Sasha Cooke has championed many works by BHM composers, including Jake Heggie, David Bruce, and Kevin Puts, and of course the opera As One by Laura Kaminsky, Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed. In the article here, she reflects on David Bruce’s unique vocal writing for the New York Festival of Song.
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Three Way premieres to great success at Nashville Opera
Nashville Opera gave the world premiere of Three Way by composer Robert Paterson, with a libretto by David Cote in January of 2017. Jointly produced with American Opera Projects, the New York premiere will be given in June of 2017 at BAM.
The piano/vocal score and aria excerpts are now available for purchase:
You can order the CD here.
From The Tennessean:
“An intriguing treatise on power, passion and human connection.”
“Highly accessible! Cote has an obvious gift for humor, yet there also are moments of genuine tenderness. Paterson’s music is mesmerizing, beautifully supporting the story.”
“Paterson’s music is rich and vibrant—and beautifully played by the Nashville Opera Orchestra, conducted by Dean Williamson. Cote’s libretto offers an unexpected blend of whimsy and wistfulness.”
From Schmopera:
“Rarely do we find a postmodern opera that builds in time for audiences to belly laugh, a postmodern opera that encapsulates the complexity and depth of evolving identity and sexuality, and a postmodern opera that is both elegant and accessible. In Nashville Opera’s production of Three Way, with music by Robert Paterson and libretto by David Cote, we find a postmodern opera with all of those things, simultaneously. This production levels the audience’s playing field in a sophisticated way: pairing common, yet updated, operatic tropes with relevant, topical humor and relatable music.”
BroadwayWorld.com has a feature about the composer, here.
Robert Paterson talks about research and the quest to create a new, original opera.
For additional information about the work, please click here.
Reviews
Austin Opera’s Manchurian Candidate
In this highly charged election season, Austin Opera performs Kevin Puts’ and Mark Campbell’s The Manchurian Candidate. Originally premiered by the Minnesota Opera, the opera is part thriller, part satire, and is based on Richard Condon’s novel. Don’t miss the chance to see this second opera by the team that created the Pulitzer-winning opera, Silent Night.
Boyer’s SILVER FANFARE opens the 2016 Hollywood Bowl Season
Peter Boyer’s Silver Fanfare will open the Hollywood Bowl’s 2016 season, for the second year in a row, as the piece chosen to begin Opening Night at the Bowl with Steely Dan on June 18. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins, will perform Boyer’s work while a video montage from past Bowl Opening Nights is projected. Silver Fanfare also opened the 2015 Bowl season in the same fashion, at a sold-out gala concert headlined by iconic rock band Journey.
Commissioned and premiered by the Pacific Symphony to celebrate its 25th anniversary season, Silver Fanfare has been performed by orchestras including the Boston Pops, Cincinnati Pops, and Nashville Symphony, and Boyer’s recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on Naxos has been broadcast extensively on American classical radio stations.
Daugherty’s THE DIARIES OF ADAM AND EVE premieres in Texas
Martha Walvoord, violin and Jack Unzicker, double bass at the dress rehearsal of Michael Daugherty’s “The Diaries of Adam and Eve” (2016) inspired by the novella by Mark Twain. This dynamic duo, who commissioned the 30 minute work, will perform the world premiere this Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening at 7:30 PM at the university of Texas-Arlington School of Music.
Sparr Concerto for Jazz Guitar premieres in Arkansas
The Arkansas Symphony will give the premiere performances of D.J. Sparr’s new Concerto for Jazz Guitar on April 9 and 10, with Ted Ludwig as soloist. Writing for guitar often stymies composers, but Sparr is unique in that he himself is an excellent guitarist who has premiered many new works, including Michael Daugherty’s Gee’s Bend.
The Arkansas Symphony Youth Orchestra will perform Sparr’s The WOW! Signal in May, rounding out this celebration of Sparr’s music in Arkansas.
D. J. Sparr: Playing Well with Others from NewMusicBox on Vimeo.
Paterson/Campbell’s THE WHOLE TRUTH
The Whole Truth, a new one-act opera by composer Robert Paterson and librettist Mark Campbell, was premiered in January as part of the exciting wave of new operas that overwhelmed New York City. A sold-out success that garnered uniform praise, it was paired with Stewart Copeland’s one-act opera, The Cask of Amontillado.
The Whole Truth is a short comic opera for three singers—soprano, mezzo-soprano and baritone—that uses very limited production elements in its storytelling and has been written to be performed in intimate to medium-sized venues. In the opera, a young married woman named Megan (a role shared by the soprano and mezzo-soprano) carries on an affair with a fellow dentist and a dalliance with young carpenter that lead her to momentarily confront the web of lies she has created to other…and to herself. Using a single bed positioned vertically onstage and a couple of chairs, the settings include a psychiatrist’s office, Megan’s dental office, the bed of her lover, the dining table and the bed she shares with her husband, and another psychiatrist’s office. The Man (played by the baritone) employs six cardboard cutouts to help represent the roles he plays: Psychiatrist 1, The Lover, The Husband, The Carpenter and Psychiatrist 2.
Duration: 27′
Instrumentation: piano/vocal version—three singers (soprano, mezzo-soprano, baritone) and piano. Chamber version (10 instrumentalists): flute, oboe, bassoon, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello, bass.
