MNiatures (2021)

Right here for the next few weeks.  A set of four mini-operas from Minnesota opera.  MNi-operas.  Are they MNspired?  It's a MNteresting question.  Let's MNvestigate.

Asako Hirabayashi, Dear America, Beat Your Heart Defiantly, Naked and Open with Love

Well, there's no way you can call this an opera.  It's really a short song-cycle, as singer and librettist Rebecca Nichloson performs a series of short pieces accompanied by a cellist and Hirabayashi herself on piano and harpsichord.  That's not a criticism by any means.  The music is very arresting, and Nichloson has a resonant voice.  The subject matter is the typical sort of The Way We Live Now stuff we're seeing so much of this year.

Chim Lạc (Lost Bird)

A short story about a young Vietnamese-American woman whose grandmother has just died, who, through magical realism, gets to delve into her cultural heritage and learn things about her family she never know (my policy of only identifying operas by composer is very stupid in a case like this, as the librettist, Oanh Vu, is indeed Vietnamese-American and really just as important).  Very visually distinctive, with the characters in silhouette accompanied by paper cut backgrounds.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  Very lush, jazzy music.  A definite winner.

Ritika Ganguly, Xylem

Boy, hard to say what THIS one is about.  There's a brief intro where the composer and director talk about it, but that's not much help.  It's about a magic tree, apparently, that has the power to realize its desires through its roots.  "She's basically a bored tree," Ganguly helpfully clarifies.  The thing itself consists of people on stage playing and singing, interspersed with some crazy cut-out animation and singing in...I'm embarrassed that I don't know what language, but I would guess Hindi if I had to.  Really, though, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, because it's really exciting and artistically rich.

Khary Jackson, Don't Tread on Me: A Century of Racism

Three brief vignettes about the African-American experience at fifty-year intervals, in 1920, 1970, and 2020.  The first is about a World War I veteran back home and forced to deal with the habitual casual indignities of institutional racism.  The second is about a woman just come home from her first day of work as manager (of something; hard to say).  And the final has a guy reading headlines about the (real) instances of white people calling the cops on blacks for no reason.  I liked the second one best, by a wide margin; there's this ebullient sense of promise, like sure there's racism and sure it sucks but we've got in and we're moving on up.  Very optimistic.  Justifiably?  Well...stay tuned, I guess.  The other two segments felt under-developed to me.  A huge theme like this might need more space to stretch out.

I'm impressed, I must say.  The quality level of these four pieces is consistently high.  If they ever want to do more MNiatures, I will definitely be along for the ride.