Blue, London Coliseum - grief, race, and police brutality

<First published online in the Financial Times on April 21, 2023>

Opera often gives musical expansiveness to emotions beyond the scale of speech. You can feel American composer Jeanine Tesori applying that expansiveness throughout her opera Blue, which received its UK premiere on Thursday at English National Opera. Written before the murder of George Floyd but now produced inescapably in its wake, it tells of a black policeman and his son, born during act one and dead in a police shooting before act two, the focal point of the opera’s sense of injustice.

In act one Tesori’s efforts tend to misfire, sometimes in ludicrous ways, even though there is an absorbing narrative that raises a spectrum of emotion. In act two there is almost no story, only different aspects of grief over the loss of an adolescent child, yet the music and the emotion all touch the same target with deeply affecting power.

Tesori falters most obviously when her music overinflates the conversation. The women’s exclamatory “Damn, girl!” sounds phoney when sung with elongated vowels at force. A further problem is that the young Mother’s three female friends tend to sing with distorted vowels, as if words mattered less than sound. Tesori often also over-orchestrates: consonants get lost amid brass and percussion.

In an interesting structural device, most of the scenes are either all male or all female. Act one ends with a male duet for the bitter, accusatory Son (Zwakele Tshabalala) and the conciliatory Father (Kenneth Kellogg), who are at loggerheads over the Father being a cop — the blue of the title — and the whole social system being run by white people to suit white people. Although Tesori’s music seldom makes the words seem natural, they do register forcefully here without sounding like inconveniences to the music. What changes during the scene is the Son’s yearning for the Father’s love: he needs and cherishes the parent he says he hates.

Act two begins, after the Son’s death, with another male duet as the Father consults the Reverend about wanting to kill the policeman who shot his son. Not only does Ronald Samm’s performance as the priest, eloquently uniting words and music, raise the opera’s tension in a new way, but now the verbally lucid Kellogg meets his music with a vocal power not evident before. Even though the three friends remain verbally problematic, their long scene with the Mother (Nadine Benjamin) releases the drama’s grief with irresistible melodic power. An ensemble church scene for both sexes rings the changes in that grief with real beauty and skill. Blue ends with a flashback to the Son’s last time with his parents; he is carefree, assuring them that he’ll come to no harm.

Forcefully conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldron and directed with classically formal stage spacing by Tinuke Craig, this was the second London premiere in a week of a political opera dealing with the after-effects of shootings. Although Kaija Saariaho, Finnish composer of the Royal Opera’s Innocence, is far the more sophisticated and original, it’s the second act of Tesori’s often cruder Blue that rings most true.

@Financial Times, 2023