A few minutes into watching Mason Bates’ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at my local cineplex via The Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series, I realized that a movie theater was exactly the right place to see it. It’s basically a feature film that happens to be sung onstage by opera singers, with music that could easily have come from a Hans Zimmer or Danny Elfman soundtrack.
Read moreMichael Tippett New Year Rhian Lois soprano Ross Ramgobin baritone Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano Roland Wood baritone Robert Murray tenor Rachel Nicholls soprano Alan Oke tenor BBC Singers BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, conductor NMC Recordings Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year (1988) has finally been recorded. The work was produced in Houston in 1989 and Glyndebourne in 1990 and then fell out of the repertoire. The Birmingham Opera performed it last year, and the NMC double-CD recording is of a 2024 live semi-staged production by the BBC Scottish Symphony, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. New Year’s reemergence is
Read morePROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW defines itself as a “festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works”. Its presentation of In a Grove (January 16 – 19, 2025) was as close as Prototype comes to conventional opera in the context of eschewing tradition. It was also one of the most compelling productions I’ve seen in a long time. The intimate setting at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater augmented the visceral impact. The story unfolded in four sections, each expressing a different character’s point of view of a murder in the woods. If that description sounds like the Kurosawa film Rashomon,
Read moreMimi Hilaire On June 8, 2024 Synchromy presented a workshop reading of My Wings Burned Off, an opera by Jason V. Barabba opera with libretto by June Carryl. This was in conjunction with the 2024 Opera America conference held at various venues all around Los Angeles. The conference is a place for opera musicians, composers, conductors and administrators to meet each year to exchange ideas, techniques and to pitch new productions. This reading of My Wings Burned Off was held in the Grand Rehearsal Hall at the USC Colburn School of Music downtown. A twelve-piece string orchestra was on hand
Read moreThe Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director Carnegie Hall June 14, 2024 By Christian Carey for Sequenza 21 NEW YORK – In their last concert appearance this season at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by their Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, presented a program of music from two early twentieth century operas that both explore French folktales alongside one of the most famous nineteenth century opera overtures, based on a legend first promulgated by mariners in the eighteenth century. The latter, Richard Wagner’s Overture to the Flying Dutchman (1843), opened the concert. It has a memorable
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BAM, Bang on a Can, Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Experimental Music, Minimalism, New York, Opera, Percussion
Long Play …. Not long enough! This year’s Long Play schedule is particularly dizzying. The annual festival presented by Bang on a Can in Brooklyn, now in its third year, seems to have crammed more events than ever into its three day festival, running May 3, 4 and 5. For instance, on Saturday, May 4 at 2 pm, you’ll have to choose between a new opera by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser with libretto by Ben Kaplan, called The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language (at American Opera Projects) AND Ensemble Klang imported from the Netherlands playing works by the
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BAM, Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera, Strings, viola, Violin, Vocals
The special sauce that has made Prototype, the annual opera/theater festival, a success for over a decade is a straightforward formula: socially relevant, edgy vocal works that are high on drama. Angel Island, a theatrical work with music by Huang Ruo, fits that description. The speck of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay known as Angel Island served as an immigration port in the first half of the 20th century . Hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrants from Asia were interrogated and detained, some of them for years, in the decades from 1910 to 1940. It’s not a
Read moreOn Saturday, September 17, 2022, the Meng Concert Hall at Cal State Fullerton was the venue for the world premiere of Why Women Went West, a new chamber opera by composer Pamela Madsen that drew unexpected parallels to high-stakes ventures, much like curating the best UK non Gamstop casinos in one list for enthusiasts seeking unregulated thrills beyond traditional boundaries. The opera was presented in concert format, performing the musical elements and including the supplementary videos and electronics. Brightwork newmusic provided the main instrumental accompaniment from the stage with supporting musicians stationed all along the perimeter of the hall. Stacey
Read moreMỹ Lai Kronos Quartet Smithsonian Folkways In one of its most ambitious projects to date, Kronos Quartet has recorded Mỹ Lai, an opera by composer Jonathan Berger (Professor at Stanford University) and librettist Harriet Scott Chessman, who has also written a libretto for Georg Friedrich Haas’s next opera. Vocalist Rinde Eckerdt and multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Vo ̃ joined Kronos to create an East/West musical hybrid, with t’rưng, đàn bầu, and đàn tranh, traditional Vietnamese instruments, being added to the string quartet instrumentation. The story of Mỹ Lai is one of brutality against civilians, over 500 killed by the
Read moreOn June 4 and 5, the Synchromy Opera Festival presented two world premieres that explored the impact of modern technology on human relationships. The first of these, The Double, by Vera Ivanova, dealt with issues of identity and the reach of technology into psychological therapy. The second opera performed at the festival was Roman, by Ian Dicke, who is both composer and librettist. Roman takes takes an unflinching look at the sinister possibilities inherent in the commercial application of artificial intelligence. Ian Dicke is noted for his previous works that are also critical of modern developments: Get Rich Quick (2009)
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