Jeanine Tesori & Tazewell Thompson: Blue
Pentatone

In a historically and culturally significant confluence of events, three ‘Black' operas premiered in the summer of 2019: Anthony Davis and Richard Wesley's The Central Park Five (at the Long Beach Opera), Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons's Fire Shut Up in My Bones (at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis), and Blue (at The Glimmerglass Festival), the latter the creation of librettist Tazewell Thompson and composer Jeanine Tesori. Each carries with it a further distinction: Davis's is the first opera by a Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in music; Blanchard's became the first opera by a Black composer to be presented at the Metropolitan Opera; and Tesori's, awarded the Music Critics Association of North America 2020 Award for Best New Opera, is the first of the three to be available in a physical form.

Written after the death of Trayvon Martin and a year before George Floyd's, Blue couldn't, of course, be timelier. A powerful meditation on racial injustice in contemporary USA, its tragic story-line concerns an African-American police officer whose son is killed during a protest at the hands of a fellow officer. While the first draft of the libretto presented the father as a jazz musician, making him a police officer was a masterstroke for introducing tensions that were absent in the initial conception. In place of a too-simple us-them dynamic, the final version complicates matters and is therefore all the more realistic for exploring the complex conflicts that inform peoples' lives, regardless of skin colour. Blue resonates at the intimate family level but also obviously on a grander scale as a commentary on race relations today.

Vocal and instrumental forces come together eloquently in this superb realization by the Washington National Opera. Thompson's libretto is moving and panoramic, and Tesori's music is stylistically diverse yet always pointedly connected to the text. With his stentorian delivery, bass Kenneth Kellogg brings the father vividly to life, as do mezzo-soprano Briana Hunter as the mother and tenor Aaron Crouch the son. Fleshing out the vocal parts memorably are baritone Gordon Hawkins as the reverend, and three pairs of female (Ariana Wehr, Katerina Burton, Rehanna Thelwell) and male (Joshua Blue, Martin Luther Clark, Christian Simmons) singers as girlfriends and police officers; finally, the Washington National Opera Orchestra under the direction of conductor Roderick Cox supports the singers with deeply engaged playing. Recorded in June 2021 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Opera House, Blue boasts exceptional sound quality. Pentatone honours Tesori and Thompson's two-act creation with a handsome physical presentation that houses two CDs and in-depth booklet (containing commentaries and libretto) within a sturdy six-panel package. The label's catalogue includes stellar releases of repertory works, but Pentatone demonstrates admirable advocacy for contemporary work in its programming too, Blue a prime illustration.

Musically, the lines blur between theatre and opera, something not altogether surprising given Tesori's background. While she's written a number of operas (Blue her third), she's as well-known for the musicals Fun Home, Soft Power, Caroline, or Change, and others; she was also recently the Supervising Vocal Producer for Spielberg's film West Side Story. Boasting more than 150 directing credits, the award-winning Thompson has as impressive a CV. He's directed premieres and revivals at nearly every major theatre across the United States and directed and taught at NYU, Juilliard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Tulane, and Indiana University. Blue, surprisingly, is his first libretto, though one would never guess as much given its exceptional quality.

In a production featuring a Black librettist, singers, and conductor, Tesori is conspicuously white. Deeply sensitive to the racial dimensions in play, she deferentially tailored her music for Blue to the libretto rather than subjugating the text to the score. It's not the only time she's dealt with racially sensitive issues in a project, however. Caroline, or Change, her first collaboration with Tony Kushner, is about a Black maid working for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana, and West Side Story grounds its romantic story in a New York setting rife with ethnic tension.

Blue unfolds across multiple scenes with shifts in time and tone. The first act begins with the mother's girlfriends at first joyful over news of her pregnancy but then fretful upon learning the baby'll be a boy and aware of what that portends. The father's police officer brethren, on the other hand, are thrilled to learn he's fathered a son. Leaping sixteen years ahead, the son's now a student and activist and appalled that his father's a police officer (even saying he's “dressed in a blue clown suit”) and candid about his friends' discomfort over visiting a home where the dad's a member of the force. Despite the son's expressions of contempt, the father is resolute: “You my son, and your daddy loves you.” As the father meets with a reverend at the start of act two, we quickly surmise the son's been shot and killed by a police officer. A dramatic funeral scene follows, after which a poignant epilogue takes us back in time to a family dinner, the son alive and announcing his plan to study at R.I.S.D. and in a final moment of tragic irony assuring his parents that at an upcoming peaceful protest, “Nothing will happen.”

At every moment, the tone of Tesori's music reflects the mood of the scene, her music jubilant for the intricate vocal counterpoint between the mother and her girlfriends and sombre and anguished during the church and funeral scenes. Stylistically, the composer blends classical, jazz, and blues into a vibrant, ever-shifting tapestry, with a handful of motives appearing throughout. While there are duos, trios, and arias, the material more registers as a complex, integrated whole where words and music deftly align. Striking musical moments abound: the portentous prologue where ascending strings suggest sirens; the girlfriends' soulful “Keep on keepin' on” refrain; the lyrical motive first expressed vocally in “We wish on ev'rything you can wish on” and then instrumentally in the transition to the second scene; the tenderness of the hospital scene as the father grapples with holding his son for the first time; the plaintive refrain “I lay my burden down” that emerges during the meeting with the reverend; the anguish of the mother's pleas in “Oh God! Bring my baby back” and the plaintive reprise of the ascending figure that follows; the congregants' supplicating “Somebody, oh somebody, oh God, must come forth” during the funeral episode and the father enumerating all the things a “Black boy” must do to stay alive (“Don't wear a hoodie / Don't carry shiny objects / Don't get a tattoo …”); and more.

April 2022