Were they taking it in and agreeing with it? I was getting the sense, and I don’t know if it was just me projecting, that a good number of the people in the audience didn’t want to think about these things. Katherine: I wished I knew how the people around me were feeling about it. Michaela: I thought it was really good having in an opera. It seemed completely overwrought: the red solo cups, the tiki torches. Katherine: On the one hand I thought, “Well, it’s always good to be reminded”-but they really throw it in your face. Soo: The social issues are what I like most about it, how issues of race, gender and sexism and all that come in. Julius: I liked Act I well enough, but Act II had me in tears it was simultaneously hard to watch and impossible to look away. It was just like, “OK, now people are getting killed.” I thought Josefa’s husband was pointless: Is he dead, is he alive? I don’t really care either way. Particularly in Act II, there wasn’t an emotional attachment to these characters to make you care about what was happening. Katherine: There were so many threads, I don’t know how successful it was.
#Girls of the golden west adams series#
I think Act I is a series of character studies, looking at these people and why they do the things that they do. Julius: It feels very open and honest to me, like a very beautiful look at humanity. Shiri (a retired medical worker): I liked watching the young lady adjusting to the minimalist nature of life in the mines. I feel sorry for the singers who had to work with this score, but they seemed game. Michaela: The singers were all good, especially Ned. Katherine: I thought the main two women were such good singers that I enjoyed listening to them, even if I didn’t enjoy the music. Michaela (a string player): After the opera, I came out and a guy was singing “O Holy Night,” and that’s what was going through my head-nothing from the opera.
I’m not that into John Adams, generally-I don’t know what it is, but I don’t particularly like it. Katherine: I would never listen to the music when I wasn’t watching the opera, I’ll say that.
#Girls of the golden west adams how to#
Soo: The last aria is so deep, and he sure knows how to build a climax with the orchestra. Julius: I think his comments about it being a simpler language for a simpler people are intriguing, and I think that’s reflected very clearly in what he’s done. Soo (a music educator): The music is great it’s typical John Adams. Julius: The music is more nostalgic than what I expected it almost feels like it’s out of Adams’s mid-90s style, rather than his more recent language in things like Scheherazade.2. I really liked the bar scene, and the moving panorama-that was actually a popular technology of the 19th century. I thought they were minimal but very effective a few pieces of staging did a lot of work. Katherine (a humanities graduate student): I liked the sets. “Let’s carry the bed onto the stage, leave it there for about 45 seconds, and then have two new people walk on and carry it off.” Julius (a composer): SF Opera overdoes their staging to an ungodly amount. She is the opera’s central character along with her are Ned Peters, a fugitive slave and miners, barkeeps, and prostitutes of different races and ethnicities.I attended the second performance at San Francisco Opera, and spoke to a handful of audience members during and after the show. With Adams, director Peter Sellars constructed much of the libretto from the letters of Louise Clappe, an educated woman who wrote under the pen name Dame Shirley while living in San Francisco and the Feather River mining communities. The new John Adams opera “ Girls of the Golden West” depicts the Gold Rush, an iconic moment in California history when people of different backgrounds suddenly came to live in the same place.
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