If that's starting to sound a little familiar, it probably should - it's the story of Cold Mountain, a best-selling novel and a star-studded 2003 movie. Only this story is set during the Civil War. It's a story that could have been taken from a breaking news report: A soldier, gravely wounded in a brutal battle, flees the fighting to try and make his way home. Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera Click on the image for the index.Isabel Leonard and Nathan Gunn star as Ada and Inman in the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Cold Mountain at the Santa Fe Opera. There are now more than 500 DVD and Blu-ray reviews available. All of this is spun around the romance between the hero, Inman, and his classy but clueless girlfriend Ada (Isabel Leonard) who is busy dodging the attentions of the creepy and repulsive Teague (Jay Hunter-Morris) with the help of the sassy but practical Ruby (Emily Fons). There’s much more in the same vein with summary executions, baby torture, a choir of dead soldiers and the hero dying with the last shot of the piece. This production is rough on Canadian singers.
He ends up as part of a heap of chained together corpses. A little later our hero, a Confederate deserter played by Nathan Gunn, rescues Laura (Andrea Nūnez) from being thrown from a cliff by her preacher boyfriend (Roger Honeywell). Within five minutes Owens (Robert Pomakov) has been stabbed and buried alive and his son (Adrian Kramer) bound, gagged and dragged off to the army. Add to that that it’s a melodrama set in the currently fashionable Civil War South. It takes a story from a best selling book that has already been made into a Hollywood film and turns it into an opera. Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain, which premiered at Santa Fe in 2015, is an example of what seems to be becoming the standard American formula for new opera. This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
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