OPERA PHILADELPHIA'S PRESENTATION OF Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain (heard Feb. 7) reaffirmed the power and high quality of the composer’s first-ever opera. A co-commission with Santa Fe Opera and Minnesota Opera in collaboration with North Carolina Oper

Gene Scheer skillfully transmutes Charles Frazier’s ultra-discursive, stream-of-consciousness novel into dramatically viable scenes. The taciturn Southern deserter hero Inman thus becomes inevitably rather garrulous, not least in fantasy ensembles joining him with the distant object of his odyssey home, the sensitive Ada. Sensibly, the resourceful runaway slave Lucinda (merely described in the novel) here has dramatic agency and bears witness to an African-American perspective
Feb 07, 2016