Terence Blanchard’s Grammy!
CHAMPION: Best Opera Recording of 2023
I saw Champion a few nights ago at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and it deserves all the praise it has been receiving. I loved the orchestrations (Blanchard, a well-known jazz trumpet player, called it something like an “opera in jazz), the fascinating story, the fabulous choreography and riveting dancing by an exceptionally talented cast.
I saw Blanchard’s previous opera, Fire Shut Up in my Bones when it was performed here in 2022, and remember moments of great beauty combined with difficult scenes in which the protagonist looked back over his life — his mother struggling to raise him, a gang shooting, sexual abuse by a cousin, and finally having to decide whether to seek revenge or move on in his life.
Interestingly, both Fire Shut Up in my Bones and Champion portray a Black man looking back on his life and coming to terms with who he is.
Champion is based on the life of boxer Emile Griffith, who immigrated to New York to find the mother who left him and his six siblings in the Virgin Islands. He dreamed of being a baseball player, a singer, and a hat designer, but his boss trains him to be a boxer.
In the opera, he’s old and alone with a caregiver, confused with dementia, possibly from all those blows to his head, and looking back over his life. He was a talented boxer, but he always battled demons. As a child, his mother left him with a fundamentalist cousin who forced him to carry heavy cinder blocks, trying to beat the devil out of him. Instead, he built muscles and he struggled with his sexuality.
In 1962, he fights Benny “Kid” Paret, who taunts him and calls him gay. Emile punches him 17 times in less than 7 seconds and puts him in a coma. Benny dies, and Emile is haunted for the rest of his life. One of the most stirring moments in the opera is when Emile (baritone Justin Austin) sings “What Makes a Man a Man.” I’ll be thinking about Champion for a long time.
The next day my opera buddy (Arna) and I saw La Cenerentola (music by Gioachino Rossini and lyrics by Jacopo Ferretti), a 300-year-old comic opera based on the Cinderella story. We don’t usually attend matinees, but we had trouble coordinating our schedules, so we enjoyed two days of opera in a row. Some might think it too much of a good thing, but it was fun! The auditorium was filled with school groups and families — we even heard a baby cry at some point (not typical of an opera afternoon).
If you’ve never seen an opera in person, Rossini’s Cinderella would be a great choice. It’s entertaining and you might, like me, find yourself gaping in awe at the virtuosity of everyone on the stage.
La Cenerentola was first performed in Rome 1/25/1817 and first performed by the Lyric 10/14/1959). I saw it last in 2005 and it was cute, but I don’t remember being so awed by a combination of brilliant singing, great costumes, and awesome comic timing.
It was also wonderful to witness the excellent Lyric debut of female conductor Yi-Chen Lin, who looks about twenty in her picture, but conducted beautifully. We won’t always have to point out if conductors are women, and there are way more now than there used to be, but women are still underrepresented as conductors of great orchestras.
In case you don’t believe me, and for a taste of the Lyric performance, here’s the prince, virtuoso tenor Jack Swanson, singing “Si ritrovarla io giuro,” and Cinderella, sung by unbelievable mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya, performing “Non piu mesta.”
Awesome, right?
