It all begins with "First Correspondence," the letter Stieglitz wrote to O'Keeffe in 1915 after seeing her charcoal drawings. A telling aria titled "Faraway," and sung by Gilfry, captures this fact, as does an orchestral interlude that bears the title "The High Priestess of the Desert." Fleming and Gilfry also each sing "The Thing You Call Holy," another suggestion of the tension between the two, as well as the connection. The two remained married until Stieglitz's death in 1946, although it is worth noting that from 1929 on, O'Keeffe spent most of her time living and working in Taos, New Mexico, the source of her greatest inspiration, while Stieglitz remained in New York. The handwritten letters between the two (collected in Sarah Greenough's two-volume book, "My Faraway"), were projected on a screen above the orchestra, along with pictures of many of O'Keeffe's magnificent paintings and Stieglitz's black and white photographs of the woman (more than 20 years younger than he, and a great beauty) whom he adored, and married in 1924 after divorcing his first wife. Puts' work, a most ingenious song cycle, draws on the extensive correspondence and the complex, tempestuous and largely geographically distanced love affair and marriage between Georgia O'Keeffe (the remarkable painter who has been dubbed "The Mother of American Modernism"), and Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer who was the first to champion her work and helped catapult her to fame. The first half of the evening was devoted to "The Brightness of Light," an exceptionally beautiful work with a libretto and music by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts that was first performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2019. Ideally backed by the outstanding members of the Lyric Opera Orchestra, the concert was led by Lyric's exuberant Music Director, Enrique Mazzola.
You could not have found a more ideal example of just such a pairing of personalities and styles than the unusual concert performed last week on the Lyric Opera stage by the golden-voiced soprano Renee Fleming and baritone Rod Gilfry, both of whom can shift easily between opera and musical theater.
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