a fragile married woman about to give birth to a daughter, Amelia, her first child. This one has an original story credited to Stephen Wadsworth, who directed the handsome, effective production. Most operas are based on a literary source or, increasingly, a film. Until Saturday night, when the Seattle Opera introduced Daron Aric Hagen’s “Amelia,” an earnest and original, if heavy-handed and melodramatic, opera with a libretto by the poet Gardner McFall.
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Jenkins had never presented the premiere of a commissioned opera. But amid his many accomplishments, which include an extensive renovation of the company’s house, there was one glaring omission: Mr. SEATTLE - For 27 years as its general director, Speight Jenkins has done very well by the Seattle Opera.