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Review
Yardbird review – a solemn hagiography, lacking wit and energy
It’s a risky enterprise, building an opera around the life of a musical legend. It’s especially risky in the case of Charlie Parker, the great saxophonist and composer who was one of the founding geniuses of the post-war jazz movement known as bebop. The life story is a tragic one of blazing talent brought low by a chaotic private life, obsessive over-work, and drug and alcohol addiction. When he died in 1955 at the age of 34, the doctor who attended the scene said Parker had the body of a raddled 55-year-old.
It’s the story of a "tragic flaw", all too easily rendered as solemn hagiography. Unfortunately, that’s exactly how librettist Bridgette Wimberly and composer Daniel Schnyder have chosen to fashion it in their opera Yardbird (Parker’s own nickname), originally commissioned by Philadelphia Opera and Opera Theatre Harlem and first produced in 2015. When the curtain rises we see the ghost of the recently deceased Parker, seated among the chairs and tables of the jazz club named after him, hedged in by giant images of jazz’s earlier heroes and martyrs: Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Clifford Brown.
Parker can’t rest easy in his grave, as he hasn’t yet completed the great symphonic work that eluded him in his short life. But whenever he tries to work he’s interrupted by visitations from the various women in his life; his patron the eccentric Baroness de Koenigswarter, his three wives, his mother. The great work is forgotten, as Parker is drawn into reminiscing about his life. His second wife Chan chides him for abandoning her children, his mother laments the difficulties she faced in raising a boy, in a country riven with racial prejudice.
Now and again the scenario flickered to life, thanks to some powerful performances. Angela Brown recalled the great blues divas of old in the role of Addie, Parker’s indomitable mother, and Rachel Sterrenberg as the angry abandoned second wife Chan was almost as fine. Will Liverman as Parker’s friend Dizzy Gillespie brought some much-needed humour into the proceedings. Tenor Lawrence Brownlee was as vocally impressive as ever in the title role, but his status as ghostly revenant meant his role was frustratingly reduced to that of bystander.
The real problem was Schnyder’s music, a lifeless amalgam of Forties big band music and the angular atonalism of American composers like Gunther Schuller. Of the wit and energy of Yardbird’s immortal music there was barely a trace.
Yardbird is at the Hackney Empire on June 11, 13, 15 and 17. Tickets: 020 8985 2424