www.operaphila.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201c \u2018Suddenly Last Summer\u2019 is ultimately about who gets to tell the story, and who gets silenced,\u201d Bryan said. \u201cI was drawn to the complexity of Tennessee Williams\u2019 world, to the beauty and terror of this Southern Gothic story, and especially to the questions it raises about power, sexuality, vulnerability, wealth and the ways that truth can be controlled. Bringing the work to Philadelphia is incredibly meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSuddenly Last Summer\u201d is set between the Garden District of New Orleans and the Mediterranean coast.<\/p>\n
The story centers on the mysterious death of the poet Sebastian Venable. Sebastian\u2019s cousin, Catherine (soprano Mikaela Bennett), witnessed his final moments and returned to New Orleans consumed by the need to tell what she saw.<\/p>\n
Sebastian\u2019s wealthy and powerful mother, Mrs. Venable (played by Stephanie Roth Haberle), is determined to suppress Catherine\u2019s account, going so far as to attempt to have her lobotomized so that the story can be erased from her memory.<\/p>\n
The opera transforms Williams\u2019 confrontation between competing versions of reality into a striking musical premise: The character who tells the truth is given the power of song, while those attempting to control the narrative speak.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of my work is intense,\u201d Bryan said. \u201cI tend to be drawn to different stories, either of historical figures or contemporary events that have an intensity. This one was interesting because it\u2019s just a different kind of intensity and the grotesqueness of the story was interesting.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, I kept coming back to it because I was excited about the idea of the collaborators, and then I was excited about how Tennessee Williams really brings you into his world. It\u2019s like once you read certain things, I feel like I just kept thinking about it and trying to understand the characters and must think about how he would write about certain details that were very evocative and made me want to create music.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is Bryan\u2019s first opera, but she has been writing music and performing for as long as she can remember.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was 5 (years old), I started studying piano,\u201d said Bryan, who grew up in New Orleans. \u201cI would call myself self-taught as a composer at that age, because I was always creating original music. My parents would help me record it and make sure I kept records of it and everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would write for my friends. So that\u2019s when I started learning to write for different instruments. I was like, \u2018Oh yeah, how does a trumpet work? Like, what about this range?\u2019 or I wrote for a lot of my vocalist friends, and I always enjoyed writing for voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bryan\u2019s score for \u201cSuddenly Last Summer\u201d draws on the two worlds at the heart of Williams\u2019 story: the lush Mediterranean landscape where Sebastian dies and the humid Garden District of New Orleans where Catherine returns.<\/p>\n
Bryan spent time composing in both locations during the development of the opera. The resulting score incorporates an eclectic range of sounds, including bird song improvisations, suspended harmonies and musical gestures rooted in Bryan\u2019s lifelong relationship with the sounds and traditions of her hometown.<\/p>\n
\u201c(The original story is) written very poetically, but its basically a scene of date rape,\u201d said Bryan. \u201cI wrote the piece and I just got into all the musical things of it. I just dove right into it. So I felt what I had was time to dive in fully and create on my own and then step away from it, and then have workshop time together, and then take from that and then create again. So there was enough time to kind of get fully into the world and then kind of step back from it and then workshop together and, and that really helped to make the project the way we did.\u201d<\/p>\n
The production was conceived by Daniel Fish, whose radical 2019 staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s \u201cOklahoma!\u201d won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical after transferring from the Fisher Center at Bard to Broadway and subsequently won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival in London.<\/p>\n
Bryan saw \u201cOklahoma!\u201d and was inspired to write the opera.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very excited,\u201d Bryan said. \u201cIt\u2019s all coming real, because I had the date and it was sometime way in the future. It felt far away when we were doing the original one, but it\u2019s actually here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opera Philadelphia is known to be on the cutting edge of the genre. Sure, they do the classics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[858,69,71,70,1483,289,210],"class_list":["post-305800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-ontap","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-theater","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-dtd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}