Sean McCann - The Leopard (2CD/3LP)

Sean McCann
The Leopard
Recital
USA, 2025
LP

Recital number 114 is label head Sean McCann’s first opera (or radio play), and it brings together many of his abiding interests—avant-garde performance art, spoken word, collaboration, and, musically, a constant tension between an ornate, sometimes old-fashioned, but nonetheless overwhelming beauty, and frequent rufflings and complications of that beauty, sometimes coming out in sounds that are bizarre, profane, or downright frightening. (The dyspeptic vocalizations often favored in sound poetry, for instance, or the blood-curdling scream—or leopard’s cry?—that inaugurates the “Overture.”)

There’s a kind of story here, largely about a mummy who lops off, cooks, and eats parts of himself. The plot is supported by startlingly realistic foley art, and you can follow along in the gorgeous 88-page libretto book, which will answer some questions, raise others, and provide its own wrong paths and misdirections.

It’s just a guess, but I can imagine McCann getting deep into archival audio recordings of sound poetry and experimental performance art and becoming increasingly intrigued by the piece that’s missing—the stage picture unseen, the context lost, the impossibility of knowing for certain whether the strangeness you’re experiencing would be any less strange if you were properly seated. And so here’s an opera that has never been performed (at least not yet), the missing context a constituent piece of it, an auto-cannibalistic feast for the imagination.

It’s probably not as God intended, but I’ve found that, while this rewards close listening, it’s almost more intriguing when I put it on in the background, puttering around, doing dishes, surrendering to my inability to track the story and letting each strange moment wash over me as its own encounter.

However you come at this, there’s a whole lot to sink your teeth into. It’s an artifact destined to baffle the curious for years to come.