This review first appeared in the print edition of Opera Canada.
Zachary Wadsworth’s The Far West is a setting for tenor, chorus and strings of texts by poet/priest Tim Duglos, who died of AIDS in 1990. These are very personal and curiously optimistic texts. In G-9 for example death is described as “a great adventure” that will end “in just the right place”. Only in Parachuteis there much in the way of anger. Here AIDs is “an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink”
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