The opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s season arrived on Monday, complete with heavily trailed significance: Fire Shut Up in My Bones, with music by Terence Blanchard, is the first opera by a black composer in the 138-year history of the Met.
Based on an eloquent memoir by Charles M Blow, now a New York Times columnist and television presenter, Fire Shut Up in My Bones tells the story of Blow’s molestation when he was seven, his painful coming to terms with his bisexuality and his final realisation of his love for and debt to his mother (powerful soprano Latonia Moore). Boy soprano Walter Russell III sang the child Blow, lightish baritone Will Liverman the adult.
Blanchard is a noted jazz trumpeter, ensemble leader and composer of scores for 60 films (including most of Spike Lee’s) and one previous opera, Champion, seen in St Louis in 2013. He is no modernist; his father loved opera and played him recordings of the 19th-century repertory, and Puccini and La bohème are his templates. Like almost everyone since, however, he lacks Puccini’s gift for the soaring vocal line. In the third act of Fire some of the vocal music approaches real lyricism, but generally the music, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, is carried by the accompaniment (Howard Drossin is credited in tiny type with “additional orchestrations”). The instrumental music is full of driving ostinatos and interspersed with richer effusions. There are also some haunting offstage choruses.
The production has expanded the 2019 St Louis original, with additional music plus choreography from Camille A Brown (from the recent Met production of Porgy and Bess), including a cadre of bare-chested men as Blow’s fantasies and the protracted step and line dancing of Blow’s fraternity brothers. For the audience this was the hit of the night, but little music was involved. (Brown co-directs with James Robinson, artistic director of the Opera Theater of St Louis.)
But on the whole, the evening is carried by Blow’s tortured story and Kasi Lemmons’s libretto, which does a wonderful job adapting the dramatic elements of Blow’s tale. Lemmons, who is also a film director, compacts the first-person narrative to a single soprano portraying Destiny, Loneliness and, in the end, Blow’s first real lover (all three portrayed by the fine soprano Angel Blue). Much of the surrounding material — the small Louisiana town where Blow was raised, the racial context of the time, many subplots — gets sidetracked, though, with Blue and Blow standing around as observers.
★★★☆☆
To October 23; metopera.org. Subsequent performances scheduled for Chicago and Los Angeles
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September 28, 2021 at 06:38PM
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Fire Shut Up in My Bones makes Met Opera history - Financial Times
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