Word: bolcom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this is another in a series of strong American opera premieres during the past few years, which has also included Philip Glass's The Voyage and William Bolcom's McTeague. San Francisco Opera general director Lotfi Mansouri speaks of sharing Liaisons with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and taking McTeague in return; it is an excellent idea, for both works merit second and third productions, and not just in this country...
...production costs, disastrous deficits, a declining talent pool and a static, aging repertory, American opera companies seemed to be the dinosaurs of arts organizations. In the past few years, however, a string of important and popular new works by composers as disparate as John Corigliano, Philip Glass and William Bolcom has helped improve opera's artistic fortunes. At the same time, audacious native-born stage directors like Peter Sellars and Francesca Zambello have replaced the old histrionic semaphoring with bold, psychologically penetrating productions starring fine singing actors like June Anderson and James Morris...
...Gandhi's nonviolent pacifism, operas have taken on such subjects as the thawing of the cold war (John Adams' Nixon in China), a horrifying mass murder (John Moran's The Manson Family) and the life and times of a fiery black radical (Anthony Davis' X). Throw in William Bolcom's 1992 McTeague, a setting of Frank Norris' wrenching turn-of-the-century novel, and Steve Reich's The Cave, a challenging examination of the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict that gets its American premiere this week in Brooklyn, and you have something like a Golden Age of American opera...
...untapped audiences hungering for something new. But as long as symphonies insist on treating their customers to the same handful of well-known works -- masterpieces though they may be -- symphonic music will lack the excitement that attends a new music-theater piece by Philip Glass, John Corigliano or William Bolcom...
...contrast to the cinematically luxurious Greed, the libretto of McTeague -- by Bolcom's longtime collaborator Arnold Weinstein and director Robert Altman -- relates the action in spare, simple prose. McTeague (tenor Ben Heppner), a powerful brute who has set up shop as an unlicensed dentist in San Francisco, falls in love with his best friend Marcus Schouler's girl, Trina (soprano Catherine Malfitano, in a marvelously sensual performance). After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery -- and McTeague's practice is ruined when the jealous Marcus (baritone Timothy Nolen) reports him to the authorities -- the relationship sinks slowly into a morass...