Artist Paul Gauguin’s life was an opera waiting to happen: a few months sharing the Yellow House in Arles with Vincent van Gogh, during which time their quarrels caused van Gogh to cut off his own ear; travels to French Polynesia, mainly the fabled Tahiti, where his drinking and fornicating gave rise to many improbable legends, as well as several children; a prison sentence from the colonial government for siding with Polynesian natives in a dispute with French colonials; death (before he could start his prison sentence) from an overdose of morphine; posthumous fame — there’s material for two or three operas there.
Well, a young Italian composer, Fabrizio Carlone, finally figured this out, and wrote a shortish opera to his own libretto, featuring quotations from Gauguin’s correspondence and writing. Mark Streshinsky, Artistic Director of the West Edge Opera, found the opera online, tracked down the composer, who was living in Japan, got him to agree to some necessary changes, and then engaged choreographer Yannis Adoniou and his Kunst-Stoff Dance Company, and a lead baritone, Anders Froehlich, who, thanks to extensive training in ballet, is able to participate in Adoniou’s dances. The result, Bonjour M. Gauguin, promises to be one of the most exciting, if strange and avant-garde, operas the West Edge company has ever done. And that’s saying something.
Streshinsky describes the music as sort of updated Debussy, so you needn’t worry about the dissonant assaults of high modernism, if that’s not your thing.