United States Hanlon, The Pigeon Keeper: Soloists and Orchestra of Opera Parallèle / Nicole Paiement (conductor). Cowell Theatre, San Francisco, 9.3.2025. (HS)
Production:
Composer – David Hanlon
Librettist – Stephanie Fleischmann
Director – Brian Staufenbiel
Sets – Jacquelyn Scott
Costumes, Hair & Makeup – Y. Sharon Peng
Lighting & Projection – Jessica Drayton
Dramaturg – Cori Ellison
Cast:
Orsia – Angela Yam
Pigeon Keeper / Widow / Grocer / Schoolteacher – Bernard Holcomb
Thalasso – Craig Irvin
Kosmo – Shayla Sauvie
A heartfelt and original fairy-tale plot, highly listenable and inventive music, strong singing from the four cast members and the best new libretto I have experienced in years combined to make the world premiere of The Pigeon Keeper a winner. The chamber opera is from composer David Hanlon (who has a long affiliation with Houston Grand Opera as both a composer and a conductor) and Stephanie Fleischmann, a much-lauded librettist. A small but impressively adept cast made the one-act, 80-minute piece a delight, which I experienced in its third and final performance in San Francisco’s Cowell Theatre.
Co-commissioned by Opera Parallèle and Santa Fe Opera, the story focuses on how an enigmatic child, rescued from the sea by a fisherman and his daughter, disrupts the family and the community at large. It reveals the hate that lurks beneath the surface in the world’s attitudes toward immigrants and is particularly timely now because of what is happening in the United States, although the inspiration for this piece came a decade ago. Immigrants who perilously crossed the Mediterranean in small boats to escape political prosecution were welcomed in a small Greek village until it became too overwhelming for the locals.
Nuances in the story also stem from Hanlon’s Jewish grandfather, who could not flee Nazism in the late 1930s until a Quaker family in Connecticut agreed to take him in.
Fleischmann’s libretto, poetic yet never artsy, matches well with Hanlon’s often colorful music, and goes beyond plain storytelling to explore our human relationship to nature. The lyrics teem with references to the Earth, the climate and the sweep of the sea. Although the action is set on an unnamed Mediterranean island, the characters have Greek names, and there is an aura of Greek culture.
The libretto also invents words to add an exotic edge to the English conversations, suggesting a stranger’s language even if it isn’t hard for an audience to pick up. Jacquelyn Scott’s scenic design adds its own theatricality with windows on the buildings popping open to reveal the chorus or a single character. Projections flood the vertical surface with moving water or flocks of birds in flight.
Those birds, their fluttering music voiced by seventeen members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, are more than a scene-setter. They reappear several times. When we learn that the Pigeon Keeper, himself an outcast immigrant, called them back to the abandoned dovecote where he made his home, the recurring pigeons create a metaphor for acceptance.
Hanlon’s music for the birds may be impressionistic, but his arias flow easily in comfortable directions (as opposed to the unsettling modern style of constantly defying expectations). For musical color, there is the orchestra of a string quintet plus flute, clarinet and percussion, and Nicole Paiement’s conducting brought out spicy rhythms with her trademark balance of precision and flexibility. Some of this music suggested Greek dances or included sinuous Oriental gestures that hint at an Islamic origin for the Pigeon Keeper.
However, the Pigeon Keeper is not the star of the show. He is actually one of four villagers portrayed by tenor Bernard Holcomb with a bigger-than-life flair. Two of the characters (a Widow and a Schoolteacher) are women, and benefit from his good command of falsetto. The Pigeon Keeper and the other male character, the Grocer, demand a wide musical range. Holcomb delivers with warmth and power, as someone who sings at The Metropolitan Opera and Chicago Lyric should.
Soprano Angela Yam, an Emerging Artist at Boston Lyric who has also sung at Santa Fe Opera, plays Orsia, a twelve-year-old girl scraping by with her widowed fisherman father. Her agile, shining voice and small stature made the girl realistic. Her enthusiasm made us believe her when sees the rescued boy as an incarnation of a brother who died at birth and begins calling him Kosmo, which was to be her brother’s name.
Baritone Craig Irvin, active in several opera companies in the American Midwest, sings the role of the father, Thalasso, with persuasive warmth. Thalasso cannot accept another mouth to feed and resists helping the refugee child, but he yields to Orsia’s pleas to let the boy stay for three days while she finds someone to take him in. Still grieving over the deaths of his wife and stillborn son, Thalasso repeatedly warns Orsia to have nothing to do with the characters he mistrusts.
Kosmo is so traumatized by his situation that he doesn’t speak (or sing) until the last few scenes. When he does, as voiced by eighth-grader (and member of the San Francisco Girls Chorus) Shayla Sauvie, the pure, lyrical sound seems to win everyone else over. Kosmo gets to stay when the Pigeon Keeper, despite the boy being an outsider — or perhaps because it — agrees to take him in.
Underlined by the music’s caressing sound inching toward an epiphany, it is a moist-eyed ending to a highly accessible, well-wrought opera.
Harvey Steiman