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Gramophone, July 1998
by Edward Seckerson

Harvey Milk is nothing if not up-front about itself. There's an urgency, a times-they-are-a-changin' restlessness. It's vibrant, it's exuberant, it's occasionally awkward, even embarassingly naive. But that's all part of it's honestly. And there is - often where you least expect it - genuine inspiration. I saw Harvey Milk at its Houston premiere in 1995. The authors have tightened, reworked, added, taken away, and generally honed their first efforts.

The spirit came across then and it does so now with renewed conviction. American opera is in good shape while pieces like this raise their voice. The year before he died, Leonard Bernstein said that he dreamed of the day when his next opera might be presented on Broadway. Now I know what he meant.

Le Devoir (Montreal), April 18-19, 1998
Reinventing Opera

Harvey Milk: A Breath of Fresh Air
by François Tousignant

Michael Korie constructs a libretto that is no less than brilliant. Stewart Wallace takes ownership of all this material with unsurpassing inspiration. Fear not, good people, he seems to be telling us, I pilfer like Picasso and Duchamp in the musical music that goes from The Rite of Spring to Bernstein. You'll hear popular American music. Whoever insisted that drag queens have refinement or that leather studs have class? Although some critics professed outrage, and then often refuted themselves, the opera was quickly praised as the best new American opera in many years, maybe the best new opera, period.

The Guardian (London), May 29, 1998
by Andrew Clements

Few recent music-theatre pieces have attracted so much attention. Harvey Milk certainly works dramatically, and Wallace's score, unashamedly eclectic, draws on whatever sources it needs to chart the drama. It may not be opera as we traditionally recognize it, but there is a real sense of identity and coherence which holds the attention throughout these action-packed two hours.

Bomb Summer 1998
by Bruce Bauman

A beautiful recording. Korie's libretto, with echoes of Lenny Bruce and Bertolt Brecht is now seamlessly unified into the depths and nuances of Wallace's score. The diversity of Wallace's influences is evident in the rich musical cornucopia that ranges from carnivalesque to elegiac. The fire and snap of the vocal performances propels Harvey Milk to the heroic.

The Indianapolis Star, August 16, 1998
Harvey Milk Opera Challenges, As Its Subject Did

The vividness and hypnotic flow of the score rivet the attention, as surely Harvey Milk must in the theater and as its subject did in real life. by Jay Harvey


New York Times, June 7, 1998
by David Schiff

Is Headline Opera Yesterday's News?

If only Leonard Bernstein had lived to set this libretto rather than wasting his efforts on the narcissistic psychodrama of A Quiet Place. Harvey Milk contains moments that are touching and zany and contemporary in ways that we are used to on the stage but hardly ever encounter in the opera house. And as it reaches its tragic conclusion, the opera suddenly feels both wrenching in its pain and heroic in its politics. At these moments Harvey Milk seems to open possibilities for a vital, risk-taking musical theater, free from the oppressions of tradition, good taste, and Masterpiece Theater restorationism.

Liberation (France)
by Claude Glayman

This fifth opera by Stewart Wallace is more ambitious and in any case more successful than many current North American musical productions of those said to belong to the ''CNN School.'' His models seem to Leonard Bernstein if not Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber. The score of Harvey Milk is worthy of these models; it borrows very little from repetitive music and bears witness to an impeccable realization that should only gain from being seen on stage.

Pittsburgh Press
In and Out, June 25, 1998

Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk makes for gripping drama even on CD without the visual. The excellent libretto by Michael Korie is sad but also funny at times, touching and very moving.

Liberation (France)
by Claude Glayman

This fifth opera by Stewart Wallace is more ambitious and in any case more successful than many current North American musical productions of those said to belong to the ''CNN School.'' His models seem to Leonard Bernstein if not Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber. The score of Harvey Milk is worthy of these models; it borrows very little from repetitive music and bears witness to an impeccable realization that should only gain from being seen on stage.

