Maestro Patrick Summers and the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra Virginia bass Cory McGee, also an HGO Studio Artist, sang the roles of the boy Billy and of Amy’s father Papi. Villalón’s character, who does not appear in the book, is one of the charming additions to the opera.Ĭuban-American tenor Andres Acosta portrayed the role of Jasper. She and Peter do snow angels during an appealing orchestral interlude. “Try being a girl in a world of boys” she complains to Peter, as she builds a snowman for his amusement and shares her sled with him for a downhill ride. In a cast most of whose members doubled assignments, he also performed the role of the boy, Tim, in an endearing performance.Įlena Villalón’s Amy, Andreas Acosta’s Jasper and Papi and Cory McGee’s BillyĬuban-American soprano Elena Villalón, an HGO studio artist, sang the role of Amy, a girl who befriends Peter, in a convincing, beautifully sung, portrayal. Ĭalifornia bass-baritone Nicholas Newton, possessing the cast’s lowest voice, brought vocal authority to the role of Peter’s Daddy.
I subsequently praised her performances of France’s Agnes Sorel and of Serena. My first Karen Slack performances were during her San Francisco Adler Fellowship years early this century. Of the cast members, Slack was the best known to me.
Slack’s expressive voice of power was enlisted for a heartfelt performance of Mama’s soliloquy, sung in Peter’s bedroom after he left for his venture alone in the snow.
Soprano Karen Black was dramatically persuasive and vocally outstanding in the role of Peter’s Mama. Karen Slack’s Mama and Nicholas Newton’s Daddy and Tim McMillon, in her second year as an HGO Studio Artist, brought a bright-sounding, youthful voice to the role. Dressed in the iconic hooded red snowsuit illustrated in the book, McMillon was convincing and affecting as a child experiencing snow for the first time. Performing the role of the young boy Peter was Maryland soprano Raven McMillon. In their adaptation, they created an affecting portrait of a racially-mixed neighborhood. Pinkney’s libretto and Thompson’s music fleshed out vivid portraits of the boy Peter’s family and of the kids in his neighborhood. The book only briefly references a child experiencing the snow, his mother, some boys throwing snowballs and an unidentified friend. Her collaboration with compoer Joel Thompson proved felicitous. To adapt it to an hour long opera, the Houston Grand Opera, in cooperation with the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, secured the services of children’s author Andrea Davis Pinkney as librettist. Keats’ sparsely worded book is intended as a bedtime story. Once the world premiere was rescheduled, the decision was made to stream the performance and make it available without charge to the world audience. Like other operatic projects throughout the world, the Covid-19 pandemic required a year’s postponement of the world premiere. The opera’s world premere was originally to take place at the Houston Grand Opera in late 2020. What if you were to take an Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book – one beloved for the past six decades, with the distinction of being the book title that has been checked out of the New York Public Library more than any other in the library’s history – and transform it into an opera? The book, Ezra Jack Keats’ “The Snowy Day” was the source of such an operatic adaptation, commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera.Īlthough Keats’ “The Snowy Day” is a story about a boy’s first experiences in snow, the book’s characters are sympathetic representations of black children and adults, who were conspicuously absent from most children’s literature up until its 1963 publication.
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