Mia Clarke
Tue, 02 Jun 2009
If you think ICE’s performance of Iannis Xenakis provides enough Greek for the week, hold up. The Mediterranean theme doesn’t stop there. He may not be Greek, but Brit composer Mark-Anthony Turnage knows how to put a punk-rock spin on the classic Oedipus myth: by transposing it to the Thatcher era. His first opera, which debuted in 1988, during the tail end of the Iron Lady’s reign, is set among the gloomy fug of East London, where mass unemployment gave rise to the sound and fury of racism, violence and economic depression.
The Chicago Opera Vanguard tackles this modernization of Freudian mother-loving with plenty of spunk and a sparkling array of profanities. One might think that, in 2009, people have better things to worry about than a few four-letter words, but no: One of the COV’s donors—which, for this project, include individual donors, nonprofits and city granting orgs—pulled 30 percent of the production budget due to the “bad language” and punk content, according to the company’s artistic director, Eric Reda.
What would Joe Strummer do? Raise a middle finger. With a stellar cast of Chicago’s singing stars and a 19-piece orchestra fashioned from the best institutions in the city, the COV isn’t giving up on its mission to produce the Chicago premiere of this seminal masterwork. Hopefully, with a little support from the people, this new cutting-edge group can get its voice heard and Turnage’s opera about the plague of oppression won’t be a case of life imitating art.
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