02/20/17 Daniel Sonenberg, USM Composer, Opera Made in Maine

Posted by Erik Jorgensen

On this Historic Inauguration-Day Friday, we were able to set aside the political events in Washington to come together and talk baseball and opera.....or, to be specific, we heard about an unusual combination of both: a baseball opera.

Dan Sonenberg has been working with Portland Ovations on his latest project. The USM School of music professor, composer, drummer and father of triplets is nearly done with The Summer King, an opera about Negro-League baseball legend Josh Gibson. We heard a short clip from a workshop performance at the Merrill, where it was first performed in a stripped-down format in 2014. Professor Sonenberg commented on the scale of the project, noting that “This is a two-hour opera and a fourteen-year odyssey.” The project is on course for a fully staged world premiere later this year in Pittsburgh - a remarkable achievement and a rarity in the world of contemporary opera - where few operas are written and even fewer are performed at all, let alone by a high-level company.

Josh Gibson came from Pittsburgh, is arguably one of the greatest hitters ever, as well as a solid defensive catcher, playing baseball from 1930-47. He died just before the color barrier in baseball was broken, and had he lived, he would surely have joined other aging heroes of the Negro Leagues in Major League Baseball. His is a tragic story and not well known among the public.

Sonenberg described the many challenges of writing an opera – the number of roles, the number of instruments and types of music, the libretto, and even issues of practicality, like a boys’ choir that comes on toward the end. This, surprisingly turns out to be an impractical factor given that kids need to go to bed, and therefore finding those performers for a run would be challenging.

Portland Ovations and its director Aimee Petrin made what he called a “wild decision” to produce the initial performance. He noted that an opera score is often just “a great paperweight,” mostly because unlike a book that can be picked up and read, it’s something that exists in a strange imaginary space, despite there being a score. “It’s not real until it’s heard and seen,” he noted, adding that there is a huge gulf between going from a small workshop to a premiere.

He said it would never have reached the point where it is now without the early support of Ovations, and a small, but critical, grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which provided something of a “seal of approval” for the project.

It’s the experience of a dream coming true, says Sonenberg.

For more information, go to: www.danielsonenberg.org

(Photo: Rusty Atwood, Aimee Petrin, Daniel Sonenberg, and President Laura Young.)