The Metropolitan Opera announced that its co-production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha with the English National Opera will debut next season on April 11, 2008. The ENO is doing nine performances of Satyagraha this April. Written in 1980, Satyagraha is based on Gandhi’s formative years in South Africa, as he developed his philosophy of nonviolent protest as a powerful force for change. It is the second work in the ”portrait” trilogy by Glass, which also includes Einstein on the Beach (1975) and Akhnaten (1983-84). Satyagraha involves the director Phelim McDermott and the designer Julian Crouch, two of the three artistic directors of the visionary British theater
Read moreSince it’s opera week here at Sequenza 21 and there’s a lot of chatter in the comments about transplanting operas between cultures and Galen has raised the topic of fugues in the invisible YouTube video below, it seems somehow fitting to mention that Miller Theater and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music are presenting tonight and tomorrow night the U.S. premiere of Lost Highway by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, a multimedia opera based on the weird and wacky David Lynch film of the same name. Film buffs will recall that Lynch’s film involves sex, murder and a character named Fred Madison who mysteriously becomes Pete Dayton through a
Read moreSpeaking of great American operas, Tobias Picker has written two of them; Emmeline, which is an unqualified masterpiece, and An American Tragedy, which I think history will regard more dearly than its contemporary reviews might suggest. Between those two landmarks, Picker wrote a kind of “forgotten” opera called Thérèse Raquin, an epic based on the Zola novel which, like Tragedy, involves an unwanted lover being chucked overboard in favor of a more attractive alternative. Picker’s psychiatrist, if he has one, could probably make something of that. Thérèse Raquin premiered at The Dallas Opera in 2001 and is now having its New York premiere run, in a revised
Read moreI don’t know Ricky Ian Gordon personally but he e-mails me frequently with updates on his projects, never neglecting to sign off with “xxxooo” which I find endearing although I’m sure he does the same for all the guys. I know and like his music mainly from Audra McDonald and a wonderful recording of his songs called Bright-Eyed Joy but nothing I’ve heard or read prepared me for the universal praise for the Minnesota Opera’s production of Gordon’s (with libretto by Michael Korie) The Grapes of Wrath. What we have here, apparently, is a real contender for the title of the Great American Opera.
Read moreThe big news in London this weekend is a £1 million (almost $2m) tie-up between English National Opera and Sony PlayStation to put games consoles into the foyer of the hallowed London Coliseum. This is an opera house renown for its shock tactics, as the production shot from their Don Giovanni here shows. Of course, anything to reach a new audience must be praiseworthy. Or must it? On An Overgrown Path isn’t so sure, and also has the full story.
Read more“What to Wear” ended its all-too-short run yesterday. When you find out its schedule for performance in New York, get your tickets right away. Better yet, get tickets for two dates (or more), because you’ll want more than one evening. As reported and commented on last week, this is the opera with music by Michael Gordon and libretto, design, direction, and occasional voice-overs by Richard Foreman. Gordon’s music is a pleasure to hear and feel. (I wouldn’t have minded a few fewer decibels.) David Rosenboom, one of whose sidelights is being dean of the CalArts School of Music, was music director
Read moreDeutsche Oper said it will scrap planned showings of Mozart’s Idomeneo because of warnings by Berlin security officials that a scene in the current production depicting the head of the Prophet Mohammed (along with the heads of Jesus and the Buddha) present an “incalculable security risk.” Actually, they said references to “world religions” but we know which one is the problem. This is the kind of infuriating capitulation that can push otherwise rational people at least temporarily into the nuke ’em back to the Stone Age camp. But, we need to remember that Death of Klinghoffer and the American premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Silver Tassie suffered similar fates
Read moreMark Swed, who is (perhaps wisely) ignoring our attempts to stir up trouble over his incoherent Jefferson Friedman review last week, is wild about the Michael Gordon/Richard Foreman opera What to Wear which is now playing a limited run at REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in beautiful downtown L.A.. A couple of snippets: “What to Wear” — with dazzling, hard-hitting music by Michael Gordon and words, staging, design and equally hard-hitting and dazzling zaniness by Richard Foreman — is being called a rock opera. It’s not. If it were, rock opera could, after the premiere of this arresting new
Read moreMichael Gordon’s new post-rock opera What To Wear opens tonight at the Redcat Theater in downtown LA. Richard Foreman wrote the libretto and directs the stage production. According to our sources (Michael, who “guarantees a good time will be had by all”), What to Wear is a raucous and bitingly funny work about fashion. There are 4 main characters (all called Madeline X) and 2 ducks, a small one and a big one. There are ten singers, ten actors and 7 musicians all under the musical direction of David Rosenboom. “What to Wear postulates a world in which military tanks and nightmare
Read moreReader Bill Westfall passes along this link to a story about a new research study that reports more than one quarter of classical music fans use cannabis and 12.3 per cent of opera buffs have tried magic mushrooms. This, I suppose, is as opposed to the 100 per cent of Grateful Dead fans who do and have. The finding suggests an interesting topic: Great Composers Who Were Stoners. Discuss. And speaking of discussion, get on over to the new, spiffed up Composers Forum page and weigh in on Rob Deemer’s question about how important a web presence is for an active composer’s career. Meant
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