Bullock/ Tines/Appleby/Los Angeles Master Chorale & PO/Adams
(Nonesuch, two CDs)
The opera met with a mixed response on its 2017 premiere. After two reworkings, and with many of its original cast reprising their roles, this premiere recording is a rich and energetic mix
John Adams’s fourth full-length opera was first performed in San Francisco in 2017. Then the music of Girls of the Golden West played for almost three hours, but after two reworkings – the first for the European premiere in Amsterdam in 2019, the second for the concert performances in Los Angeles last year on which this recording is based – it runs for just over two. Like its predecessors, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West is based on real historical events and characters, in this case in the California gold rush of 1849, as chronicled in contemporary documents and journals of the time, from which the director, Peter Sellars, assembled the libretto.
Reviews of the San Francisco premiere had been mixed; the opera’s sheer length and its discursiveness, which blurred the sense of narrative, were both criticised, but Adams’s cuts and revisions seem to have done a great deal to tighten the dramatic focus. The first act presents the socially and racially diverse community, black and white, Asian and Latin American, brought together by the hunt for gold in this fleeting frontier world, while the second shows the tensions that grew up between the miners and their followers, and their tragic results, culminating in the lynching of a Mexican woman who had killed the man who had tried to rape her. Everything is observed by “Dame Shirley”, the pen name of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife from Massachusetts who spent 18 months in the California mining camps and brought that world vividly and wittily to life in her letters home.
