Drawn to stories that intersect the political & cultural worlds: Anthony Davis's opera The Central Park Five released on disc by Long Beach Opera

I first came across the case of the Central Park Five when I read Joan Didion's essay Sentimental Journeys first published in the New York Review of Books in 1991 and collected in her book After Henry. In the essay she considers the case of the Central Park jogger from 1989 to examine the way the city's sentimentality for the narratives it tells about itself, whether they are true or not. No-one reading the essay could have doubted that those indicted for the crime, the Central Park Five, were innocent. Though it took time for justice to truly be served.

It might seem a strange subject for an opera, but then operas have been long fascinated with the excesses of human emotion and frailty. The Central Park Five by composer Anthony Davis and librettist Richard Wesley premiered at Long Beach Opera (LBO) in 2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2020. And the work was released by LBO this week on Platoon. 

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