With most of the country's able-bodied men on the battlefield, workers for the Transcontinental Railroad were initially in short supply. Getty Images/Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/ For each mile of track laid, a ten square mile parcel of land was provided. And the companies got land for their efforts, too. A mile of track laid in the mountains yielded $48,000 in bonds. As the terrain got tougher, the payouts got bigger. For each mile of track laid in the plains, the companies would receive $16,000 in government bonds. Where the two companies would meet was not predetermined by the legislation.Ĭongress provided financial incentives to the two companies to get the project underway, and increased the funds in 1864. The Union Pacific Railroad was granted the contract to lay track from Council Bluffs, Iowa west. The Central Pacific Railroad, which had already built the first railroad west of the Mississippi, was hired to forge the path east from Sacramento. When it was passed by Congress in 1862, the Pacific Railway Act permitted two companies to begin construction on the Transcontinental Railroad. Bridges’s Josefa, a Mexican woman who receives a death sentence from a kangaroo court, is fiercely dignified, and entrancing in the lullaby “Ven esta noche amado, querido.Pictures of the American West/National Archives and Record Administration/Alfred A. Tines sings before being walked offstage with a gun to his back. With a penetrating bite, he delivers the setting of text from Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: “The Fourth of July is yours not mine,” Mr. The most bitter music of the evening is reserved for the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, as the doomed former slave Ned Peters. (Genuinely tender is the baritone Elliot Madore, as Ramón.) Ryan McKinny’s bass-baritone is terrifyingly masculine, and Hye Jung Lee, as the sympathetic prostitute Ah Sing, has an enchantingly delicate soprano voice capable of shocking power. The tenor Paul Appleby, smooth and tender in fare like Mozart, has immersed himself in the role of Joe Cannon with a Missouri twang and desperate fury. Sellars’s staging and John Heginbotham’s choreography.)īut elsewhere, this score brings out some of the most inspired performances you’ll find among its cast of young stars. (It’s not promising, though, that it was also limp and lazy in acting out Mr. The Dutch National Opera chorus, which sang with unfortunate imprecision all night, may still be settling into these passages. Adams has written some of the most sophisticated and stirring choral music in modern opera here, he most often saves it for new settings of old folk songs that take a chilling turn from boisterous to sinister.
Adams also suggests Weill and Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” a similar opera about money, rowdiness and savagery. But, with an accordion and a delightful taste of the lowbrow, Mr.
It has the propulsive momentum that runs through most of his music, and playful touches of Americana like galloping rhythms and expansive fifths. Adams’s score, played with exactitude and enthusiasm by the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Backstage workings are clearly visible period costumes are juxtaposed with red Solo cups inside a bar with the appearance of a roadside dive somewhere in the Sierra Nevada.Ĭlose listeners may also hear some Brecht in Mr. But by turning to naturalism, he undercuts his original, still-present concept of a California history pageant à la Brecht - especially because the Brechtian set design, by David Gropman, is nearly unchanged. Sellars’s solution, with a slightly altered staging in this revival, is to put more bodies onstage, to have characters spend less time addressing the audience and more time interacting with one another.