Pittsburgh Press
In and Out, June 25, 1998

Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk makes for gripping drama even on CD without the visual. The excellent libretto by Michael Korie is sad but also funny at times, touching and very moving.

Diapason October 1998
by Guillaume Connesson

CNN opera has struck again! After the success of John Adams' Nixon in China, many composers enthusiastically attacked subjects depicting contemporary society. The result can be trendy and vulgar (like Jackie O) or truly staggering like Wallace's Harvey Milk. What could have been "the opera of the gay community" took on a universal tone. Librettist Michael Korie's approach is in effect more mythic than documentary, imparting to Milk a moving symbolic power.

As for Stewart Wallace - a 38-year-old composer already up to his fifth opera - his writing is remarkably effective, and extremely eclectic like all self-respecting American music. The references to Bernstein are frequent, but Wallace's treatment of the vocal parts recalls Britten, and his harmonies Copland, not to mention turns of phrase inherited from The Rite of Spring or the very John Adamsian ostinati that stud the score. The big drag parade in the first act is admirably brought off, with a melodic vitallity worthy of the great Lenny, and the somber Kaddish that opens and closes the opera has great depth.

The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) March 28, 1999
by David Perkins

Opera is good at finding the human underside to a public life - that's why Otello and Boris Godunov work so well - and as musical-drama, Harvey Milk works marvelously. Wallace's score is energetic and eclectic and immediately gets your attention with a vivid mix of Tibetan chanting and Orffian declamation of verses from the Jewish Prayer for the Dead. This is cross-spliced with Milk's mother telling her young son about Nazi atrocities and warning him about golems and "men who are different." Then Diane Feinstein, a fellow supervisor, is heard, from the historical tape, announcing Milk's murder to the press while the murder itself is acted in silhouette. It's so effective as an opening - all the themes are there - even Puccini would have smiled in admiration.

Stereo Review, November 1998
Opera Verité by Jamie James

Wallace, a versatile, accomplished composer, moves easily from postmodernist pastiche to a tuneful, brass-heavy idiom closer to Broadway than traditional opera. He has a lot of fun with quotations in the scene at the Met, wittily looping together allusions to Puccini and Wagner. A scene at a Gay Pride parade has the raucous high-stepping energy of a half-time show at the Rose Bowl. The best music in the score is an epilogue in the form of a Kaddish, the Jewish lament for the dead, which is somberly, delicately scored and sung with haunting purity by countertenor Randall Wong. This vivid recording of a polished, committed performance by the San Francisco Opera introduces a formidably talented composer-librettist team.

Eclectica Magazine August/September 1998
by Don Mager

Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie's opera about Harvey Milk had a highly successful premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 1995. The coherence of the work as based on a recording alone is quite remarkable. This is surely due, on the one hand, to Korie's masterfully constructed libretto, and, on the other, to the superb meshing of Wallace's musical effects with text. This opera is as much a collaboration as high-water marks like those by Strauss and Hoffmensthal, or Verdi and Boito. Like these illustrious predecessors, Wallace and Korie give to their story mythic grandeur, and as such, the unhistorical fictions are fitting and effective. Many post Berg twentieth century operas take themselves so seriously in their attempt to evoke either verismo or psychological realism.

Wallace and Korie, on the other hand, give us moments to relish in which we know that we are, indeed after, "at the opera." This accounts for show-stopping moments such as big choral finales to acts one and two, full-blown arias for Anne Kronenberg, Dan White and Harvey Milk, and the wonderful bed-scene love duet between Harvey and Scott. The simple phrases "You're my family" and "For the one I love," because of Wallace's well-shaped musical texture, evoke a genuine and powerful emotional resonance - the kind of resonance that the best operas have always summoned, even when their librettos are pompous, preposterous, melodramatic and obligatorily heterosexual. Harvey Milk is good opera and never pompous, preposterous, melodramatic nor straight.

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