‘The Summer King’ makes for thought-provoking performance

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For the company’s first world premiere in its 78-year history, Pittsburgh Opera is presenting Daniel Sonenberg’s “The Summer King,” an opera about an AfricanAmerican baseball player from Pittsburgh, composed by a white New Yorker who teaches at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. This is one of Pittsburgh Opera’s most ambitious projects, and one of the riskiest. The new work has some flaws, but it’s a serious, thought-provoking theater piece, musically sound and emotionally moving.

The strength of Mr. Sonenberg’s musical writing and Pittsburgh Opera’s superb production should recommend “The Summer King” to opera buffs and sports fans, to those with an interest in local history, to the African-American and Hispanic communities. All these were represented at the opening performance Saturday evening — including the title character’s reallife great grandson — which generated an excitement through Benedum Center and a feeling that this was something special.

The eponymous hero, Josh Gibson, made history by hitting a ball outside the walls of Yankee Stadium in 1934. He was a member of the Negro Leagues, playing for the Homestead Grays and later Mexico’s Vera Cruz Azules. He was acknowledged for his talents but never accepted into the major leagues, which were not racially integrated until 1947 by Jackie Robinson, months after Gibson’s death at the age of 35.

Mr. Sonenberg’s opera, with a libretto by the composer in collaboration with Daniel Nester and more recent revisions by Mark Campbell, was first commissioned and given a trial concert reading by Maine’s Portland Ovations in 2014. In the opera, Gibson becomes a flawed hero in the tradition of classical tragedy, with issues that are timely today including racism, alcoholism and drug use, mental and physical health care and the consequences of sudden unprepared-for fame. If anything, the libretto tries for too much all at once. The multitude of characters is confusing, one wishes for greater development of each. While the action progresses in swift cinematic fragments, some segments go on too long, and the scenes after the protagonist dies seem superfluous and anticlimactic.

The subject matter provides opportunities for classical and jazz styles, ragtime, mariachi and big band swing, and Mr. Sonenberg is well suited to this eclectic mix. While his training was predominantly classical, studying at Bard College with the venerable Joan Tower, he had early on learned drums, guitar and piano with hopes of becoming a singer-songwriter. His dissertation at City University of New York was on Joni Mitchell. This score is soundly crafted, with vocal writing that allows the singers to project the words, and gratifying arias that should have “legs” and survive in concert on their own.

Pittsburgh Opera has given its all to this show: a multi-racial chorus and large cast in which each principal is individually excellent, but fits into the dramatic scheme, superb musical realization under Antony Walker, scenic designs by Andrew Lieberman that allow flash changes, and direction by Sam Helfrich that moves the action fleetly to its inevitable ill-fated conclusion.

In the title role of Gibson, baritone Alfred Walker swings a bat with the same ease and naturalness that allows him to manipulate his burly, resounding baritone voice. He can be tender in a love duet with his young wife Helen (bright and edgy coloratura Jacqueline Echols), heartbreaking in an aria describing her death during childbirth, and yet, in the second act, elicit the viewer’s admonition for the character’s dissolution and self-destructive behavior.

Portraying Gibson’s girlfriend Grace, Denyce Graves at 53 retains the booming chest tones and riveting persona that made her Carmen and Dalila world-class enactments for more than two decades. When this woman is on the stage, everything around her disappears into her own luminosity. The third principal, honey-voiced tenor Sean Panikkar, plays Courier journalist Wendell Smith, who describes Gibson’s gift as “lightening” — a quality that each of these three singers possesses in abundance.

Deep-voiced bass Kenneth Kellogg is an asset as Gibson’s sympathetic friend, Sam Bankhead, while Jasmine Muhammad’s luscious soprano enhances the lines afforded to the flirtatious Hattie. In multiple assignments of smaller parts, high tenors Norman Shankle and Martin Bakari, dramatic tenor Ray Very and bass Phillip Gay all do yeomen’s work, although the proliferation of humanity that surrounds the opera’s central figure is too often overwhelming.