The historical Dame Shirley was a fascinating woman with a pioneering spirit. Sellars’s patched-together approach doesn’t work as well for “Girls,” a work that cavalierly invites comparisons with Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the West”), an Italian’s take on the Gold Rush. Though the results had awkward aspects, that opera maintained a strong narrative impetus: Its plot was driven by a countdown to the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Sellars also assembled a libretto from poetry, journals and original documents. Sellars, which had its premiere here in 2005, Mr. Most of Ned’s words come from the journals of fugitive slaves.įor “Doctor Atomic,” the previous collaboration between Mr. When Ned (the charismatic young bass-baritone Davóne Tines) first appears, he describes himself in the third person: “Ned Peters was a hustler from Independence town,” Mr. “Not dainty, simpering kid-gloved weaklings, but muscular, stalwart, dauntless young braves.” (The words come from Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.”) McKinny sings lustily over skittish, pointillist music in the orchestra. “It was a driving, vigorous, restless population,” Mr. The opera opens with Clarence, a hearty miner (the exuberant bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), who sets up the story almost as if giving a lecture.
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