Cincinnati Opera / Recenzie

Cincinnati — A new opera, Castor and Patience, takes on the pervasive barriers to land ownership for Black Americans. With a libretto by former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith and a score by composer Gregory Spears, the opera tells the story of two cousins' struggles in owning and keeping property long held by their family. It premiered at Cincinnati Opera last week. Smith and Spears started their work together around 2016 talking about a story highlighting how Blacks have been stripped of land ownership. But their ambitions really began to take shape during their research expeditions to the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. There they met with many people including Hilton Head Island resident Emory S. Campbell, a descendant of West Africans brought here as slaves. Campbell saw the story of his people as a natural starting point. "This is Black history when we talk about how people settled after the Civil War," Campbell said. "You have to begin with the Gullah culture, with Gullah people." A family struggles The story and characters of Castor and Patience began taking shape through Smith's and Spear's meetings with Campbell, his family and many others throughout the Sea Islands. "We learned about people whose families had owned land — Black families in the South — since Reconstruction," Smith said. "They purchased it from the government by pooling their resources sometimes with other members from their community. And this land, from day one, has been sort of fraught. The opera, set during the 2008 recession, recounts how Castor, who has grown up in Buffalo, New York, is besieged by creditors. So, he visits his cousin, Patience, at the family homestead nestled in the islands. He wants to sell his share of land to stave off bankruptcy. But Patience resists as she counts losses in the community. Since emancipation in 1863, Black communities nationwide have suffered massive property loss from legal abuses including forced sales of jointly owned real estate and discriminatory laws. Spears had been reading more about them. "It's something I've thought a lot about and how in that process can I be a part of creating this piece that is about something reckoning with history which is something that we all must do in this country and the importance of that and how art can play a role in that and really connect an audience emotionally," he said. The opera's characters include Castor's and Patience's children who are getting to know each other as well as the betrayals their family has endured. Throughout Patience underscores her efforts in defending the family's land — as some community members moved away and allowed land speculators and developers to swoop in. Reflecting personal history Soprano Talise Travinge, who portrays Patience, identified with many aspects of this story. "I think Patience found me rather than the other way around," she said before describing how her extended family from New Orleans had settled in Georgia after Katrina. She described that situation as "another issue of land and people losing land, family losing their land because they couldn't find the deed, which was then under water." But Castor and Patience also delves into other aspects of the Black experience in America such as Castor's lack of power under dubious credit schemes. In an area, Castor lashes out singing: You took My car, my money, My credit, you're Working on my name. You took my dignity... More operas are planned This production is part of Cincinnati Opera's push to tell grand operas that reflect Black Americans' experiences. Meantime, Smith and Spears are working on more operas. Castor and Patience is part of a trio of operas the pair has set out to complete that tell American stories. Their next one, The Righteous, is slated to premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2024.

“Castor and Patience,” a work by Gregory Spears and Tracy K. Smith with an intense yet relaxed score, premieres at Cincinnati Opera. CINCINNATI — Brett Dean’s tumultuous adaptation of “Hamlet” played at the Metropolitan Opera two months ago, but it is still ringing in my ears. Almost literally: It is a loud, chaotic score, mustering warring batteries of percussion and audience-encircling electronic effects, complex polyrhythms and virtuosic extended techniques. In all these qualities, it stands for a large swath of contemporary operas (some good, some bad) defined by being overwhelming. They are hurricanes of shock-and-awe sound, anarchic and bewildering. The music of Gregory Spears — whose sensitive “Castor and Patience” was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and premiered here on Thursday evening — is the opposite. Warm, steady, restrained, securely tonal, the orchestras in his works tend to serenely repeat small cells of material, without strange instruments or strange uses of conventional ones. So self-effacing is Spears’s style that the somber drone at the beginning of this new piece emerges without pause from the ensemble’s tuning, as if by accident. The overall effect is of a smoothly unfurling carpet — reminiscent of Philip Glass in its unhurried yet wrenching harmonic progressions — atop which voices soar. And soar, and soar. The agonies and pleasures of “Castor and Patience,” running through July 30 at the Corbett Theater at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, are like those of a less densely orchestrated Puccini. As in “Tosca,” “La Bohème” or “Madama Butterfly,” unabashedly, even shamelessly effusive vocal lines draw us poignantly close to characters in a rending situation: here, a Black family riven by disagreement over whether to sell part of a precious plot of land. Precious, because purchased with hard-won freedom. The action takes place on an unnamed island off the coast of the American South that was settled