VAN MAGAZINE REVIEWS 'STRANGER'

ONLY CONNECT

“…For Phan, the son of Greek and Chinese immigrants, seeing beyond the traditionally historical carries added meaning as an operatic tenor. In an interview with VAN last year on anti-Asian racism in classical music, he mentioned that, despite a specialization in Britten on recording and in concert, he has never been cast in one of the composer’s operas. “Being biracial, I don’t experience things the same way as people who have full Asian heritage and faces experience it sometimes,” he said at the time. “But the way it constantly manifests itself is…in this question that presents itself with full Asian singers that people ask: Are they capable of doing this thing that is artistic and expressive?”

‘Stranger,’ an object lesson in new methodologies of interpretation, answers that question with a resounding, Joycean “yes.” Britten’s own connective thread through his operas—the stakes of being an outsider in a hyper-codified society—is picked up here in Muhly’s texts, which include an oral history interview with Ellis Island emigré Rose Breci, a dispatch from an anonymous Lower East Side tenement-dweller published in the Jewish Daily Forward, an open letter to President Grover Cleveland and the United States Congress against the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, and—most powerful of the texts—an 1879 letter from Boston merchant Wong Ar Chong to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, sent just a few years before the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act…

…Phan’s deceptively halcyon tenor—clear and crystalline, but able, on a dime, to reflect the explosive storms of human experience—is an ideal vehicle for the emotional capaciousness that Muhly gives his texts. Closing out “Stranger” with two letters written by wives to their deployed husbands during World War II (a departure from the ideas of exclusion and isolation, but also a counterpoint in hearing friendly words sent to two people isolated in foreign settings), Phan’s tenor weaves itself into a lavender haze of unconditional love and unencumbered longing, accented by a holy minimalism in Brooklyn Rider’s accompaniment. At times the quartet arches into silence save for the overtones. The closing piece reminds us, as history snakes around itself, that what we are invariably left with in any era are people looking to connect.”