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Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Schuller: The Fisherman and His Wife; Holst: The Cloud Messenger
Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:
The Christmas holiday season, it's often said, is a magical time meant for the delight of the children. It's the time of year to listen to opera written with the age group in mind. There is indeed a whole genre of such lyric theater music. One excellent specimen is Gunther Schuller's The Fisherman and His Wife (1970), commissioned by the Junior League of Boston to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. They approached Professor Schuller of Boston's New England Conservatory to write the music. Literary great John Updike was engaged to update the 19th century Brothers Grimm fairytale for modern staging. The Opera Company of Boston premiered it. It was televised on Boston's WBZ. The Boston Modern Opera Project revived the opera in 2015 in celebration of Schuller's 90th birthday, but he did not live quite long enough to witness the new production. Gil Rose conducts BMOP and Odyssey Opera of Boston. Released in 2020 on CD through the proprietary BMOP Sound label.
Gunther Schuller's The Fisherman and His Wife is an operatic parable about greed. Since it runs for merely an hour, there's time remaining for a choral setting by Gustav Holst of a love story drawn from ancient Sanskrit epic poetry.
Holst completed composing The Cloud Messenger in 1910 just before he started work on his famous orchestral suite, The Planets. Holst prepared his own English language text. He tweaked the old story somewhat for his own modern musical purposes. He conceived a gigantic, oratorio-style opus, which was a disappointment at its first performance, so it was put aside: that goes to explain why The Planets became Holst's best known work, and why nobody has ever even heard of its predecessor. There's a scaled-down arrangement of The Cloud Messenger for chamber orchestra and voices, recorded in 2019 with the Choir of King's College, London and the instrumentalists of the Strand Ensemble, conducted by Joseph Fort, who is also the arranger. It was released last year through the Scottish Delphian record label.