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| Wes Mason as Hamlet (photos by Ellen Apple Photography) |
Wes Mason sings Clint Borzoni's "Two Nooses" from "When Adonis Calls":
As if Hamlet wasn't enough to sing, on Friday, May 8th he sang three excerpts from composer Clint Borzoni and librettist John De Los Santos'When Adonis Calls, which is part of the Festival's Frontiers series, a presentation of new operas that are under development. That performance included the tour de force aria "Two Nooses" sung by the Poet. His muse was fellow baritone Matt Moeller. All of the text is based on poetry by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.
Here is the text to the aria:
I have two nooses, one for you and one for me.
Let's die to this life and be born again, together
on a farm somewhere, where time is snail-paced and
two dusty lads may share a bed. Let's quiver and
giggle during thunderstorms and gawk dumbfounded at
endless skies full of tireless stars.
Let us die now together from our lands so far apart, where sirens
shriek, where soulless politicians wave and
rant and preachers vomit vile vitriol about anyone who
doesn't eat the same pathetic breakfast cereal; let us
meet together in a land rules by hobbits, dwarves, and
dinosaurs in flannel vests...
I have two nooses, both weaved from letters and
poems received and sent. They contain your dreams, your
faith, your scent; I share one with you, my poet my
friend, with the queries: What is life, if but the brutal matrix of aloneness; and
What is love, if not worth dying for?
