Girls of the golden west julia shirley character names

#Girls of the golden west julia shirley character names full
#Girls of the golden west julia shirley character names series

One small highlight, as it were, was Dame ShirleyвЂ™s parlando description of watching a small group of Indian women at work gathering acorns.

#Girls of the golden west julia shirley character names full

This wordless bit of nonsense epitomizes the music of John Adams, full of pretence yet empty.ДЄct I of Girls of the Golden West seemed to go on forever. ItвЂ™s a simple, rollicking bit of music that includes repeated choruses of da du da du da du. Later, a male chorus of gold miners sing a bouncy ballad about the life of a gambler who loses his gold at the betting tables in the bars. Indeed, John Adams writes music for this wagon ride that recycles his propulsive, repetitive minimalist rhythms and augments them with frequent jerks and bumps that bounce the audience around almost as much as Dame Shirley gets bounced as she rides in the wagon. In one long segment in Act I, a journey undertaken by Dame Shirley in a wagon, we are in for a long and bumpy ride. Musically, the experience of listening to Girls of the Golden West can be something of a grind. When Dame Shirley spends four or five minutes describing the interior of her rustic cabin and another four or five minutes describing the local hotel, the audience may get restless, given that all this time is wasted describing in words what we can see with our eyes in the sets designed by David Gropman. However, while this provides a bit of narrative continuity it also is often irritatingly redundant. In the role of Dame Shirley, soprano Julia Bullock had the unwelcome job of singing large chunks of Louise ClappeвЂ™s descriptive prose in a drab parlando style.

#Girls of the golden west julia shirley character names series

What narrative thread there is in this opera is supplied by a character named Dame Shirley, which was the nom de plume of an educated woman from Massachusetts named Louise Clappe, who chronicled the life and landscape of the California mining camps in a series of letters originally published in 1854 in a new literary magazine out of San Francisco, The Pioneer. But that comes later in this overlong Girls of the Golden West. All these diverse men donвЂ™t always get along with one another, however. The opera opens with a character named Clarence, sung here by bass-baritone Ryan McKinney, who is clad in buckskin, wielding first a gold-minerвЂ™s pick, then a rifle which he points ominously at the audience as he sings something to the effect that вЂњNever has the world seen such an assortment of men from all nations gathered together in one place.вЂќ Here, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, he sings, there are Mexicans, Chinese, Frenchmen, Chileans, Peruvians, Americans and Native Americans. Working in tandem again with librettist-director Peter Sellars, the Adams-Sellars team presented in Girls of the Golden West a collage вЂ“ mish-mash might be a better term вЂ“ of disjointed scenes involving stick-figure characters drawn from various chronicles of the California Gold Rush days of 1849. What this says about our local opera company I hesitate to say. At the close of the opening night of Girls of the Golden West, John Adams was awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal. And yet, for god only knows what reason, John Adams continues to garner accolades wherever he goes. They are not meritorious but meretricious that is to say, they claim to strike a pose of musical innovation and progressive politics, yet endlessly repeat tired formulas of musical minimalism and equivocate on most of the political issues they evoke. To me, his works are built mainly on pretence. I have said it before, and IвЂ™ll say it again: John Adams may be the most over-rated composer in todayвЂ™s world. Bouncy propulsive rhythms repeated endlessly in minimalist fashion and overly percussive orchestration get old fast. I caught the second performance of this turkey on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and black indeed was my mood after sitting through three and a half hours of this bloated, self-indulgent opera from a composer who merely recycled all his familiar-and often irritating - musical tics. Whatever oneвЂ™s expectations might have been, Girls of the Golden West turned out to be a real turkey, a half-cooked one at that. Two days before Thanksgiving, San Francisco Opera unveiled the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, the new opera by John Adams it commissioned in partnership with Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera.