Fill-in deserving of permanence: The opera short
DURING the days last June, mezzo-soprano Raehann BryceDavis was marching and calling for justice with thousands of others in the streets of Los Angeles following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. But at home, by night, she was rehearsing ‘All’afflitto è dolce il pianto,’ an aria from Gaetano Donizetti’s 1837 opera ‘Roberto Devereux.’
In the aria, Sara, Duchess of Nottingham, is hiding her tears from everyone but the audience as she beholds in the tragic tale of the Fair Rosamund a reflection of her own lovelorn grief.
As she sang Sara, first onstage for LA Opera’s at-the-buzzer production in February 2020 and afterward, at home, as concert halls shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic and all of her outlets for expression dried up, Bryce-Davis started to see in Sara a reflection of her own turmoil.
“I came to this realisation that the sorrow that she felt and the sorrow that I felt could express the same message,” she tells me in a phone interview.
The result was ‘To the Afflicted,’ a short film BryceDavis created with filmmaker Jon Goff and pianist Esme Wong that not only captures the singer’s exquisite control of the aria’s lucent bel canto colors, but also the fear, anxiety, mourning and rage happening outside of the aria, in the summer of 2020.
In its caption, Bryce-Davis describes the short as ‘a clenched fist around the (reins) of destiny, an open hand raised in praise’ and a dedication to ‘those in opera and those fighting on the front lines for justice and equity.’
It also was one of the first examples of what has become something of a vanguard in opera shorts. What might at first sound like inappropriate attire for the Kennedy Centre is actually the product of a surprisingly symbiotic relationship between the good old-fashioned music video and good even-olderfashioned opera.
And the harvest of this unlikely hybrid is a range of short films that showcase top talents in American opera, highlight contemporary composers and recruit other artists (including costume designers and cinematographers) as well as tens of thousands of new viewers.
Opera Philadelphia recently debuted ‘The Island We Made’ a hauntingly beautiful collaboration among composer Angèlica Negròn, drag superstar Sasha Velour and filmmaker Matthew Placek, which includes the most emotionally satisfying application of peanut butter to graham crackers that I’ve ever seen. — The Washington Post