By the time the curtain lifted at the Ordway on Saturday evening, it was already Sunday in the United Kingdom — the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 100 years exactly since the Armistice finally brought World War I to a conclusion.
That gave an added poignancy to the events onstage, where Kevin Puts' Great War opera "Silent Night" was playing.
Minnesota Opera premiered the piece in 2011, and this revival of the original production went a long way to explaining why it has since become so popular with other opera companies.
Puts' opera centers on what happened in the Belgian trenches at Christmas 1914 — a near-miraculous truce between Allied and German soldiers, who spontaneously left their bunkers to swap seasonal greetings and exchange mementos.
Mark Campbell's cinematic libretto features numerous shifts of scene and perspective, from a Berlin opera house to a Scottish church, and from a battlefield to the French, German and Scottish bunkers.
It could have been a major headache for the production crew, but Francis O'Connor's ingenious set design ensured it wasn't.
O'Connor set the action on and around a revolving platform to suggest the various locations, at one point metamorphosing into a glitzy cocktail party at a chalet.
The complicated battle scene in Act One was grippingly blocked by director Eric Simonson. For once the fighting looked real — so often in opera it is risibly ham-fisted, but fight director Doug Scholz-Carlson gave the bayonet thrusts and body hits a visceral immediacy.
