Blue [Double Album] (World Premiere Recording)

Best New Opera Award

Blue, an all-too-timely story of one family’s devastating loss — the teenage son of a black police officer is killed by a white police officer — is given universal resonance by Jeanine Tesori’s gripping, accessible music and Tazewell Thompson’s poignant, unflinching libretto.

Blue was selected as the recipient of this year’s award in mid-March, and we at MCANA are proud to be announcing the award now, in this difficult time, when many of its planned productions around the country had to be canceled, and because incidents like the one at the center of the opera continue to occur. We hope that this important work will see many more performances in the future.

Blue deserves pride of place because it was a commissioned world premiere, and because it is very, very strong. Composer Tesori crosses all known boundaries, from acclaimed musicals (Caroline, or Change; Fun Home) to opera (A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck, also commissioned by Glimmerglass and first done in 2011, Zambello’s first season). She also teaches, works in film and television and is now writing a score for the Metropolitan Opera.

Two years ago Zambello asked Tesori and Thompson — a playwright and veteran Glimmerglass producer — for an opera about race in America. Inspired by James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates and his own experiences, Thompson has produced a sensitive, poetic libretto. It tells of a black couple who are thrilled to have a baby boy, despite the warnings of friends who fear the fate awaiting so many young African-American men. The father is a New York City policeman, and between the acts the boy, now a rebellious teenager, is shot dead by a white cop. In the second act the father’s rage and the mother’s despair are gradually consoled with the help of their pastor.

Tesori’s music is eclectic, like so many new operas, but assuredly so. Her orchestration is rich and her vocal lines retain a beauty and eloquence, unlike so many new operas. Occasionally the opera skirts sentimentality, but is mostly loving in the first act and elegiac in the second. Thompson produces, and does an accomplished job. Donald Eastman’s décor consists of a back wall showing an angled city street façade that shifts colors hauntingly, along with roll-on set pieces.