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Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls \"multimodal narrative.\" Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.

[...]LBO went its own way with generic staging and designs by the company's artistic and general director, Andreas Mitisek, and generic video projections by Frieder Weiss -- the team responsible for an uneven but more ambitious production of Philip Glass' \"Akhnaten\" last season.

Lorca and his idea of \"deep song\" are at the center of this work, exerting a magnetic pull on all of its characters, sometimes through his presence on stage but often through his painful absence after his murder in 1936 at the hands of Franco's forces during the Spanish civil war.

It was opera made in haste, and it was a mess. After losing his way with another tragic subject, [Osvaldo Golijov] dropped plans for a Holocaust opera and persuaded playwright David Henry Hwang to fashion a libretto on [Federico Garcia Lorca] just months before the premiere. Hwang viewed Lorca's death through the eyes of Margarita Xirgu, a famed Catalan actress who starred in Lorca's first stage success, \"Mariana Pineda.\" In the opera, which takes place in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1969, Xirgu, now an aging actress, dies onstage while once more reprising her Mariana Pineda. In her last moments she imagines Lorca's arrest in Granada in 1936 and his being led to Ainadamar, the \"fountain of tears,\" where he was shot along with a teacher and a bullfighter. there were also compelling musical moments in \"Ainadamar,\" so compelling that audiences and critics alike bent over backward to give this uneven opera the benefit of the doubt. Golijov's promise as an opera composer was too strong to be discouraged. A New York performance was canceled when [Dawn Upshaw] took ill. Several months later, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group remounted \"Ainadamar,\" with minor musical changes and some toning down of the production. That might have been the end of the opera had Peter Sellars not been in the audience. Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who also conducted \"Ainadamar\" in Los Angeles, led what may be the finest moment of his young career in a performance of ideally flowing lines. He will not, unfortunately, be the one who makes the recording of the opera. That will be Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, which will perform \"Ainadamar\" in concert at next summer's Ojai Festival.

''Ainadamar,'' Osvaldo Golijov's brief opera at the Santa Fe Opera Saturday evening, remembers the deaths of these two people but confesses its fascination with death in general. [Mariana Pineda] was garroted in 1831 by counterrevolutionaries not unlike the fascists who shot [Federico Garcia Lorca] in 1936. In the opera, their stories are told by way of Uruguay, where the playwright's erstwhile leading lady Margarita Xirgu is long exiled and approaching death in 1969. ''Ainadamar'' refers to Granada's Fountain of Tears, where Garcia Lorca was killed. Peter Sellars directs it as a ceremony of mourning, with women in black acting out mourners ritual choreography. Mr. Sellars casts a keen eye on the look of violent death: re-enacting twitching last moments or slumping firing squad victims whose shootings are backed up and repeated as in a tape loop. The cast is small and largely female: Dawn Upshaw as Xirgu, Kelly O'Connor as Garcia Lorca, and Jessica Rivera as the younger Xirgu. Ruiz Alonso and Jose Tripaldi were the soldiers/executioners. Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducted well.

The saga of \"Ainadamar\" began with [Osvaldo Golijov] dropping his initial idea for a Holocaust opera told through the eyes of grieving women and turning to [Federico Garcia Lorca] for inspiration at the last possible minute. Last spring, he talked playwright David Henry Hwang into crafting a libretto in a matter of weeks. Hwang had the further constraint of maintaining the original all-female cast. In the great operatic tradition, the Argentine-born Golijov, who translated the libretto into Spanish, composed right up to the Tanglewood premiere. In certain respects, \"Ainadamar\" is a remarkable achievement for something so quickly crafted. The short opera (in Tanglewood it was paired with another premiere, Robert Zuidam's \"Rage d'Amours\") ambitiously presents Lorca from several simultaneous points of view and time frames. His death is seen in flashback by the aging actress Margarita Xirgu, who is waiting backstage to give her final performance of Lorca's early play, \"Mariana Pineda.\" She recalls the poet and herself as a young woman, visualizes his execution and communes with his spirit as she walks on stage, where she collapses and dies. [Dawn Upshaw] is a rapt, commanding figure as the elder Margarita, as is Kelly O'Connor, a strikingly charismatic mezzo-soprano, now a graduate student at UCLA, as Lorca. Among Golijov's improvements is that he has given O'Connor a more exuberant, Lorca-like entrance. Unhappily, though, these impressive singers did not register ideally in Disney.

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is expanding its musical horizons this week with performances of \"Ainadamar,\" an opera by Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang. It's an evocative, meditative work on the 1936 death of beloved poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered in the Spanish Civil War. Two performances remain, tonight and Saturday in Symphony Hall.

[Osvaldo Golijov]'s first opera percolates with the catchy Latin beat of the Argentine-American composer's riotously colorful \"St. Mark Passion,\" which had its Midwest premiere at Ravinia three summers ago. The stars of that show, soprano Dawn Upshaw and conductor Robert Spano, were back for \"Ainadamar,\" along with Spano's superb Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

[OSVALDO GOLIJOV]'s music, charged with Spanish rhythms and timbres, is hypnotically beautiful and lustrously orchestrated. The electronic waters of the opening are as primordial as Wagner's portrait of the Rhine; the percussive patterns of horsehooves, later echoed in gunshots, are terrifying. Golijov has omitted the role of the young [Margarita Xirgu], assigning her music to a new character; he's extended some scenes and added a dream sequence about Xirgu's fantasy of escape with [Federico Garcia Lorca] to Cuba. An \"Havana\" song evokes Kurt Weill, as do some other details, but without the mordancy, and a little more mordancy would help cut the prevailing sweetness.

Furthering the [Osvaldo Golijov]-Chicago connection, Yo-Yo Ma will perform a new Golijov work for cello and orchestra with the CSO Aug. 6 at Ravinia. The composer's collaboration with the cellist's Silk Road Ensemble will result in a new work to be given as part of the CSO's MusicNOW series in 2006-07. [Dawn Upshaw] also will perform Golijov's eclectic vocal work \"Ayre\" on a MusicNOW program that same season.