The Guardian Reviews “Voodoo”
Steve Wallace, JoAnna Marie Ford and Janinah Burnett in a scene from Voodoo a long-lost Harlem Renaissance opera. Photograph: Regina Fleming/Supplied
“The scene’s high-wire act is Lola’s series of incantations, featuring more than a few long-held top notes that soprano Janinah Burnett delivered with murderous (and magical) intensity.”
The attention-grabbing potential of an “undiscovered masterpiece” is easy to understand. Given history’s penchant for doing certain artists dirty, the public can easily entertain the idea that our grasp of aesthetic history might be lacking. Still, after reading the advance hype around the latest “lost treasure” nominee – a silent movie reel long thought incinerated, or an unpublished manuscript by a literary great – one can sometimes encounter the piece itself and think: “Obscurity was no great tragedy here.” And yet on other occasions the rare find turns out to be the real deal.
Friday night’s concert-presentation revival of Voodoo – a 1914 opera by Harlem Renaissance composer Harry Lawrence Freeman – clearly fell into the glorious latter category. Known in his own time as “the colored Wagner” (given his declared love of the German opera heavyweight), this colleague of Scott Joplin was also steeped in American melody. He wrote more than 20 operas, in addition to composing some pop tunes. While no public recordings of his operas survive, one did play at Carnegie Hall in 1947. (Freeman also gets a mention alongside Joplin in Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, as part of a section that laments the mostly lost history of early African American classical composition.)