Boston Lyric Opera Plays the Music of Terence Blanchard at Emerson Cutler Majestic Theater

Terence Blanchard
Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre
Boston Lyric Opera's Champion: An Opera in Jazz
Boston, MA
May 22, 2022

Now in its 45th season, Boston Lyric Opera is the largest and longest-lived opera company in New England (founded in 1976). Standing away from popular themes, BLO's programming has remained faithful to the tradition of trail-blazing new ground and offering new ways to enhance the opera-going experience.

Always pursuing productions on the edge of popular themes, Boston Lyric Opera has covered topics including sexual ambiguity, gender-bias, racial prejudice, and future dystopia society in its contemporary operatic plots. Champion: An Opera in Jazz is no exception, incorporating the subject of a renown boxer (1960's welterweight pugilist Emile Griffith) who's life is torn apart by the killing of a competitor in the ring. Griffith's later recognition of his own bisexuality, in an un-accepting society, leads to a destructive downward spiral as he searches for forgiveness.

An equally compelling musical score written by multi-Grammy Award-winner Terence Blanchard, renown jazz trumpeter, composer (including movie scores), and band leader of E-Collective, creates an orchestral arrangement that wraps around the intense story-line. Having read the following quote by Griffith, "I killed a man, and the world forgives me; I love a man and the world wants to kill me," Blanchard was drawn into the profound message and started writing the musical score.

His approach to the composition was to enter the period of time in the 1960's/70's with its racial conflict, segregation and fusing the desperate circumstances of this individual with current societal norms, "I'm trying to do what Puccini did—use the colors and the culture and the folklore of the day to tell a story. If Puccini wrote a scene, he could write it based on one harmonic color, even though he would use a lot of different harmonies in it. What I'm doing is taking how jazz harmony moves and doing the same thing."

Blanchard's musical adaptation offers a pallet of jazz genre, interpreting the rise and fall of the anti-hero boxer. With hand clapping, syncopated rhythms, a hint of blues and Bessie Smith, soft jazz orchestral ballads, and a West Side Story-like dance number, the musical score seamlessly fuses the opera and jazz styles.

The cast, with powerful portrayals of Griffith by baritones Brian Major and Markel Reed(as a younger Emile Griffith), and mezzo-soprano Tichina Vaughn as his mother Emelda Griffith, delivers not only superb voicing but believable period characters, which includes street-wise profanity and direct language.

Orchestral jazz in the hands of contemporary masters like Maria Schneider, Darcy James Argue and Terence Blanchard, as featured in this Boston Lyric Opera production, continue to offer the composer a wide pallet of experimental arrangements. In Champion: An Opera in Jazz, the audience is the beneficiary of this complex and emotional exploration.