The conversation turns philosophical, making for stirring stage drama, which the opera-makers handle with cool dexterity. Don’t get shot. When the Father, devastated, seeks solace from a soul-healing and moralizing Reverend, he echoes the rebellious tone of his dead Son. Don’t wear cornrows.” Don’t call attention to the police. In a second-act flashback, after the Son is killed by a cop offstage, the Father remembers that unavoidable, bittering talk they once had: “Don’t wear a hoodie. The Mother’s three girlfriends, on the other hand, express alarm at the prospect of raising a Black boy.Ī 16-year jump cut introduces the Son as a disaffected teenager, aspiring artist, and social justice activist. Tesori imitates the hubbub of a sports bar when the Father announces the birth of his child to his cop buddies.
The Son is born into a nameless Black family in Harlem, with a police officer for a father and a housewife for a mother, whose purpose and identity precariously depend on her husband, and now on her newborn. The narrative of the two-act, two-hour opera consists of conversations that allude to key plot elements. Tesori’s harmony and natural lyricism afford tension and release - a natural fit for Thompson’s tragic storytelling that is occasionally tempered by lighthearted relief. The Tony Award-winning theater composer has a flair for painting tonal flourishes and tasteful orchestral washes that approximate the emotional resonance of Thompson’s tightly crafted libretto. Though the latter’s summer 2021 production was canceled, the premiere recording allows the music to take center stage, and benefits from the high points of the original collaboration. Like her first two operas, Tesori’s Blue was commissioned by Francesca Zambello, the director of Glimmerglass and Washington National Opera. But Blue is back in strong shape this year - not only with Seattle Opera’s run that ended on March 12, but also with a crisp debut studio recording by Washington National Opera, conducted by Roderick Cox, out March 25 via the Pentatone label. Complicated family dynamics, racial tensions, and authoritarian law enforcement are all at the backbone of the new opera by Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson, premiered at New York’s Glimmerglass Festival in 2019 and then mostly silenced by the pandemic. If opera can be the barometer of the present, Blue is the opera for our times.
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