After the controversial debut of Holy Blood and Crescent Moon in Cleveland last year, Fort Worth Opera director Mario Ramos scrambled to locate the composer Stewart Copeland, the former drummer for the rock band Police. "I couldn't care less who he was," Ramos says. "It was the story [about warring Muslims and Christians in Beirut, where Copeland grew up] that attracted me." Ramos concedes that Copeland's background might help tap into a new audience "because of the musical language he uses," says Ramos, "a person who has never been to the opera can understand it."
Copeland, unfamiliar with the genre when he started composing Holy Blood five years ago, liked the challenge. He did have experience writing soundtracks for TV's The Equalizer and for other movies such as Rumblefish.
Now, he says, "It's my duty to break the barrier of what opera is supposed to be." Holy Blood will he staged at the Tarrant County Convention Center in November, for the second time ever. The Cleveland production and the roasting it recieved from critics taught Copeland a few lessons - including subtlety. In the Police, he made the crowd go wild "With opera," he says, "there's another aesthetic - trying to get the crowd to shut up. I want them to care about tenor and how he relates to his soprano. I don't want to hear any throats being cleared."
But when the final curtain fall, Copeland says, it will he fine for the audience to cut loose. "They can burn down the house," he says.
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