Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 5 - Blue

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 Critics Association of North America 2020 Award for Best New Opera, and was the first of this trio to have a commercial recording available. The second trio of which Blue is a member resides in the work of composer Jeanine Tesori; it is her third opera. Tesori’s first two operas were also commissioned by forward-looking opera director Francesca Zambello, former General Director of The Glimmerglass Festival and current Artistic Director at Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center. Tesori’s fourth opera, Grounded , a collaboration with playwright, now librettist, George Brant, opened the 2024/25 Season at the Metropolitan Opera. Opera is an important part of Tesori’s polyphonic voice as a composer. Her training as a pianist began in finding tunes on the keyboard at age three; she became a serious classical musician in her teens, then switched from pre-med to a music major at Barnard College. She worked for 15 years as a gigging musician in Nashville, learning from Buryl Red (who had studied with Elliott Carter at Yale) and taking inspiration from Leoš Janáˇcek, Béla Bartók, and Tania León, composers whose work spans classical art music shaped by folk rhythms, melodies, and structures from eastern Europe and Cuba. Many of Tesori’s recent projects have given voice to experiences outside of her own identity. One of her best known and most celebrated works is the musical Fun Home (2013), based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel that centers on the discovery of queer sexual identities and the pain of losing a loved one to suicide. Caroline, or Change (2003), Tesori’s first collaboration with Tony Kushner (who later wrote the libretto to her first opera), is about a Black maid who works for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana, and engages the early Civil Rights movement through spirituals, the Blues, Motown, and Klezmer music. Soft Power (2018), her collaboration with David Henry Hwang, reverses the lens from The King and I by exoticizing America through a Chinese musical, set in the future, that challenges the nature of democracy, cultural identity, and racism. Soon after Blue , Tesori was the Supervising Vocal Producer for Steven Spielberg’s movie version of West Side Story (2021), a work about class, racial ethnicity, and Puerto Rican life in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the late 1950s. Blue brought Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson together. Commissioned for The Glimmerglass Festival, an early impetus for the opera’s story was Zambello’s question, “Why is the killing of innocent Black men happening all The opera is rich with depictions of complex family relationships,as with The Father and Son. Karli Cadel - The Glimmerglass Festival