From Bora Yoon's "Weights and Balances." Photo: Julia Frodahl
Many of us waited with bated breath during the recent breakdown of talks between management and the orchestra at NYC Opera. Even though the season is proceeding, the company’s plan to keep themselves afloat (if not artistically viable) seems dubious at best. No music director, draconian cuts for the players and chorus, and no base of operations. Instead NYCO will present a truncated season at several venues. After hearing how shabbily the company has treated its employees – while George Steel continues to make in excess of $300,000 – why would they expect their audience to follow them around town? It portends difficult days to come for opera – and opera goers – in the city. Take nothing away from the Metropolitan (although its recent conductor troubles are noteworthy): but a city with New York’s operatic history would seem to have room for more than one major company.
Fortunately, as Zachary Woolfe points out in a recent excellent article in the NY Times, several smaller companies are attempting to fill the void left by City Opera’s vicissitudes. Opera Omnia, Gotham Chamber Opera, DiCapo Opera, and others are making it possible to hear a plethora of works from the repertoire that are unlikely to be programmed any time soon, either at the Met or languishing NYCO: baroque gems, less known Mozart, neglected bel canto, and the like. The remaining challenge, and it’s a daunting one, is to nurture operas by living composers.
To further the efforts of those working towards that end, three longtime champions of contemporary works – HERE’s Kim Whitener and Artistic Director Kristin Marting and Beth Morrison of Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) – have recently announced a promising new venture. Prototype:Opera/Theatre/Now, a festival that they plan to be an annual event, debuts in January 2013.
Unlike NYCO, Prototype will have a single performance venue, HERE’s space in Soho, for which they will try to build an audience. And, also unlike City Opera, the festival, with steady hands at the rudder, will pursue a coherent artistic vision, presenting chamber operas in the contemporary classical/post-classical vein. Some of the names being mentioned as participants in the Prototypes‘s initial presentations should be familiar to those who’ve attended recent editions of VOX: David T. Little, Byron Au Yong, and Bora Yoon.
Dare we hope for an open call for proposals for new chamber operas? More information about Prototype as it’s available.
Once again, we find ourselves in the thick of things. The New York concert season is reaching a fever pitch of pre-holiday season intensity, in which presenters and ensembles try to get their programs heard before the inevitable onslaught of Messiahs, Nutcrackers, tree-lighting ceremonies, and caroling elbows its way to the forefront of New York’s calendar of musical events – ready or not. While we can’t be in two places at once (I still think Steve Smith has a magic ring that enables this power!), hopefully between the various new music enthusiasts in the Sequenza 21 community’s NYC cadre, we can support these “hot tickets.”
Tom Cipullo's The Husbands in Rehearsal
11/4 at 8 PM at Weill Recital Hall: Opera Shorts 2011
The third annual installment of the Remarkable Theater Brigade’s Opera Shorts program is this Friday. These mini-operas – ten minutes or less – are an emerging composer’s dream: a chance to hear a brief slice of their work on the stage. But Opera Shorts draws some heavy hitters to the mini-opera game as well. The 2011 installment features works by prominent songsters Jake Heggie, William Bolcom, and Tom Cipullo, as well as emerging creators Marie Incontrera, Mike McFerron, Davide Zannoni,Anne Dinsmore Phillips, Patrick Soluri, and Christian McLeer. Given the length of that list, it’s lucky that none of them have Wagnerian ambitions — this time out at least!
11/4 at 8 PM on the water: Bennett Brass at Bargemusic
Can’t decide whether you’d prefer an evening of early music or present day fare? Bennett Brass (trumpeters Andy Kozar and Ben Grow, hornist Alana Vegter, trombonist Will Lang, and tubist Matt Muszynski) has got you covered. Friday night at Bargemusic, they are presenting a program that works with both of the venue’s series: ‘Here and Now’ and “There and Then.’ The latter is represented by a Rameau suite and Elgar’sSerenade for Strings (but this time arranged for … you guessed it … brass!). Among the more recent music is Fanfare for All by the Dean of Dodecaphony: Milton Babbitt. His compositional antipode John Cage is also on the bill, as are some still-living figures: Ted Hearne, Nick Didkovsky, and Dan Grabois.
BoaC. Photo: Pascal Perich and Julien Jourdes
11/5 at 9 PM at Zankel Hall: Bang on a Can’s 25th NYC season opener!
BoaC celebrates 25 years of gigging in New York City with a show at a ‘modest’ venue – Zankel, the theater downstairs at Carnegie Hall! The centerpiece of the show is the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen’sLifewith film by Marijke Van Warmerdam (postponed from a previous season due to that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland). There’s also David Lang’ssunray, Michael Gordon’s for Madeline, Kate Moore’s Ridgeway, three pieces commissioned by Bang on a Can from David Longstrethof the Dirty Projectors (Instructional Video, Matt Damon, Breakfast at J&M), and Lukas Ligeti’s Glamour Girl. The concert serves as a live preview of the All-Stars’ first studio album in five years: a two-CD set titled Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (out January 2012 on Cantaloupe Music). Ticket info is here, but we’ll let you in on a nice perk for early attendees: the first 200 to arrive get a free drink at the Zankel Bar!
