There was a great deal to anticipate in this union of a publishing sensation - the novel sold nearly 4 million copies, spent over a year on The New York Times’s best-seller list, won a National Book Award and was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law - and a prominent composer writing her first opera. It’s that the work doesn’t evoke much at all. But the trouble with this new work, which had its premiere here on Saturday, isn’t that it might have evocations of lush Eastern forests ringing falsely amid New Mexican brush. Here in the desert, then, “Cold Mountain,” commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Minnesota Opera and, naturally, North Carolina Opera, isn’t as much a fish out of water as some might have feared. Frazier’s descriptions of the Blue Ridge Mountains, “the fading rows of ridges standing pale and tall as cloudbanks,” each “a shade paler and bluer.” It’s quite a ways from here to western North Carolina, where Charles Frazier set his 1997 novel, “Cold Mountain.” And it’s quite a different landscape out there, too.īut as you wait for Jennifer Higdon and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of the novel to begin around sunset at the Santa Fe Opera, and you look through the wide-open back of the stage at the azure-colored crests in the distance, you can’t help but be reminded of Mr.
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