Shop Now

Infodad

A Diversions CD featuring excerpts from two operas by James Cook (born 1963). This entire disc runs just half an hour – which will whet the appetite of listeners who are favorably inclined toward contemporary opera composition, but will be more than enough for those less interested in it.

Cook’s music is testimony to the continuing interest of some modern composers in the potential intensity and over-the-top melodramatic possibilities of opera, a form once memorably described by Franco Zeffirelli as “a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.”

The operas Abishag and Jane the Quene, however, are scarcely celebratory. The title character in Abishag is a young woman assigned to the Biblical King David to lie next to him and give him body heat, since in his old age nothing else could warm him. She was not his concubine but was regarded as one by some in the palace, the result being intrigue that, in the book of Kings, led to the assassination of one of David’s sons. The three excerpts from Abishag are the opening and closing scenes and the brief David’s Liebestod, all arranged for voice and piano. The opening is suitably dramatic, the closing suitably quiescent, and David’s Liebestod is simply suitable to its topic.

Jane the Quene is about Lady Jane Grey, England’s “Nine Days’ Queen” in the 16^th century. This too is a story of intrigue and family drama, and one that does not end well for the title character. The two excerpts on the CD are Gentle Mr. Aylmer, the reference being to an English bishop who tutored Jane, and Love’s Farewell, which is as gentle and wistful as would be expected from its title. There is not enough material on this disc to judge the worth of the two operas themselves, but there is enough to show that Cook knows how to handle various vocal ranges and typical-for-the-stage operatic concerns.