Cascadia Composers Quiltings

Meaning and quality on a shoestring

Opera Theater Oregon's tribute to Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill: expressive performances, timely message.

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We all know a bit about Woody Guthrie, the 20th-century American social-justice troubadour. Apostles and adopters like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Cash embraced and copied his music ad infinitum. During these 21st-century trying times, when social justice is taking a far back seat to greed and power-grabbing, why not celebrate Guthrie again?

Opera Theater Oregon’s This Land Sings: Songs of Wandering, Love and Protest took up the cause with an engaging production built on Michael Daugherty’s radio-show-style chamber opera Aug. 24 at Alberta Rose Theater. The house wasn’t sold out, but close enough. Scenery was spare, other than big-screen slides of the Dust Bowl and other Depression horrors, and costumes were non-existent—though conductor/OTO co-creative director/composer Justin Ralls wore suspenders. The outfits leaned toward muted country-folksy with a touch of  frontier vibe rather than showy or elaborate.

Opera Theater Oregon's 'This Land Sings.' Left to right: Daniel Mobbs, Lisa Neher, suspendered Justin Ralls, announcer Thom Hartmann. Photo by Michael Daugherty.
Opera Theater Oregon’s ‘This Land Sings.’ Left to right: singers Daniel Mobbs and Lisa Neher, suspendered conductor Justin Ralls, announcer Thom Hartmann. Photo by Michael Daugherty.

But the music? The singing? The conducting? The ensemble-playing? They were terrific and made up for any deficits in visual design. With this piece, OTO continues to fulfill its mission of presenting contemporary English-language works that shine a bright and piercing light on social, political and environmental issues. If you saw OTO’s 2017 Two Yosemites, composed by Ralls, then you know the group set a high bar for its mission and continues to pursue it with utter sincerity. (Read Arts Watch’s interview with Ralls here).

New music for old songs

Daugherty, an Iowa-born composer and musician, is a six-time Grammy winner with a long list of award-winning contemporary works. His music moves from folk to Stravinsky, from jazz to Mahler. It shimmers with American vernacular. In This Land Sings, which premiered in 2016 at Tulsa Camerata, he reshapes a dozen of Guthrie’s songs.

But, contrary to popular opinion, Guthrie was not a composer—he was a lyricist who set new words to borrowed melodies. Daugherty composed original melodies around Guthrie’s lyrics, and scattered several instrumentals throughout the one-hour opera to help to tell Guthrie’s story—and to draw some parallels to today’s world without beating us bloody with the message. He also composed a new overture strictly for this production.

I loved how Daugherty created duets between single instruments and singers. Daugherty was jazz arranger Gil Evans’ assistant for a couple of years in the ‘80s and was Yale University’s jazz band leader, and in this piece you can hear how solos and conversations among instruments—and between instruments and singers—play into his jazz leanings. “This Trombone Kills Fascists” (a riff on the sign pasted on Guthrie’s guitar) gave trombonist Jason Elliott a moment, and trumpeter Logan Thane Brown got another with his solo in “Marfa Lights.”

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Woody Guthrie with antifa guitar.
Woody Guthrie with antifa guitar.

With the help of narrator Thom Hartmann, who played the radio announcer and is a real-life well-known progressive radio personality broadcasting from Portland, This Land Sings stepped us through Woody Guthrie’s peripatetic life (1912-1967). OTO localized the text (with Daugherty’s permission), because Guthrie lived in Portland’s Lents neighborhood in the ‘40s, did some lucrative public relations for the Bonneville Dam project during that prolific period (“Roll on Columbia, Roll On”), and wrote about the devastating post-war Vanport flood in the late ‘40s. 

The well-paced original text was written by Daugherty and Jason S. Heilman, and it was smoothly presented by Hartmann, a practiced pro behind the mike.

Hootenanny

But let’s talk more about the music, the production’s sustaining highpoint. The seven-member ensemble included clarinetist Lisa Lipton, bassoonist Danielle Goldman, trumpeter Logan Thane Brown, trombonist Jason Elliot, violinist Bryce Caster, bassist Dan Schulte, and—most amazing—indefatigable percussionist John Lipton, who played instruments from vibes to bongos to bells and whistles and doodads in between. Daugherty might have written the most exciting percussionist score of any opera, notwithstanding some Wagnerian intercessions in The Ring. The percussion gave the music gravity, levity, originality and sparkle.

Lisa Neher and Nicholas Meyer in OTO's 'This Land Sings.' Photo by Michael Daugherty.
Neher and OTO artistic co-director Nicholas Meyer in ‘This Land Sings.’ Photo by Michael Daugherty.

