Blanchard’s Champion in Boston: Pre-Production Journal Ep. 1
February 2, 2022
Back in April of 2021, I was contacted by Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) about their upcoming production of Terence Blanchard’s first opera, Champion (2013). I was aware of Terence not only as a Grammy Award winning trumpeter and longtime compositional collaborator of Spike Lee, but also because his second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which premiered at Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2019 was slated to be presented at the Met in September of 2021.
The opportunity to work at BLO, an outstanding company based in one of my favourite U.S. cities, was exciting in itself, but when I learned that Champion was based on the life of African-American welterweight boxer Emile Griffith, I was immediately on board.
Griffith was a professional boxer from the U.S. Virgin Islands who became a World Champion in the welterweight, junior middleweight and middleweight classesfrom the late 50’s to the late 70’s. His best known contest was a bruising 1962 title match with Benny Paret, following which Paret died, a tragedy which haunted Griffith for the rest of his life.
After The Time of Our Singing (TTOS), Kris Defoort’s opera based on Richard Powers’ novel of the same name, Champion is the second jazz-influenced opera in my 2021-22 season, but whileboth works feature an orchestra enriched by a jazz quartet, they could hardly be more different! While Defoort illustrates his characters and their journeys with a broad palette of influences ranging from Bach to David Bowie, Blanchard’s Champion is more stylistically streamlined: “An Opera in Jazz”, according to its title.
To be sure that I understand all its musical ingredients, I’m taking the same approach I did with The Time of our Singing in creating a detailed mock-up in computer software. This is a slow, detailed process of recording all the orchestra parts using instrumental sample libraries played on a keyboard, and then singing the vocal parts over the top.
While I sometimes worry about what my neighbours experience when I do this (!), I find the process to be extremely rewarding with contemporary opera, because it allows me to experience everything from the performers’ point of view.
In performing these parts myself and then stacking my own ideas into a version of the piece, I hear what works and what doesn’t. I can try different versions of dynamics, balance, tempo and phrasing and also quickly identify challenges that might come up in rehearsal. It’s a slow process at the start, but I end up with a really profound understanding of the piece.
Is it a little OCD? Sure it is! But I think that goes with the terrain for a conductor. For me, the trick is to be obsessively detail oriented in the R&D phase, so that I can let everything I’ve learned “melt into the rehearsal pot”. I find that understanding all the musical ingredients intimately and having a “starter recipe” in mind actually makes for a more open approach to new “flavours” that emerge with collaborators, so that, ironically enough, what feels like absolute certainty as a starting point, becomes conducive to flexibility. It’s a bit of a paradox!
Anyway, we’re still three months out from the first rehearsal, so lots to discover still, but it’s been a fascinating journey this far!
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