Archive | April, 2010

Whaling in Dallas

April 30, 2010

I’m feeling very twenty-first century at the moment, even though part of my mind is firmly rooted in the nineteenth. That’s because I’m typing this post on an iPad at an altitude of about 32,000 feet, connected to wi-fi on an American Airlines flight to Dallas, where I’ll be attending the world premiere of Jake Heggie‘s opera adaptation of Moby-Dick.

I just received an e-mail from my sister who writes that she recently read about the production in American Airlines’ in-flight magazine. Apparently not this month, however, because there’s no article about it in the copy of the magazine that’s in the seatback pocket in front of me.

Wait. Hold on. I’m connected. Googling …

Here it is. It was in last month’s issue. And if your interest is now piqued, you can read more about the opera at the Dallas Opera’s website.

Heggie won a Guggenheim five years ago and is the composer of four other operas: Dead Man Walking (premiered in 2000, libretto: Terrence McNally), The End of the Affair (2003, rev. 2004-2005, libretto: Heather McDonald), To Hell and Back (2006, libretto: Gene Scheer), and Three Decembers (2008, libretto: Scheer).

Moby-Dick, which was commissioned by The Dallas Opera together with San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, Calgary Opera and State Opera of South Australia, is an opera in two acts, with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It has eight major roles and a 40-voice men’s chorus. It is scored for an orchestra of 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, 2 percussion, harp, strings). It’s premiering tonight at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, TX, and here are the credits: Conductor: Patrick Summers. Director: Leonard Foglia. Set Designer: Robert Brill. Lighting Designer: Donald Holder. Costume Designer: Jane Greenwood. Film and Projections: Elaine McCarthy. CAST: Ben Heppner (Ahab), Stephen Costello (Greenhorn), Morgan Smith (Starbuck), Jonathan Lemalu (Queequeg), Talise Trevigne (Pip), Robert Orth (Stubb), Allan Glassman (Flask), Jonathan Beyer (Gardiner).

I’m particularly excited to hear Heppner whom I’ve heard before at the Met as Tristan. At the moment, I’m listening to a collection of Heggie’s songs, entitled The Faces of Love – The Songs of Jake Heggie, which features Renee Fleming, Sylvia McNair, Jennifer Larmore, Frederica von Stade, and Carol Vaness among others. At first hearing, the songs (which are settings of poems by a variety of poets, mostly contemporary) are stylistically varied, but strike me overall as lush, lyrical, and witty. I particularly like the jazzy “Eve Song; Snake,” which imagines Eve’s response to the serpent’s proposition in the Garden of Eden and is sung by McNair.

It bodes well for tonight.

[Photo: Tenor Ben Heppner as Ahab; credit: Karen Almond, Dallas Opera.]

Posted in Blogging, Moby-Dick, Music | Comments { 1 }

Into the Deep

April 28, 2010

In the summer of 2008, I had the opportunity to meet the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns and to serve as a consultant for his film on the American whaling industry, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World.

I’ve been a fan of Burns’s work since watching The Civil War, the documentary series on which he collaborated with his brother Ken Burns, serving as co-producer and co-writer (with Geoffrey C. Ward). Ric is best known for the eight-part series New York: A Documentary Film, which offers a compelling portrait of the city and its cultural history. Burns’s New York remains a touchstone for the Writing New York lecture course that I teach every year with Bryan Waterman: it’s recommended viewing for the course and we show several clips from it in the course of the term. The film’s use of visual materials helps to make the history of New York more vivid for our students, and Burns’s stress on the city’s cosmopolitanism resonates with one of our course’s major themes. In addition, though, our use of the film clips enables the students to meditate on the documentary imperative, to think about the ways in which documentaries use devices such as music and experts to help persuade and about the ways in which fictions (whether on the page or on the screen) can also serve a documentary function.

It was great fun to meet Burns and his team, and to get a glimpse of how Burns puts films like New York and Into the Deep together. And now the film is set to premiere. It’ll be shown on PBS stations  on May 10 as part of the American Experience series. You can learn more about the film by visiting its page on the PBS website and by reading this press release. The website is itself an excellent education resource, with a photo gallery, historical timeline, and bibliography. The film is centered on two events in the history of American whaling: the famous sinking of the whaleship Essex by a whale and the attempt by its crew to reach the western coast of South America by sailing thousands of miles in their whaleboats, and the publication of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

I’ve been invited to a preview of Into the Deep next week at the Museum of Natural History next week. Stay tuned for a subsequent post about the film.

Posted in Film, Moby-Dick | Comments { 0 }