Walnut Creek's Festival Opera has always been a gutsy little company, and now — struggling to get out of a financial crisis spurred by the Great Recession that reduced operations last year — even in the midst of intense fund-raising, it's planning to produce an intriguing, unusual program few big companies would risk.
In announcing the plan for the Spring, Executive Director Sara Nealy writes: "We are doing what we can afford, and using the year to recover from some financial setbacks. Though smaller-scale, we are very excited about the work."
And well she should be: On April 26 and 28, http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/575923">Festival Opera will present two chamber operas commemorating the Holocaust: Viktor Ullman's The Emperor of Atlantis and Jake Heggie's Another Sunrise.
Ullman's opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis or Death Abdicates), with libretto by Peter Kien, was written in 1943 while the two were interned in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp.
The opera satirized the political situation of the war while delivering timeless messages of the power of life and death. A struggle between a deluded, warring emperor and Death itself wreaks havoc on humanity until one of them gains the upper hand. The Nazis did not allow the opera to be performed, and both composer and librettist were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.
Written in four scenes, the opera features a small cast of singers as well as a 13-piece chamber orchestra. The opera's West Coast premiere was in 1977 by the San Francisco Spring Opera Theater.
Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer — responsible for the 2010 Moby-Dick — created Another Sunrise, which had its world premiere in Seattle in 2012. The Festival Opera production will be only its second production. In the short work, a Polish resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor struggles to tell her story to a tape recorder during a sleepless night.
The work goes to the essence of what it takes to survive, Heggie has said:
I’m particularly inspired by stories of social justice and the inequities of life, and how we are all connected as human beings despite those inequities. The full breadth of Krystyna Zywulska’s work as a memoirist, poet and satirist is still being revealed and given new appreciation. Her story cries out to be told through theater and poetry.
New York stage director Beth Greenberg will direct the productions, Matilda Hofman will conduct. The cast is comprised of Marie Plette (in the one-woman Heggie opera), Eugene Brancoveanu (Emperor Overall), Philip Skinner (Death), Roberto Perlas Gomez (The Loudspeaker), Rebecca Garcia (The Maiden), Christopher Bengochea (The Soldier and Harlekin), and Valentina Osinski (The Drummer Girl). Both operas will be sung in English.