Libretto by Mark Campbell • Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen McCauley
Commissioned by UrbanArias, Robert Wood, Executive and Artistic Director
Premiere of Chamber Version: American Modern Ensemble, Tyson Deaton, conductor, Walker Lewis, director, Dixon Place, New York, NY, January 16, 17, 18 and 19, 2016.
Premiere of Piano/Vocal Version: UrbanArias, Robert Wood, conductor, Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC, February 21, 27 and 28, 2015.
Watch the video here:
David Bruce’s NOTHING premieres at Glyndebourne
If someone you knew declared that life had no meaning, how would you convince them it does?
That’s the question a group of teenagers ask themselves in Nothing, a compelling new youth opera that premieres at Glyndebourne this February.
They decide that each of the group must give up an object that means something to them. This starts with toys and clothes, but things quickly escalate as the classmates go to ever more extreme lengths to try to persuade their friend there are things worth caring about.
In Nothing members of Glyndebourne Youth Opera aged 14-19 perform alongside professional singers. It is the latest in a line of pioneering youth operas that have premiered on the main stage at Glyndebourne.
The opera has been adapted from Danish author Janne Teller’s award-winning novel by composer David Bruce and librettist Glyn Maxwell. Their popular adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter wowed audiences in the UK and New York.
Read the Independent review here.
Classical Music previews the piece.
Kahane THE FICTION ISSUE
The Fiction Issue, a collaboration with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, is Gabriel Kahane’s first album of chamber music, comprising three pieces written between 2011 and 2015. The title work, featuring Shara Worden, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and premiered in 2012. It was revised in 2014. Bradbury Studies (2014-2015), for quartet alone, is a deconstruction of the song “Bradbury (304 Broadway)” from The Ambassador, and is dedicated to Brooklyn Rider. Finally, Come On All You Ghosts (2011), on poems by Matthew Zapruder, closes the set.
Read Nate Chinen’s review in the New York Times here.
Sheet music for The Fiction Issue is available here.
Sheet music for Come On All You Ghosts is available here.
Kaminsky/Campbell/Reed to write Georgia O’Keefe Opera
San Francisco’s Opera Parallele (OP) has announced its first main stage opera commission, the creation of a new opera by American composer Laura Kaminsky inspired by the life of Georgia O’Keeffe at the time she left New York to embark on her iconic and influential experiences in New Mexico. The company has been awarded a prestigious Repertoire Development Grant from Opera America in the amount of $35,000 to support the work’s initial stages of creation and workshopping, and is set for an April 2019 premiere. The opera will feature a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, with a film by Reed as part of the production. The production team will be led by Opera Parallele Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel, will be conducted by OP Artistic Director and founder Nicole Paiement and will feature a cast of ten, details will be announced. The production is being undertaken by Opera Parallele in consortium with American Opera Projects and Cornish College of the Arts, and all three co-commissioners will present performances and other activities to be announced.
About The Opera
Today It Rains is set in May 1929, when Georgia O’Keeffe takes a train from New York to Santa Fe with her friend Rebecca Strand, propelling herself away from her tumultuous relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and his circle in search of a more fulfilled life as an artist. The libretto will segue seamlessly between O’Keeffe and Strand, charging forward through the American landscape, and O’Keeffe looking back on her love for Stieglitz. The opera will culminate in a moving finale as O’Keeffe arrives in Santa Fe to begin her new life. The opera’s title comes from one of O’Keeffe’s letters.
About The Composer
Laura Kaminsky is an award-winning, internationally recognized composer of opera, orchestra, chamber, vocal and choral music who is known to Bay Area audiences most recently for the Festival Opera production of As One, an opera about gender identity . As One (co-librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed), premiered in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to unanimously positive reviews, and was mounted in 2015 by Festival Opera in Oakland. Subsequently, the As One team has since been commissioned by Houston Grand Opera for a new work, Some Light Emerges, that will premiere in 2017, and by San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle for Today It Rains. Other upcoming commissions include a Piano Quintet for Ursula Oppens and the Cassatt String Quartet and a new work for Flute and Piano for the University of Minnesota/Duluth.
Kaminsky has received grants, awards and fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Opera America, Chamber Music America, BAM/The Kennedy Center De Vos Institute, Aaron Copland Fund, Virgil Thomson Foundation, Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music, American Music Center, USArtists International, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Likhachev-Russkiy Mir Foundation Cultural Fellowship, Kenan Institute for the Arts, Artist Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, Bronx Arts Council, Arts Westchester, North Carolina Arts Council, Seattle Arts Commission, and Meet the Composer. She has received six ASCAP-Chamber Music America Awards for Adventuresome Programming, a citation from the Office of the President of the Borough of Manhattan, the 2015 Polish Gold Cross of Merit, a decoration awarded by the President of Poland for exemplary public service or humanitarian work, as well as the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2010 Chopin Award. She has been a fellow at the Hermitage Artist Retreat Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Centrum Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Millay Colony for the Arts, and, in 2016, the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
Currently composer-in-residence at American Opera Projects, Kaminsky is a member of the faculty in the School of the Arts/Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY, where she served as dean from 2004-2008; she was also Artistic Director of Symphony Space in New York City until 2014. Previously she was chair of the music department at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Artistic Director of the European Mozart Academy in Poland, and visiting faculty at the National Academy of Music in Ghana. In New York she held the positions of Director of Music and Theatre Programs at The New School, Artistic Director of Town Hall, and Associate Director of Humanities at the 92nd Street Y.