Leonardo Balada’s tragic-comic chamber opera Hangman! Hangman! is a free adaptation of an American cowboy folksong. Johnny is about to be hanged for horse theft, an act he admits but asserts was no crime as “the horse was weak.” After appeals to his mother, father, and Sweetheart fail to procure the ransom money to spare his life, Johnny is rescued in the veritable nick of time by a wealthy Irishman who announces he has just purchased the entire town and then proceeds to make Johnny his personal deputy. The opera ends as the fickle townfolk celebrate Johnny as their hero.
The Town of Greed is a sequel to Hangman! Hangman! and takes place 20 years later. Johnny has become a ruthless industrial capitalist who pollutes the town’s environment and depletes its precious resources by selling out to foreign interests. The townfolk aren’t bothered in the least by all of this as long as it keeps their pockets stuffed. Before long we’re right back where we started, with Johnny once again about to face the hangman’s noose. His brilliant notion to manufacture “celebrities” to restore the town’s fortune nearly saves his neck, until a Wall Street Man comes in announcing he’s just bought the town for a toxic waste dump and promptly shoots Johnny dead.
Balada’s libretto abounds in caustic social commentary and outright sarcasm, for which he composed music (which in orchestral timbre faintly resembles Kurt Weill) unnerving in its silliness and outright banality, qualities perfectly captured by a small cadre of instrumentalists from the Carnegie Mellon Opera Theater conducted by Colman Pearce. The vocal lines are purposely cartoonish on the order of Shostakovich’s satirical opera The Nose. All the roles are convincingly performed, with James Longmire giving a suitably cloying, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the beleaguered and incessantly whining Johnny, and Natalya Kraevsky’s winsome, touching Sweetheart offering the opera’s few moments of poignant repose.
Overall, you get the strong impression that the missing visual element would greatly enhance the effect of both works, but the well-engineered recording gives a good accounting nonetheless. It’s uncertain if this is a disc you’ll want to play very often, but if this kind of thing intrigues you, Balada’s farcical double bill is worth at least one good listen.
