Say what you will about the historical absurdities of Puccini’s “Girl of the Golden West,” with its laughable Italian miners and its singular heroine, but that work - to which Adams and Sellars offer an ill-judged poke in the eye - at least trades in verisimilitude for genuine emotion. It jettisons actual drama in favor of endless travelogue, time-wasting asides and disjointed narrative logic.Īnd for all its stated intent to present a warts-and-all evocation of life in the Sierra Nevada of the 1850s, the piece doesn’t even conjure up that milieu with much more distinctiveness than a highbrow Yosemite Sam cartoon. It’s a portrait of Gold Rush California inhabited by pasteboard figures and disembodied political mouthpieces. Bloated, repetitive, self-righteous and dull, this commission by the San Francisco Opera (in partnership with the Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam) represents a miscalculation of astonishing dimensions. That pretty much sums up the experience of “Girls of the Golden West,” the operatic tofurkey from composer John Adams and librettist-director Peter Sellars that had its world premiere on Tuesday, Nov.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |