https://youtu.be/h5WUyIJD9Lg

My new opera, Shalimar the Clown, opens tonight at Opera Theater St. Louis. The opera is based on the 2005 novel by Salman Rushdie, with a libretto by 2016 Obie Award winner and Pulitzer prize finalist Rajiv Joseph. This world-premiere production stars tenor Sean Pannikar and soprano Andriana Chuchman as lovers Shalimar Noman and Boonyi Kaul. The cast includes Greg Dahl, Aubrey Allicock, Jenni Bank, Thomas Hammons, Katharine Goeldner, Geoffrey Apgalo, Elliott Paige and Justin Austin.

Maestro Jayce Ogren conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the OSTL Chorus. Arjun Verma is our sitarist & Javad Butah our tabla maestro. The production and design team, led by director James Robinson, includes Allen Moyer (sets), James Schuette (costumes), Christopher Akerlind (lighting), Tom Watson (wigs and makeup), choreography (Sean Curran) and Greg Emetaz (projections). Maestro Robert Ainsley prepared the magnificent OTSL chorus and our coach and pianist is Andrea Grant.

Ticket & production information

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Drama with a Purpose

Jack Perla and Rajiv Joseph’s new work for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Shalimar the Clown, based on Salman Rushdie’s novel, aims for the power of grand opera and the impact of contemporary relevance.

By Philip Kennicott • Illustration by Nigel Buchanan

WITHIN THE FIRST FEW PAGES of Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, an elegant, elderly and cosmopolitan Jewish man is brutally murdered in the streets of Los Angeles. He is killed by his Muslim chauffeur, a man from Kashmir who has nursed a toxic combination of fanaticism, hate and revenge. The victim’s daughter discovers her father’s body moments after the execution: “His throat had been slashed so violently that the weapon, one of his Sabatier kitchen knives, which had been dropped beside his corpse, had all but severed his head.” Continued…

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A Subtly Cross-Pollinated Marvel

By Joshua Kosman | November 16, 2015

For a company still operating on a dangerously thin margin, the East Bay’s indispensable Festival Opera has been doing pretty much everything right. The company’s most recent offering — an Indian-themed double bill of operatic one-acts — was canny, affecting and beautifully economical. You really couldn’t have asked for more.

For this short program, the company put together “Savitri,” Gustav Holst’s gorgeous 1916 chamber
opera, with “River of Light,” a year-old creation by San Francisco composer Jack Perla. The two pieces called out to each in interesting ways, joining India’s mythic past with its contemporary international standing. And even if Sunday’s final performance at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center showed signs of cost-cutting in the staging and presentation, there was no scrimping on musical excellence. Both works, conducted by John Kendall Bailey and featuring casts headed by soprano Maya Kherani, were executed with sensitivity and panache.

For the 40-minute “River of Light,” Kherani returned to give another superb performance as Meera, an anxious Indian immigrant in Oakland trying to figure out how to impart some of her cultural heritage to her newborn daughter. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s libretto too often resorts to brusque shorthand to make its points as it skips from one holiday scene to the next (the piece feels more like a storyboard for a full-length opera than a well-shaped dramatic work in its own right).

But Perla’s score, for a quintet of Indian and Western instruments, is a subtly cross-pollinated marvel, blending long, arching melodies with bursts of coloratura in ways that never seem forced. Meera’s anguished central aria about feeling marooned in a land far from her family and traditions took wing on the strength of Perla’s tender writing and Kherani’s stirring performance. Baritone Daniel Cilli was a bluff, sympathetic figure as Meera’s American-born husband, and Molly Mahoney and Michael Boley added spice as the Fred-and-Ethel next-door neighbors.
The program began with an winning invocation provided by sitarist Arjun Verma, tabla player Nilan Chaudhuri, and dancers Richa Shukla and Gopi — all of whom returned to participate in “River of Light.” This was crossover programming at its most persuasive.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic.

