From the 2026 Kindling Arts Festival:
Jeremy Smith’s Faith Brings Fire and Brimstone
Sitting atop the bill for the 2026 Kindling Arts Festival was Jeremy Smith’s Faith, a newly completed opera that blends the southern gothic aesthetic with the sounds of Appalachian folk and protestant hymnody. The premise of this two-act opera was inspired by the story of Glenn Summerford, a Pentecostal preacher from rural Alabama who was sentenced to life in prison after the attempted murder of his wife in 1991. To no surprise, Summerford’s story garnered national attention and has since been adapted into various forms of media, including books and documentaries. Between the tabloid dramatics surrounding Glenn Summerford and Jeremy Smith’s Alabama roots, the story was ripe for new setting through Smith’s own musical lens – and what medium conveys drama through music better than opera?
Faith was premiered in April of 2026, and its performance at Kindling Arts Festival marked the opera’s second staging. Fittingly, Spero Dei, a church in West Nashville, hosted the production. Getting to experience Faith inside a church, the setting of which is so central to the opera’s narrative, undoubtedly elevated the viewing experience. Kindling Arts’s production of Faith was under the baton of music director Daniel Krenz, with instrumental support from Blueprint Ensemble and chorus supplied from members of Nashville in Harmony.
The staging for the production is minimal, a logistical consideration that allows the production to travel very well. The opera contains three named roles plus chorus. Furthermore, the score calls for very minimal instrumentation: piano, trap set, double bass, and violin. Most concertgoers don’t often consider the tremendous headache it is for composers to find performers, secure venues, and schedule rehearsals and performances of their works. I am glad to see Smith’s pragmatism rewarded here because many scores never make it off the page, due either to their impracticality or difficulty to stage. Faith’s runtime clocks in around a brisk forty minutes. Smith packs in a lot of material into a series of short vignettes, yet importantly, the opera does not overstay its welcome.
The structure of Faith is rather concrete. A recurring body of this architecture are sequences where the full cast, or congregation, sing hymns together, accompanied by piano. Smith set these hymns in a way that is quite clever, where the language and content of the hymns that he sets feel distantly familiar, yet his compositional voice rings through. The melodies themselves are tuneful and charmingly off-kilter, and as I looked around during these segments, I noticed patrons tapping their feet and nodding their heads side to side. At times, it felt like the strophic form of these hymns bogged down the pacing just a touch, and a stanza or two could have been omitted from the hymns without it affecting the strength of the narrative.
The chorus, comprising the church’s congregation within the production, was staged on the floor of the sanctuary, positioned facing the chancel with their backs towards the audience. When the congregation rose to sing hymns, they would stand perpendicular to the audience to cheat out, but the focal point of their sound was still aimed at the Preacher downstage. I found this staging decision to be a bit awkward, and it resulted in a portion of the ensemble’s volume and diction being lost in the space before it could reach the audience. Yet, the chorus’s inclusion in this production is very necessary. Their reactions to the drama, harkening back to the chorus’s Greek roots, provided an extra layer of visual depth to the performance, and their musical contributions supplied a thickness to the full ensemble’s sound during the musical climaxes.
These blocks of full-ensemble hymn sings are juxtaposed with passages where the named roles progress the drama through recit-like passages. As the story unfolds, we see the Preacher, played by Benjamin South, address his congregation with increasingly inflammatory language and ideologies. South’s strong tenor and slick talking delivery was frequently returned with excited interjections from the congregation. His confidence in his own leadership and cunning is further bolstered by The Other Woman (Jamie Shannon Ertle), who expresses her admiration for the Preacher’s sermons. The Other Woman is quite literally set apart from the rest of the congregation, dressed in a green pantsuit, sharply contrasting the white plainclothes of the other churchgoers. This thematic device, while rather on the nose, was effective in reinforcing The Other Woman’s role as a vehicle for temptation and greed.
The primary dramatic conflict within the narrative of the opera exists between the Preacher and his wife, Faith (Angela Stenzel). As Faith challenges the Preacher and the manipulative tactics that he employs upon his congregation, a strong resentment builds between the two of them. The Preacher soon comes to view Faith as an obstacle standing in the way of power and influence, so he devises a plan to murder his wife. A highlight from the opera occurs during an aria sung by Faith in act two, where she asks God to “let this cup pass from [her].” Smith slyly works in a double-entendre here, both quoting Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and alluding to the literal cup of poison that will spell Faith’s demise. Stenzel’s performance of this number was tragic and wholly captivating, and I found Faith’s aria to be the dramatic apex of the opera. Credit to the Blueprint Ensemble as well, whose accompaniment heightened Stenzel’s moment without drawing attention away from this pivotal juncture in the story. Unfortunately, I did not feel that the opera’s concluding events were able to match the highs reached in the aforementioned aria. The final scene where Faith drinks from the cup of poison felt a little abrupt, and I found myself surprised once the production had finished. For such a tremendously important beat in the story, I wish that we could have stayed in that space a little longer to allow the tension to fully boil over.
I do want to spotlight a particularly engaging device that Smith utilized in the chorus. Towards the end of the production, the chorus accompanied a solo passage from the Preacher, reinforcing the instrumental ensemble with a “stomp-clap” figure. Though the tempo of this passage was relaxed, the inclusion of body percussion provided a propulsive drive to the music. The stomps and claps on the stressed beats tastefully mingled with the stirring rhythms in the drums and bass, resulting in a very intoxicating groove. To feel the vibrations travel from the feet of the performers to the wood floors and into one’s own body was a wonderfully visceral and immersive experience. I found this to be a very exciting and rewarding musical decision. And beyond the ingenuity of this excerpt’s construction, its execution was strong as well. Daniel Krenz negotiated the full forces of the ensemble with great precision here, leveraging the voices of each section to deliver a powerful musical moment.
Faith is a brilliant conception for an opera, and composer Jeremy Smith has effectively crafted a sobering cautionary tale of authoritarian systems of power and groupthink. The Kindling Arts Festival’s production of Faith was largely successful, and I am very excited to see the operatic tradition continued with fresh and inventive ideas. I am grateful to have been able to attend this performance and look forward to more exciting work from both Mr. Smith and Kindling Arts.
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Ethan Morrell is a composer and audio engineer from Nashville, Tennessee. He is currently finishing up his Bachelor’s degree at MTSU. In his free time, Ethan enjoys attending concerts, cooking, and following NBA basketball. He is also a co-host of The Fresh Faced Filmbro podcast.
