But that comes later in this overlong Girls of the Golden West. All these diverse men don’t always get along with one another, however.
The opera opens with a character named Clarence, sung here by bass-baritone Ryan McKinney, who is clad in buckskin, wielding first a gold-miner’s pick, then a rifle which he points ominously at the audience as he sings something to the effect that “Never has the world seen such an assortment of men from all nations gathered together in one place.” Here, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, he sings, there are Mexicans, Chinese, Frenchmen, Chileans, Peruvians, Americans and Native Americans. Working in tandem again with librettist-director Peter Sellars, the Adams-Sellars team presented in Girls of the Golden West a collage – mish-mash might be a better term – of disjointed scenes involving stick-figure characters drawn from various chronicles of the California Gold Rush days of 1849. What this says about our local opera company I hesitate to say. At the close of the opening night of Girls of the Golden West, John Adams was awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal. And yet, for god only knows what reason, John Adams continues to garner accolades wherever he goes. They are not meritorious but meretricious that is to say, they claim to strike a pose of musical innovation and progressive politics, yet endlessly repeat tired formulas of musical minimalism and equivocate on most of the political issues they evoke. To me, his works are built mainly on pretence. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: John Adams may be the most over-rated composer in today’s world. Bouncy propulsive rhythms repeated endlessly in minimalist fashion and overly percussive orchestration get old fast. I caught the second performance of this turkey on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and black indeed was my mood after sitting through three and a half hours of this bloated, self-indulgent opera from a composer who merely recycled all his familiar-and often irritating - musical tics. Whatever one’s expectations might have been, Girls of the Golden West turned out to be a real turkey, a half-cooked one at that. Two days before Thanksgiving, San Francisco Opera unveiled the world premiere of Girls of the Golden West, the new opera by John Adams it commissioned in partnership with Dallas Opera and Dutch National Opera.
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