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River of Light Shines at Festival Opera

By Rebecca Wishnia | November 16, 2015

“Opera has not always told everyone’s story,” Festival Opera’s General Director Sara Nealy remarked in preface to the company’s Nov. 14 performance. But the company’s double-bill at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center last weekend represented a refreshing shift toward inclusivity. With John Kendall Bailey conducting Gustav Holst’s Savitri and the West Coast premiere of Jack Perla’s River of Light, Festival Opera explored Indian cultural narratives, both mundane and divine
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Festival Opera is a small company with a small budget, and director Tanya Kane-Parry’s staging was powerfully minimalistic. She manipulated levels to suspenseful effect: As Satyavan sings, Death looms behind him, perched on a tree stump. But the lack of scenery and amateurish props made the production seem more like a school play than a professional opera. Holst envisioned an intimate setting for Savitri, but this is a story of literally epic proportions, and Festival Opera’s production needed more pomp.

In contrast, Jack Perla’s “River of Light” made the space come alive. Perla, a San Francisco-based composer and pianist, wrote the work in 2013 for the Houston Grand Opera’s community initiative HGOco. Kherani debuted the role of Meera, a successful businesswoman and newlywed who has little time or energy to reconnect with her Indian roots. But after the birth of her daughter, Meera longs to recreate the traditions of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Houston-based author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni wrote the libretto, whose references (Children’s Fairyland, The Chapel of the Chimes) were tailored to Oakland for this performance.

The opera is dynamic from its opening Kathak dance (an expressive, classical style from northern India), which was choreographed by Antonia Minnecola and performed by Richa Shukla and Gopi. Kherani was vibrant as Meera, and baritone Daniel Cilli brought his usual charisma to the role of Meera’s husband, Burton. His voice sounded much stronger on Saturday than it did in Festival Opera’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos last summer. Tenor Michael Boley and mezzo-soprano Molly Mahoney, playing the neighbors, rounded out the ensemble.

Perla, who has written operas for the Los Angeles Opera, Opera Theater of Saint Louis, and Seattle Opera, is also active in jazz and world music. His versatility as a composer shines in River of Light, which seamlessly integrates jazzy chords in the keyboard (Ben Malkevitch) with tabla (Nilan Chaudhuri) and sitar (Arjun Verma), violin (Lee), and cello (Amy Brodo). Particularly rewarding is Perla’s use of tabla; rarely is rhythm so present in opera.

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“A Triumph for Seattle Opera”

By  PHILIPPA KIRALY | Saturday, August 22, 2015

It’s a triumph. It’s riveting. It’s unsettling and uncomfortable. It’s strong. For many it will be emotional. It’s an Experience with a capital E. Go, go, go now and get your tickets for An American Dream, the new opera commissioned by Seattle Opera about our history, our experiences here during WWII, understood through lives displaced and disrupted through no fault of their own. Take the (teenage) kids. There is only one more performance—there were only two planned—this Sunday afternoon, but let’s hope it is presented again soon. (It’s intended to travel, around the state, out of state, wherever it is invited.)

The idea of the opera was conceived by Sue Elliott, then director of education at Seattle Opera, who asked for stories from the community answering the question “If you had to leave home today and couldn’t return, what would you take with you?” (The question is all the more poignant today with current stories of families fleeing homes burned by wildfire.)

From the dozens of stories, Jessica Murphy Moo wove a libretto of a Japanese legal immigrant family in 1942 forcibly relocated to a detention center from their prosperous Bainbridge strawberry farm, and the farm sold with little choice at breakdown value to an American veteran and his German Jewish wife. Forced to burn all their Japanese belongings, the American-born daughter hides her precious doll instead, and keeps a letter addressed from Germany to the wife. She in turn is agonized about the fate of her parents in Germany, and she finds the doll, her husband ordering her to burn it, which she doesn’t. Fast forward to postwar 1945, and Setsuko returns, hoping to find her father. Eva, the wife, returns the doll, the girl proffers the letter, which details the death by shooting of Eva’s parents. At the end the Japanese father returns. Here the opera ends, but there can be no happy ending for the two families.  Who now owns the farm? Who will be uprooted again, German Jew, or Japanese family? Who loses?

