Brits give ‘Death’ life on film

John Adams may have just won the Pulitzer Prize for a meditative work, “On the Transmigration of Souls,” that memorializes victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center Towers, yet that hardly means that nervous opera houses dare produce his controversial 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Last season, the Boston Symphony even canceled a performance of choruses from the opera.

But where the classical music mainstream in America fears to tread, British television has dared to dash in. A new film of the opera, produced by Britain’s Channel 4, will be screened at the San Francisco Film Festival on Easter Sunday and next Monday, in conjunction with the San Francisco Opera. Directed in a harrowing documentary style by Penny Woolcock, with the score conducted by Adams himself and starring opera singers who are also forceful actors, this audacious version of the powerful opera, which personalizes terrorists and victims alike, could well give “Klinghoffer” new life and meaning.

Next month it will be shown in New York as part of Lincoln Center’s current John Adams festival, and further screenings are planned in London, Jerusalem and South America. It airs on Channel 4 in Britain in the fall. Ever faint of heart when it comes to art, PBS rejected it sight unseen.

-- Mark Swed