Arizona Opera is bringing back its first-ever commissioned opera and performing the premiere of a regionalized version of an opera centered on the grisly 1914 mass murders at the home of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
The 2019-20 season also includes an opera that explores forbidden love in the McCarthy-era, Puccini’s beloved “La Boheme” and Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the first time the company will perform it in more than 25 years.
“These are some of the most special moments for an arts organization when you get to unveil something you’ve been working on for so long,” said Arizona Opera President and General Director Joseph Specter. “We’re very excited about the season.”
A highlight could be the return of Craig Bohmler and Steven Mark Kohn’s “Riders of the Purple Sage,” which Arizona Opera commissioned and premiered just three years ago. The performances in Phoenix and Tucson were near sell-outs and Specter said that it out performed in single ticket sales any other show over the previous 12 years including the hugely popular standards “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly.”
“No one would expect that a show as wonderful as ‘Hamilton’ should only play three performances in one city. ‘Riders’ just had that kind of popular impact,” Specter said. “We did two performances in Tucson, three performances in Phoenix, and aside from the financial upside of that production, just the fact that that show is still so much in the ether. It’s part of so many conversations I have basically on a day-to-day basis, I felt like we really owed it to Arizona to bring it back again.”
He said the success of “Riders” and of the company’s inaugural McDougall RED Series of chamber operas, launched this season, illustrates to him that “people in Arizona are ready to go on an adventure with art.”
“Maybe in the past we might have underestimated how much people are craving a variety of things. A piece like ‘Riders’ clearly proves that it can feed people’s passions just as much as a beloved traditional piece like ‘La Boheme,’” he said.
Puccini’s “La Boheme” opens the opera’s Main Stage series in January 2020; it comes to Tucson next February as part of the 2020 Tucson Desert Song Festival.
The Red Series opens this fall in October at Tucson’s Temple of Music and Art with the “Taliesin West Version” of Daron Hagen and Paul Muldoon’s “Shining Brow,” based on the murders of architect Wright’s lover and six others at his Wisconsin Taliesen estate. Specter said it’s “incredibly cool” that Hagen is creating a new version specifically for Arizona Opera that reflects Wright’s Arizona ties. The architect recreated Taliesen in Scottsdale years after the original estate in Wisconsin was set ablaze by an employee, who used a hatchet to brutally murder the seven victims.
Hagen composed “Shining Brow” in 1992-93 and wrote the second act while was living at Taliesen West, he said. The piece was premiered in spring 1993 near the original Taliesen in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The piece has gone on to be performed many times and with each Hagen has revised it, he said.
The biggest changes for Arizona include cutting 20 minutes from the show and eliminating women from the chorus, which makes the opera, Hagen said, “more of a hulking male presence over the two female characters” — Wright’s wife Catherine and his mistress Mamah Cheney, who along with her two young children were murdered.
“They are the only women besides the maid that delivers this fury-esque description of the murder of Mamah Cheney and the chef that murdered her,” he said. “It’s quite effective and dramaturgically it’s super strong, I think.”
The revival of “Riders of the Purple Sage,” based on the Zane Grey novel and set in Arizona, comes as the opera is about to premiere its second commission, this one a mystery focused on Bisbee’s famously haunted Copper Queen Hotel. “The Copper Queen” will premiere in fall 2020 to open the 2020-21 Arizona Opera season, Specter said.
