Minnesota Opera presents an adaptation of the Children’s Book “Snow Day” in Star Tribune

Quick: What is the most aware book in the history of the New York Public Library system?

To give up? The answer is “The Snow Day”, a 1962 children’s book by Ezra Jack Keats for a young boy in the city, pleased with the beauty and adventures he finds after the main snowfall. The book, won by a medal in Caldecot, violates the borders of the publication of chronicity with the experiences of a young black boy.

If you have ever read this little book – and the chances are good that you have – you may be surprised to find it adapted to opera. Yes, it’s only just over an hour, but Minnesota Opera presents it in the center of St. Paul, which opens this Saturday.

“Yes, this is a short children’s book, but it expands,” Soprano Raven McMilan said last week when we met at the Minnesota Operation Center in the northern contour of Minneapolis. “I thought it was cool to turn a simple story about the joy of Black Boy into a more tighter story, a nice little show.”

McMila debuted the role of Peter, the young protagonist of the Snow Day, when he premiered in Houston Grand Opera in 2021 and now she’s coming north to sing the same role with Minnesota Opera. She says she fell in love with the music that composer Joel Thompson wrote about the opera the first time she heard it.

“You can really hear the miracle, the excitement, the novelty of Peter’s experience in Joel’s music,” she said. “I think the result is stunning. Vocal lines, but especially, orchestrations, interludes, everything is right there.

“We often say in our area that really good composers – Mozart, Verdi, Puccini – give you everything in music. And I think Joel also does an incredible job of that. “

Thompson is best known for a work, quite different in the tone of the Snow Day: the choral composition “The Seven Last Words of the Non -Armed Forces”, which takes away its text the last words of black men killed by police. While this piece is overflowing with grief and tragedy, “Snow Day” is all about an innocent sense of miracle.