The music is by opera composer Jack Perla, an atmospheric score which surrounds but never overwhelms the voices, which are fully up to Seattle Opera’s usual high standards with all but one singer new to the company’s stage. Bass Adam Lau as Papa Kobayashi, mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen as his wife and soprano Hae Ji Chang as their teenage daughter Setsuko, with D’Ana Lombard as the German Jewish wife, Eva, and former Young Artist baritone Morgan Smith as the American veteran Jim, all are compelling in their acting, excellent in their singing. Peter Kazaras directs, with a spare set by Robert Schaub, video design setting moods and place by Robert Bonniol, and costumes by Deborah Trout. Judith Yan conducts a chamber orchestra in an admirably well-paced performance supporting but never overwhelming the singers.

The whole is taut, the entire opera is only 67 minutes, but what surrounds it is equally compelling. Two hours before curtain, fascinating videos of elderly camp survivors talking of their experiences and their very normal lives here before the war as well as during it, take place in the McCaw Hall lecture room. Simultaneously, all through the McCaw lobbies on the first two floors are photographs and posters, some discomfiting, showing the fear and hatred of “Japs” bolstered by the government decisions. There are posters of the camp rules and government proclamations regarding them, and a mock-up of an internment camp room expected to hold an entire family. Almost entirely, this is about the Japanese experience here, not about the systematic Nazi extermination of Jews from which Eva, the wife, had escaped, brought to be safe here by her American husband.

Before the opera, three survivors spoke briefly on stage, including 96-year-old Kay Sakai Nakao, Lilly Kitamoto Kodama and Felix Narte, Jr., then a small child whose Philippino family took care of the Kitamoto farm.  And after the opera, Seattle Opera general director Aidan Lang held a talk session with audience and the creative team.

The whole was a tour de force, which must return, soon.

– See more at: http://cityartsonline.com/articles/triumph-seattle-opera#sthash.I6kWzwVk.dpu

Enormous Changes, my third jazz recording, is due out July 17, 2015 on Seattle-based Origin Records. I’m THRILLED this disc is finally hitting the streets, airwaves and interwebs. This was an especially personal project, as I wrote all of the music, and most of the lyrics for the fourteen tracks. The songs focus on love, loss, fatherhood, and a persistent yearning for simplicity in a noisy, complex world. Many thanks to John Bishop at Origin Records for adding Enormous Changes to their fine catalogue!

Pre-order at Origin Records
Pre-order at iTunes
Pre-order at Bandcamp

Music & lyrics by Jack Perla (BMI)
Additional lyrics: (2) David James Brock & Jack Perla; (10) William Taylor; (12) Walt Whitman; (13) Rob Bailis

Produced by Ben Yonas & Jack Perla
Recorded by Ben Yonas at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA
Mixed by Adam Munoz at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CA
Mastered by Alan Silverman, Arf Mastering New York, NY
Design by John Bishop, OriginArts
©2015 by Jack Perla/Music Without Walls (BMI)
Unauthorized reproduction is a violation of applicable laws

An American Dream, commissioned by Seattle Opera, receives its world premiere with that company at McCaw Hall on August 21, 2015.  Peter Kazaras directs this amazing cast, which includes D’Ana Lombard, Morgan Smith, Adam Lau, Nina Yoshida-Nelsen and HaeJi Chaeng. Judith Yan is our musical director. I’m in good hands!

Ticket information
Synopsis
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Audio

Well, my Bay Area friends, finally an opera event closer to home!

I’m pleased to announce River of Light will receive its west coast premiere with Festival Opera on November 13 & 14 2015 at the Shadelands Art Center, Walnut Creek, CA.