Then there were the singers, all of whose voices resonated with expression and clarity. Mezzos Hannah Penn and Lisa Neher traded off songs with two male singers. Neher, a small woman with a very big voice, was especially alive in “Don’t Sing Me a Love Song” as she fights against wandering Woody’s perpetual “moving on.” She does a strong duet with whiskey-smooth-voiced baritone Nicholas Meyer in “Forbidden Fruit.” Penn—who sang the lead in this spring’s Portland Opera transgender chamber piece As One—could pull off any song with her deeply textured voice, but her “Bread and Roses” duet with bassoonist Goldman best showed off her burnished chops.

The scene stealer, however, was bass-baritone Daniel Mobbs, who performed a number of songs as a kind of Woody Guthrie stand-in, including the poignant closing song “Wayfaring Stranger” as well as “Graceland,” “Hot Air,” “Don’t Sing Me a Love Song” (with Neher), “Perpetual Motion” and “Ballad of Joe Hill.” Aside from his disarming stage presence, he has a bold voice that could carry in the Coliseum.

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Hannah Penn takes a duet with bassoonist Danielle Goldman in OTO's 'This Land Sings.' Photo by Michael Daugherty.
Hannah Penn takes a duet with bassoonist Danielle Goldman in ‘This Land Sings.’ Photo by Michael Daugherty.

If there was anything I could have done without, it was the post-opera ukulele-singalong/hootenanny (a Guthrie-Seeger word) of “This Land Is My Land.” I love that song, but after hearing Daugherty’s exquisite instrumental version of “This Land Sings”—proof of his extraordinary gift for blending, bending and breaking musical forms—I wanted to remain with that memory.

Protest tongue-twisters

The first part of the program featured young Brooklyn, N.Y., composer Michael Lanci’s 2017 “Songs for Joe Hill,” spoken and sung movingly by soprano Helen Huang, who has a helluva lithe tongue and can straighten any verbal twister with precision. Based on five protest songs memorializing Joe Hill—the 19th-century union activist and, some claim, martyr—Songs for Joe Hill made a tuneful and highly suitable 25-minute prelude to the longer This Land Sings, which kicked off with the song “Ballad of Joe Hill.”

Lanci was awarded the 2017-18 American Prize for his five songs accompanied by a six-member ensemble (flute, piano, violin, cello, clarinet and percussion). He and Daugherty attended the Aug. 24 performance, and after their pieces were performed, they took deep, well-earned bows.

Nicholas Meyer takes a duet with clarinetist Lisa Lipton in OTO's 'This Land Sings.' Photo by Michael Daugherty.
Meyer takes a duet with clarinetist Lisa Lipton in ‘This Land Sings.’ Photo by Michael Daugherty.

Meaning and quality

How bracing, refreshing and encouraging to see a shoestring-budget company such as OTO present such a high-quality and meaningful production. Should I say relevant? Guthrie might not like that word, but we gotta find meaning and truth, and he would approve of that.

Angela Allen lives in Portland and writes about the arts. She is a published poet and photographer and teaches creative and journalistic writing to Portland-area students. In 2019, she was elected to the executive board of the Music Critics Association of North America. Her website is angelaallenwrites.com.

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Photo Joe Cantrell

Angela Allen writes about the arts, especially opera, jazz, chamber music, and photography. Since 1984, she has contributed regularly to online and print publications, including Oregon ArtsWatch, The Columbian, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Willamette Week, The Oregonian, among others. She teaches photography and creative writing to Oregon students, and in 2009, served as Fishtrap’s Eastern Oregon Writer-in-Residence. A published poet and photographer, she was elected to the Music Critics Association of North America’s executive board and is a recipient of an NEA-Columbia Journalism grant. She earned an M.A. in journalism from University of Oregon in 1984, and 30 years later received her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Portland with her scientist husband and often unwieldy garden. Contact Angela Allen through her website.

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One Response

  1. I very much appreciate learning about this project. Opera along with headbanger thrash and electronic dance have been the only genres of music I’ve had trouble finding my wandering curiosity willing to explore. Yet the concept, theme, main muse in Woody Guthrie’s writings, description of arrangements and instrumental interplay make me think that if I still had sustainable work this woulda been a local production I’d have spent some non-rent & utilities money on.

    Thank you Angela Allen for providing such a vivid review with well-focused critique. Thank you OAW for providing the space. I’ll share links with the email media discussion list.
    Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters & Shifters
    Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
    Media Discussion List

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