Review: Use your words, Charleston. (Then add some song.)
Review of "Singers & Stanzas," a world premiere concert from Charleston's Holy City Arts & Lyric Opera
Poetry and music aren’t exactly strange bedfellows. They have commingled for centuries, with one informing the other to pine or ponder, rage or rejoice.
Consider the art song, which marries composers with poets in works created expressly for solo voice and piano accompaniment. An enduring staple of the classical music world, it has famously fueled works like Dichterliebe, or A Poet’s Love, a rapturous song cycle on romantic love based on Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine composed by Robert Schumann in the early 1820s.
But in the hands of Charleston’s ever-inventive opera company Holy City Arts & Lyric Opera, aka HALO, the art song goes local. In a fresh take on the form, HALO’s Singers & Stanzas leveraged fresh-from-the-hopper words of local poets, set to new compositions and performed by classically trained singers. The world premiere on May 4 was a one-off concert, but, with any luck, it may find its way to more audiences.
HALO is frequently game for new artistic tacks, revisiting works of opera and musical theater with inventive takes and mounting them in unexpected spots.
Think Rigoletto through the lens of college basketball. Or La traviata on the field of Charleston’s baseball stadium, Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park. Or Into the Woods atop an artillery fort on Sullivan’s Island. During the pandemic, HALO was often spotted cruising around in a pickup truck, piano in its bed, with the aim of bringing opera home, quite literally, pulling into Charleston area neighborhoods and belting arias.
In doing so, HALO seeks to render these works accessible, blowing the dust off them to engage new audiences in an art form never intended to collect it.
So it was on-mission when HALO’s general director Leah Edwards and artistic director Dimitri Pittas hatched a plan to join Lowcountry poets with a contemporary composer in a world-premiere collaboration.
HALO chose a more formal setting for this foray in Charleston’s historic Dock Street Theatre. They then enlisted four Lowcountry poets — Marcus Amaker, Evelyn Berry, Abby Duran and Brittany Porcher — to create new poems. These were set to the music by New York-based composer Laura Jobin-Acosta, then performed by Chicago-based baritone Schyler Vargas (who was operative in the programming) and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Metzger, accompanied by pianist Isaac Hayward.
In doing so, HALO seeks to render these works accessible, blowing the dust off them to engage new audiences in an art form never intended to collect it.
So it was on-mission when HALO’s general director Leah Edwards and artistic director Dimitri Pittas hatched a plan to join Lowcountry poets with a contemporary composer in a world-premiere collaboration.
HALO chose a more formal setting for this foray in Charleston’s historic Dock Street Theatre. They then enlisted four Lowcountry poets — Marcus Amaker, Evelyn Berry, Abby Duran and Brittany Porcher — to create new poems. These were set to the music by New York-based composer Laura Jobin-Acosta, then performed by Chicago-based baritone Schyler Vargas (who was operative in the programming) and mezzo-soprano Lindsay Metzger, accompanied by pianist Isaac Hayward.
The guiding directive for the poets was to focus on the notion of love, which offered pause for some of them. Love is a tricky word to blithely bandy about, ubiquitous and saturated and fraught as it can be. Assured by HALO that the word need not be restricted to romantic love, the poets took wing, delivering four wholly divergent, yet equally resonant works.
First, though, the program shared recent works joining some celebrated poets with contemporary composers. Vargas lent his layered, warm baritone to Rosephanye Powell’s composition of Langston Hughes’ “Hold Fast to Dreams,” then gave rich voice to joy in the world premiere of “This Joy,” with words by Marella Martin Koch and music by Nicolas Lell Benavides.
“End of the Line,” with text by Mark Adamo and music by John Corigliano, was a zippy, quippy cabaret number performed with sparkle and skill by Metzger, “Love Remained” by Ben Moore with a text by Michael Kelly, infused a musical theater vibe.
Hughes’s words again graced the stage in a Gershwinesque go at “When Sue Wears Red” and then a wistful “Luck,” both set to music of Ricky Ian Gordon, who then provided both text and music for the poignant “A Horse with Wings,” performed with impressive panache by Vargas.
Then we went local.
Each Lowcountry poet gave voice to a new work, along with Jobin-Acosta’s musical interpretation. Starting with Amaker’s hopeful, healing “Photosynthesis,” it had as its central metaphor a seed taking root, with love the way to work through pain. It was set to tender, reflective notes, explored fully by Vargas.
Berry’s “Arietta for Transfemmes” proclaimed a fierce, complex love, one in which “we find our way back to ourselves again.” Duran’s mournful “Mosaic II” mined forgiveness, exploring it “a dust covered veil,” noting its patterns, its indents.
In an interlude of glorious, infectious self-possession—a high and culminating note of the concert—Brittany Porcher performed her work “Exhale” as spoken word, defiantly jubilant, name-checking Whitney Houston and fully owning the Dock Street to such effect that at the end she spurred audience members ecstatically from their seats.
Wild applause for local poetry. The words were there, to be sure, felt and fine, intricate and searching. At the same time, Jobin-Acosta’s deft, sensitive interpretation of each distinct voice illustrated what can happen in collaboration—dignified all the more by Vargas and Metzger, as well as by Hayward’s masterful accompaniment, forever surrounding and never crowding voice or word.
Those are words to live by in the local arts scene—framed in notes, realized in song. By amplifying Lowcountry voices, this considered, stirring concert delivered something this city could use: nuanced, candid self-exploration through the arts. It serves as a testament to the potential of works whose words sprung from this soil, sculpted by artists reflective of an ever-changing city that more and more call home.