Dead Man Walking receives its UK stages premiere at RCS with two barnstorming central performances and a huge cast. Conductor James Holmes brought this modern American classic to passionate life.
Jake Heggie's spectacular vocal writing combine with Terence McNally's perfectly paced libretto to provide intense music drama which forces you to confront darkness.
Dead Man Walking is currently the most frequently performed contemporary American opera. Joel Ivany's staging, first mounted in Vancouver, opened recently at Minnesota Opera just days after the opera's Spanish première in Madrid.
American composer Jake Heggie's early opera performed by Washington National Opera was one of those rare experiences of an opera full of raw power and wrenching emotion with superb performers that one is not likely to forget soon.
Though reports of the work’s importance and dramatic power have attended it since its 2010 premiere in Dallas, I doubt many in the audience of the War Memorial Opera House on Wednesday night were prepared for the impact of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.
