From the headliners, it looked as if The Soraya had pulled off another major coup on Sunday night, April 6. The performing arts center at CSU Northridge got trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard to bring in two category-jumping groups, his E-Collective jazz quintet and the Turtle Island Quartet, to perform newly arranged excerpts from his two operas, Champion (2013) and Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019). It was a premiere, but only in the sense that this particular arrangement was being heard for the first time on the West Coast.
The concert marked an important artistic milestone for these two works — certainly for Fire — because the composer was participating, directing traffic, and playing his horn here. It was also the kickoff event for The Soraya’s inaugural LA Seen festival, and Los Angeles Opera’s Off Grand series signed on as a promotional partner.
Throughout the evening, including the stretches in which Blanchard’s E-Collective played on its own, various abstract designs, stills from the two operas’ Met productions, and faint images of the performers in real time were shown on a screen in the rear. Synopses of both operas were distributed to the audience.
The question was: Could the excerpts give listeners an idea of the scope, reach, and emotional impact that the full operas have clearly made upon audiences? In the case of Champion — which, in flashbacks, tells the riveting real-life story of the bisexual welterweight boxer Emile Griffith — the answer was hardly at all.
Champion was allotted a paltry four selections: a mournful instrumental prelude, two arias, and a duet, totaling about 16 minutes. The suite suggested some of the lyrical content of the opera yet barley hinted at the score’s diversity and dynamism, let alone its jazz elements, the chronology of the plot, or the tense atmosphere of big-time boxing in the 1960s and ’70s. There was just enough room for baritone Justin Austin to sketch out a virile-voiced portrait of Griffith. Soprano Adrienne Danrich sounded fine in her gently vibrating middle register, but with amplification, her tone quality became piercing on the high end.
Fire, based on former New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s memoir of his childhood, received far more attention, about 45 minutes of excerpts. This score is, on the whole, more lyrical than Champion, with more obvious allusions to traditional operatic conventions.
There was room in this suite for gospel-flavored jazz instrumental breaks in which Blanchard’s trumpet could rise majestically over the E-Collective. While the singers’ words were often difficult to make out through the amplification, two numbers achieved an emotional impact: an impassioned aria about the segregated South, sung by Danrich, and especially the Act 3 duet for Charles (Austin) and Greta (Danrich), during which he reveals the dark secret of having been sexually abused as a child and she rejects him for another man.
Despite the stripped-down instrumentation and fragmentary nature of these excerpts, it was nonetheless clear that Blanchard has a firm grip on the operatic idiom. Unlike many of today’s opera composers, Blanchard knows how to tell a story. But like most operatic scores lately, little of the music sticks in one’s memory without the context of a full production.
I’d have preferred more excerpts from Champion, but most of the first half of the evening was taken up by a terrific jazz set from the E-Collective.
Blanchard continues to play his horn through an octave-doubling device that produces a sound like the old Varitone units that were briefly popularized in the late 1960s by saxophonists like Eddie Harris, Lou Donaldson, and Sonny Stitt and trumpeters like Clark Terry and Nat Adderley. I like that fat, soulful sound — I’m puzzled as to why in the past it was blithely dismissed as a gimmick and abandoned so quickly — and it’s great to hear Blanchard reviving it.
With Charles Altura on electric guitar, Victor Gould on keyboards, Dale Black filling in on bass, and Oscar Seaton on drums, Blanchard and the E-Collective sailed through excerpts from his 2005 album Flow (including the title track, “Wandering Wonder,” and “Benny’s Tune”). The set began in a moody electronic New Age mode but soon found a groove with a sauntering tune that could have fit on a Miles Davis album circa 1985, and the playing gradually became freer and hotter. The producer of Flow, Herbie Hancock, happened to be in the audience, so Blanchard capped off the concert with “Sprocket,” a new medium-rock rhythm piece dedicated to the pianist.