11/8 at 7:30 at Le Poisson Rouge: IN MEMORIAM HENRYK MIKOŁAJ GÓRECKI
Seems like yesterday, but it’s been a year since Gorecki’s passing. To commemorate the first anniversary of his death, the Polish Cultural Institute is hosting a concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday. The program includes Kleines Requiem für Eine Polka (1993), performed by Ensemble Signal, conducted by Brad Lubman, as well as JACK Quartet playing the 2nd SQ (“quasi una fantasia,” 1991).
This Spring, Baltimore-based composer David Smooke composed Criminal Element, a “nonopera” in a fabricated language, for Rhymes with Opera,a company devoted to presenting opera in nontraditional spaces. Alongside works by Martin Zimmerman, Ryan Jesperson, and George Lam, it premieres Friday, June 17th in Brooklyn at Cafe Orwell.The program, titled Criminal Intent (hopefully Dick Wolf won’t sue), will be repeated in Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston.
As if it weren’t hard enough to compose an opera, non or otherwise, in the midst of a busy semester teaching at the Peabody Institute,where Smooke is a faculty member, the composer decided to create his own libretto, in a made-up language built out of IPA no less! To help us translate this phonetic construction and its backstory, I asked for some further information about the piece, which he shares below.
Smooke says, “In this nonopera, I consider the fraud—the unveiling of which helped spark the recession of 2008—perpetrated by Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader from France’s Société Générale who appeared to me to function as the archetypical white-collar criminal. Like his British counterpart Nicholas Leeson, who brought down the venerable Barings Bank in the 1990s, Kerviel was an interloper in the European banking society. These men were among the first working-class hires within traditionally upper-class departments and both appear to have perpetrated their crimes as part of their vain attempts to please their superiors through outworking and outsmarting their colleagues. Here, scenes of trading—number arias—recur throughout, with each growing progressively more tense. Life beyond the office is represented by a lullaby sung by paternal and maternal figures (Kerviel’s parents were a blacksmith and hairdresser in Pont-l’Abbé, Brittany), and by snippets of city life that include an invitation from friends to join their revelry. Although this piece creates theatrical scenes with some referential elements, it is a meditation on class differences and on the germinating factors in exorbitant criminal events, and is not intended to portray the life of any specific individual.”
“There is no text; the action is conveyed through an invented language notated in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The action therefore remains relatively ambiguous and non-specific. I ask the singers and the string quartet to explore many unusual performance techniques, which force them to stretch beyond their normal comfort zones.”
Criminal Element in rehearsal
CRIMINAL INTENT
Featuring the West End String Quartet Orphée Redux and Someone Anyone directed by Elspeth Davis
Friday, June 17 at 7pm | Café Orwell
247 Varet St, Brooklyn, NY 11206
Saturday, June 18 at 6pm | Windup Space
12 W North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21201
*A party for Friends of RWO after the show!*
Friday, June 24 at 7:30pm | Real Art Ways
56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT 06106
Saturday, June 25 at 2pm | Yes!Oui!Si! Space
19 Vancouver St, Boston, MA 02115
RYAN JESPERSON Orphée Redux
MARTIN ZIMMERMAN and GEORGE LAM Someone Anyone
DAVID SMOOKE Criminal Element (2011, premiere, commissioned by RWO)
Composer Chris Cerrone and I share a love for the late author Italo Calvino.
Cerrone has adapted the maestro’s novel Invisible Cities into an opera. It will be performed at Columbia University tonight and tomorrow by Red Light New Music, Mellissa Hughes, and Ekmeles. With such an illustrious cast of characters, what’s not to like?
May 13 and 14th, 2011, 8pm
Red Light New Music and
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in American at Columbia University
present the staged world premiere of Invisible Cities
1161 Amsterdam Ave. (just south of W. 118th Street)
New York, NY
$15 admission
$10 student and senior tickets available at the door
The MATA Festival’s final performance is 7:30 PM tonight (5/12) at Le Poisson Rouge.
It features the Metropolis Ensemble, premiering several new works commissioned by MATA, including Ryan Carter’sSkeumorphic Tendencies and The Rake, a hip-hoperatic retelling of Stravinky’s Rake’s Progress by Brad Balliett and Sequenza 21′s own Elliot Cole. Ticket information can be found on LPR’s site or via Metropolis here.
New York City Opera’s three monodramas – by Arnold Schoenberg, Morton Feldman, and John Zorn – premieres this weekend at Lincoln Center. The have a bunch of interesting videos discussing the works up on YouTube. Here’s director Jim Jarmusch reading reading Samuel Beckett’s Neither (the libretto of the Feldman), Alan Shawn discussing Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and director Michael Counts describing Zorn’s music.
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