Odyssey Opera / Κριτικές

Odyssey Opera has carved out a name for itself by offering works well off the beaten path for most companies. As part of a festival of British operas in May, Gil Rose and company offered a rare treat in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sir John in Love. The swift and humorous opera featured fine singing and acting from Oren Gradus (Sir John Falstaff), Michael Chioldi (Ford), Samuel Levine (Fenton), and Megan Pachecano (Anne Page), performances that made this opera one of the year’s highlights. (AK)

The two lovers—Anne Page (Megan Pachecano) and Fenton (Samuel Levine) were warm, funny, and passionate by turns, soaring in elegant lyricism and preventing parental control from destroying their own plans.

Angelic harp notes, the marimba and upper register wind instruments signal Megan Pachecano's presence. She has a sweet soprano.

The night’s uniformly strong cast was headlined by Megan Pachecano as Lady Jane Grey. She’s got a lovely, silver-toned voice and her singing on Saturday was equally precise in intonation and diction. A capable actress, Pachecano drew out as much from Jane’s passive appearances in Acts 1 and 2 (where she’s largely a pawn of her conniving parents and in-laws) as one might have hoped – maybe more: hers was a character clearly uncomfortable with her circumstances, yet unable to resist the course of events.

In 1986, the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany interviewed the composer Anthony Davis, whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” had just received a triumphant première at New York City Opera. Delany, lamenting the neglect of Black opera composers, said, “From ‘Aida’ and ‘Otello’ to ‘Porgy and Bess’ and ‘Lost in the Stars,’ we as blacks have been opera-ed, have been operated upon, have been operationalized by white composers so that there seems to be a kind of massive charge running from white musicians to us as black subjects.” Davis’s piece seemed to augur a significant shift. Andrew Porter wrote in this magazine, “ ‘X’ is a work that deserves to enter the American repertory.” Malcolm X, a relentless critic of American myths of progress, would have been unsurprised to learn that the repertory was not quite ready for an opera about his life. Two decades passed before “X” received a full revival, at Oakland Opera Theatre; then it receded for another decade and a half. The George Floyd protests of 2020 finally induced major American companies to pay more heed to Black composers. Last fall, the Metropolitan Opera presented, for the first time in its history, an African American work—Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The same composer’s “Champion” is scheduled for next season. And “X” has come back to life: Detroit Opera staged it in mid-May, and Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will give a semi-staged performance in June. In future seasons, the Detroit production will travel to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha, Seattle Opera, and, in the fall of 2023, the Met.

Anthony Davis’s work is constructed as a series of charged episodes from the life of Malcolm X, beginning with his boyhood in Michigan, through his flirtation with street life, his embrace of the Nation of Islam, his pilgrimage to Mecca, and his assassination. That this opera so promptly disappeared after its premiere feels both mysterious (given its quality) and not (given the abidingly conservative nature of the opera world). Reprising the title role he recently sang in Detroit Opera’s production of “X,” Tines was entrancing on Friday, his performance seamlessly combining vocal and dramatic gesture to delineate Malcolm X’s evolving character with pinpoint precision. In the opera’s the final moments, just prior to the assassination, Tines sang and moved with a slow deliberateness, projecting a sense of hard-won spiritual insight that only heightened the poignancy of the opera’s violent end.