by former slaves after the Civil War. Among their descendants, Castor left and moved north with his parents; his cousin, Patience, stayed put with hers. Decades later, both are adults with children of their own. It is 2008, and Castor — like so many people in the years leading up to the Great Recession — has borrowed far beyond his means. The only way he sees out of financial ruin is to return to the island and sell part of his inherited stake, likely to a white buyer intent on building seaside condos; that is an outcome that the tradition-minded Patience cannot abide. It is a battle between old ways and new, past and future, leaving and staying, overseen by the ghosts of ancestors and the lasting reverberations of their oppression. (“Living means remembering,” as one character sings.) This narrative ground is familiar — gentrification versus preservation, with echoes of “A Raisin in the Sun” — and it could have been simply overwrought. But Tracy K. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, has produced a libretto as unshowy as Spears’s score. An original story rather than one of the transformations of existing material that currently clog the opera world, her text is largely prose, and never purple; modest arias arise naturally out of the dialogue. Inflamed by aching music — the orchestra of 36 is conducted with calm confidence by Kazem Abdullah — the result is passionate, but also clear, focused and humble. Spears’s two most prominent earlier operas were both accomplished. “Paul’s Case” (2013), based on a Willa Cather story about a restless, dandyish young man, had the pertly stylized formality of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” That neoclassical (even neo-medieval) feel extended to the more naturalistic “Fellow Travelers” (2016), set amid the anti-gay witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the lyricism that was tautly, almost unbearably heightened in “Paul’s Case” felt a bit repetitive and listless over the broader canvas that followed. Six years in the making — and two years after the pandemic forced the cancellation of its planned premiere, in honor of Cincinnati Opera’s centennial — “Castor and Patience” is more intense yet more relaxed than either of those. “Paul’s Case” was 80 minutes long, “Fellow Travelers” an hour and 50. The new opera is more than half an hour past that, but it feels less protracted than unhurried, unruffled. You get to know the characters, and to sit with them. That these figures are so vivid is also thanks to a committed cast, led by the baritone Reginald Smith Jr., an anguished Castor, and the soprano Talise Trevigne, delicate but potent as the implacable Patience. Singing with mellow power, the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano brought humanity and nuance to Castor’s wife, Celeste, who starts the opera pressuring him to sell but ends up in as much agonized ambivalence as anyone. Raven McMillon and, especially, Frederick Ballentine, bristled — convincing teenagers — as their daughter and son, Ruthie and Judah. Patience’s children, West (Benjamin Taylor) and Wilhelmina (Victoria Okafor), were gentle but stirring guides to the satisfactions of island and family life. Their outpourings are so fervent, the melodies so sweet, that you can find yourself moved nearly to tears by more or less random lines — an accomplishment both impressive and, sometimes, overkill, particularly in the first act. But by the second act, the tension inexorably rising, resistance to a work so openhearted, tender and plain-spoken seems futile. If it’s emotionally manipulative — in the distinguished tradition of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Carlisle Floyd — it’s expertly so. Vita Tzykun’s set stretches the facade of a house across the stage, but leaves the bottom half jagged and cut off, revealing the beams of the foundation and marshy grasses. This is a dreamy netherworld in which characters from the 1860s and 1960s mingle with the 21st century. Kevin Newbury’s production uses some furniture and a few suggestions of shacks to conjure a range of locations on the island. If it’s not entirely evocative — with projections that tend to be murky — it’s at least efficient and straightforward. As are the mechanics of the plot. The conflicts here are as sturdily old-fashioned as in an Arthur Miller play — but, as in Miller’s work, they knot your stomach anyway. Probably unlike the version of this libretto he would have written, however, true tragedy does not strike in Spears and Smith’s telling. Everyone is alive at the end. And the secret that gets revealed near that point isn’t quite a barnburner. But it does offer the real explanation for why Castor’s parents went north — a telling reminder that migrations aren’t just abstract sociological phenomena, but also happen family by family, for individual reasons. There isn’t a clear resolution to the plot. In the last scene we see Castor, Celeste and Ruthie on the ferry back to the mainland. (Judah has decided to stay.) The implication seems to be that they’ll be back on the island for good before too long, but we can’t be sure. In a final aria — an oasis of expressive, elegant poetry from Smith, after so much expository prose — Patience dismisses the possibility of choosing either past or future. We’re always in between. For all the ambiguous peace this ending offers, a bitter undercurrent tugs: In America, especially Black America, ownership is fundamentally tenuous. You can never run fast enough or far enough to escape the forces determined to dispossess you, or worse: “Sometimes I feel like something’s trying to erase me,” Castor sings. If he does eventually return to Patience’s island, it’ll be a homecoming, but also an admission of defeat — for a man and a country. “What more,” the opera asks in its quiet final moments, “must I give away before I get free?”