Hugely admired in the US after its first performance at the Glimmerglass festival in 2019, Jeanine Tesori’s powerful Blue gets its UK premiere at English National Opera in a production by Tinuke Craig, conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren. Setting a text by Tazewell Thompson, it’s an angry but lyrical work that deals unflinchingly with the impact of racial discrimination, police brutality and racially motivated violence on a Black family in present day Harlem. The narrative is horribly and tragically familiar.
Tazewell’s relatively straightforward dramatic premise brings complex emotional resonances in its wake. At the work’s centre is the murder, at a peaceful protest, of a Black policeman’s son by one of his father’s white colleagues, an act that is never shown, though we witness the events that surround it. Around the time of his birth, the boy’s mother and her friends worry about his future in a prejudiced world, and years later we find father and son locked in ideological conflict over the former’s job. After the murder, there is only grief, as a painful confrontation between the father and the Reverend who fails to console him leads us to the son’s funeral. There are no easy answers to anything we have seen, and at the end an epilogue takes us back to what, we gradually realise, was the family’s last meal together.
Tesori’s score largely adheres to traditional structures of arias and ensembles, though it also has a directness of expression that proves persuasive. The pace falters at the start with a meandering extended quartet for the mother and her friends, but the music gradually begins to hit home. The scene for the father and the Reverend, and an agonised aria for the mother, have considerable power. There are allusions throughout to gospel, blues and jazz, and a swerve towards oratorio in the formal hymns and rituals of the son’s funeral.
Craig’s effective staging confines the action in a succession of cramped domestic interiors but uses video to take us through the streets of Harlem and chart the emergence of the political movements that drive the son on. There are blazing central performances – wonderfully sung and acted with passionate conviction – from Nadine Benjamin and Kenneth Kellogg as the mother and father. Zwakele Tshabalala is touching as the headstrong yet vulnerable son, his arguments frequently carrying the work’s intellectual and ideological weight, while Ronald Samm impresses as the Reverend, struggling to find the means to assuage a grief that is almost beyond comprehension. The smaller roles – two trios, one female, one male – are cast from strength, while Kofi Waldren conducts with considerable commitment and finesse. The playing is exemplary.