The world was spinning last Sunday, during the east coast premiere of The Comet / Poppea. To be more precise, it was the stage, set on a turntable in the 23rd Street Armory, that kept up a steady rotation — offering an oscillating view of two distinct operas: The Comet, a probing new work by composer George Lewis and librettist Douglas Kearney, and L’incoronazione di Poppea, a late opus by Claudio Monteverdi. The singers and musicians in Curtis Opera Theatre’s production were uniformly first-rate; one first-year Curtis soprano, Nikan Ingabire Kanate, sang Ottavia with a sumptuous hauteur that brought chills.
But it was the overall effect of The Comet / Poppea, partly based on a 1920 science-fiction short story by W.E.B. Du Bois, that made the most lasting impression. Monteverdi’s fluidly expressive early baroque melodies were matched to a set designed to evoke classical marble antiquity, with singers robed (or strategically disrobed) to suit the scene. The other half of the set featured two characters — Jim, a working-class Black man, and Julia, a wealthy white woman — colliding by way of catastrophe, in a fancy restaurant in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. (“I would not have been served here yesterday,” rumbles Jim, his face darkening as he sings.)
In its conceptual daring, The Comet / Poppea, originated and directed by Yuval Sharon, felt right at home here in Philly, which has earned its stature as an epicenter of risk-taking contemporary opera. In a recent interview, Sharon noted that the juxtaposition of the two operas had originally been intended as “a commentary on exclusion in classical music more broadly.”
He is hardly the only person posing that question in fruitful and provocative ways. Earlier this fall, Opera Philadelphia opened its new season with the triumphant U.S. premiere of The Listeners, by composer Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek. “I’m attracted to opera because it illuminates our inner lives,” Mazzoli, who hails from Lansdale, told me during rehearsals at the Academy of Music.
WRTI has been covering this landscape closely. This Opera Day, it’s worth reminding you about our recent feature on The Listeners, as well as an in-depth interview with Opera Philadelphia’s new general director and president, Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sang in the original L.A. production of The Comet / Poppea, and was in the audience at the Armory on Sunday afternoon.
Costanzo, in fact, provided the original spark for the project, when he asked Sharon to develop a version of Monterverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea. “I actually really resisted doing an opera that felt like it was only about an Emperor behaving badly,” recalls Sharon, which is what led him to seek the countering ballast of The Comet.
Though he is based at Detroit Opera, Sharon made a point of waving away any notions of civic rivalry: “We all want opera to succeed in all the different ways,” he says. “So Philadelphia under Anthony — his success means so much to Detroit, to The Met, to San Francisco Opera. We’re one ecosystem, and it’s great to feel that we’re all pushing in our own ways.”
Of course, our interests don’t stop at boundary-pushing contemporary opera. Quite the contrary: for our Opera Day broadcast, Saturday at 1 p.m., we’ve teamed up with the Academy of Vocal Arts to present Gioacchino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, a classic as canonical, and approachable, as they come. This opera buffa has been a star vehicle for everyone from Kathleen Battle to Bugs Bunny, and we’re excited to share this version, with Kevin Godínez as Figaro, Ethel Trujillo as Rosina, Angel Raii Gomez as Count Almaviva and Yue Wu as Bartolo.
Join us for a full day of opera this Saturday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 90.1 FM, streaming at wrti.org, or on the WRTI App.
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