Opera Underground: Caroline Shaw’s ‘Partita for 8 Voices’ and Gelsey Bell’s ‘morning//mourning’ at Green-Wood Cemetery

Under the direction of founder Andrew Ousley, Death of Classical has enjoyed a fruitful partnership with the Green-Wood Cemetery, presenting performances in the crypt. These are intimate shows, preceded by light snacks, thimblefuls of spirits and a ramble through the cemetery’s grounds. Over two subsequent weekends, Death of Classical programmed two works that are both contemporary and crowd-pleasing: Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer-winning Partita for 8 Voices and Gelsey Bell’s mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning]. 

In the decade since Partita for 8 Voices won her the Pulitzer, Shaw has covered herself in glory, collaborating with musicians from Kanye West to Yo-Yo Ma and writing music for film and television. She also found herself at the center of a brief controversy with prominent Inuit singers who accused the composer of appropriation. That is to say, she’s fully made it, in every imaginable way, and Partita marks a turning point not just for her career but for how contemporary composers treat the voice. Shaw’s piece has singers hum, mumble, speak, yodel, sing, buzz and breathe in a raucous celebration of the first and most human of instruments.

Partita was a solid bet for Death of Classical and Fourth Wall Ensemble, and while the performance was highly competent, some of the luster that attended the piece a decade ago has dulled simply because we’ve been living in a post-Partita world. Fourth Wall, under the direction of Christopher Allen, placed Shaw in conversation with the music of a much earlier era, but one no less an experimental in its own time: the English and Italian Renaissance. After a lively improvisation on medieval chant, they quickly settled in for a movement from William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices (to my ear their best performance of the evening) followed by Monteverdi’s towering Lagrime d’amante al sepulcro. After a short choral work by Shaw (2017’s and the swallow), they launched into the main event. The ensemble is a scant year old and, while polished and professional, they are still relaxing into their own signature sound. Clearly, the Renaissance material is their bread and butter; they sang the lovely, lengthy Monteverdi with dynamic relish, but the Partita felt too tidy and precise, the joyous discovery tamped down by technique, even as the musicians moved with the music.

This weekend, we moved ahead a decade from Partita for Gelsey Bell’s [morning//mourning], which premiered at last year’s Prototype Festival. In a wily, moving work of operatic post-humanism based on Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, [morning//mourning] is part eulogy, part ecological parable, part sci-fi thought experiment. If all human life vanished from the planet tomorrow, what would happen? How long would traces of us remain? Measured in days and weeks, then in thousands and millions of years, Bell’s opera pushes forward through nuclear meltdowns, the slow reclaiming of the landscape by plants and animals, through to the development of new species and finally, the death of our solar system billions of years from now. Five singer-musicians—Bell, Aviva Jaye and Paul Pinto return from the premiere, now joined by Mia Pak and Brian McCorkle—gather to pick up the pieces, held together by Bell’s sharp, stunning poetry and a musical style that filters contemporary classical techniques through a folksy musical sensibility.

When [morning//mourning] premiered in 2023, I felt immediately upon hearing it that it was the show to beat for the year. From its astounding temporal and emotional scope, perfectly calibrated libretto and delicious vocal writing, this piece felt devastating, funny, wistful and impossible to pin down. None did beat it, though some came very close (Rene Orth’s brilliant 10 Days in a Madhouse first among them). Thus, my excitement for a revival was at a high.

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Bell’s voice is an extraordinary instrument—able to traverse registers with ease, howl, sigh, chatter, caress and even break down and come back together. With Jaye and Pak, Bell sounds even better. Jaye is mesmerizing, with a sound that is both contained and full of feeling. Pak is also a real find, with her alternately lusty and vulnerable mezzo-soprano. Pinto, whom I admired in the premiere production, has come into his prime in the revival. McCorkle had a rock-inflected nasality that did not jell with the rest of the cast but brought a warm enthusiasm.

The crypt setting works to both the advantage and disadvantage of this production. It was perfectly post-apocalyptic, but the setting limited what could be done in terms of staging. When actors emerged from the crypt’s branching wings or sang from all around us, the setting was put to effective use. Elsewhere, the staging felt too clearly like the result of spatial problem solving: ingenious but not seamless, feeling more like a workshop.

This brings me to my larger issue with both concerts: the cuts. Fourth Wall omitted the third movement of Partita entirely, while [morning//mourning] cut three movements and compressed others, taking the approximately 90-minute show down to a tight hour. There are logistical reasons for this; two shows per night means that for the sake of the space and the artists, the programs need to be fairly short. For Partita for 8 Voices, the cuts were neither explained nor justified. If time was lacking, one of the other pieces could have been cut instead of the headliner.

While [morning//mourning]’s cuts were more subtle, they were no less frustrating; Bell spends significant time establishing the devastation that would ensue in the first few years, moments that raise the immediate stakes of her narrative and make the eventual imaginative leaps feel more thoroughly earned. The early sections force the listener to reckon with the extent of the damage we’ve done. Here, these raw, somber reflections were reduced to a few scant mentions. While Bell’s piece retained a large part of its beauty, its emotional range was narrowed and its ecological commentary abridged into simpler thesis statements. New listeners may not have noticed, but those who came because they heard the raptures of those who attended the premiere may have come away feeling oversold.

Given the power (and popularity in the case of Shaw’s) of both works, it is a shame indeed to hear them so excerpted. It doesn’t only hamper their effectiveness; it makes the already high ticket prices for DoC’s shows feel steeper for getting less music in the bargain.

Green-Wood is beautiful, as always; the snacks and drinks before the performance are a cute touch, and the crypt’s stark loveliness and performance limitations make seeing semi-staged works in the space fascinating, but for repeat concert-goers, these charms fade and we want more of the music we came for.