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Oct. 25, 2007, Sala Cecilia Meireles
I met the young gaucho composer Dimitri Cervo at the 2003 Bienal of Contemporary Music, where his works for solo flute and strings, Pattapiana [named for Pattapio Silva, a great Brazilian flutist who died tragically
young at the beginning of the last century] made quite an impression.
Incoming general director of Santa Fe Opera, Charles MacKay, has made clear he is “in the tradition -- I will not be an agent for radical change,” at the celebrated New Mexico summer opera festival, MacKay says.
Composer Frederick Carrilho was born in 1971 in the state of Sao Paulo, and has studied guitar and composition, most recently at UNICAMP in Campinas. His music has been heard at the recent biennial festivals of contemporary music in Rio, with the Profusão V – Toccata making a strong impression at the Bienal of 2007. We spoke in Portuguese.
October 23, 2007, Sala Cecilia Meireles, Rio de Janeiro
What makes the first visit to Guanajuato’s Teatro Juárez breathtaking is the suddenness of the encounter.
Oct. 25, 2007, Rio de Janeiro.
José Orlando Alves is a young composer, originally from Minas Gerais, but who spent many years in Rio de Janeiro, where he has been active for a decade with the composers’ collaborative, Preludio XXI.
In the long ago, when the best source of music reproduction in the home was a handsome piece of furniture, fitted with hidden audio components, and usually called radio-phonographs, my family had one — from Avery Fisher I believe — that had among its controls a switch labeled ‘presence.’
Uncut with Canada’s Mistress of the trouser-role: the multifaceted Kimberly Barber.
Glimmerglass Opera is in a watershed year. With the departure of Paul Kellogg, who had considerable success developing that annual festival, General and Artistic Director Michael Macleod has chosen to begin his tenure with a variation on the usual four-opera-season, namely a thematic collection of pieces based on the “Orpheus” legend. “Don’t look back” is the marketing catch phrase.
Almost thirty years ago a century old tradition ended with the last performance of I Maestri Cantatori.
Santa Fe Opera’s announcement August 10 that English-born impresario, Richard Gaddes, General Director of the company since 2001, will retire at the end of season 2008, took the local opera community by surprise.
The week just ended was certainly of historic moment in the world of North American opera companies.
Perhaps it is a sign that, at last, the countertenor voice has come of age in the hearts and minds of both audiences and the opera establishment.
Back in the early 1980’s two good ideas came to fruition: the much-needed new concert hall for Cardiff, capital city of Wales, and plans to hold within it the first “Singer of the World” competition.
Charleston, S.C. — For over 20 years it was two operas a season here at Spoleto USA, the all-arts festival brought to this cultural capital of the Old South by Gian Carlo Menotti in 1977.
It is every young opera singer’s dream.
On May 9th, when Santa Fe Opera finally announced that Alan Gilbert had left his post as Music Director of that company, a long-standing rumor was made official.
Robert Gierlach wishes he could rewrite “Anna Karenina,” the Tolstoi whopper turned into an opera by librettist Colin Graham and composer David Carlson. It’s not that Gierlach, who sings Vronsky in the world premiere of the work at Florida Grand Opera on April 28, has misgivings about the author’s artistry; he simply wishes that the story could have a happy ending.
In 1966 Jørn Utzon was forced to quit as architect of the Sydney Opera House before it was complete. Next week, the first new interiors he and his son have designed will be revealed. Louis Jebb reports 07 September 2004...
There’s still a hint of jest in the comparison, but it’s not without reason that Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally are mentioned now and then in opera circles as “the Strauss and Hofmannsthal of the 21st century.”
McNally, of course, didn’t really need a composer. One of the most popular playwrights of the day, he has an uncanny ability to find words that “make music” without staff paper. His early “Lisbon Traviata” and more recent “Master Class” document that gift.
McNally, however, struck out in a new direction when he wrote the libretto for Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” premiered in San Francisco in 2000 and now the most performed new opera of the decade. He then wrote the text for “At the Statue of Venus,” which Heggie composed for the gala 2005 opening of Denver’s Ellie Caulkins Opera House. And on February 29, 2008, the Houston Grand Opera will premiere “Last Acts,” a chamber opera written by Heggie for star mezzo Frederica von Stade. Gene Scheer based the libretto for it on McNally’s “Some Christmas Letters,” performed at a 2001New York AIDS benefit. In mid-December the cast and production crew of “Last Acts” met in San Francisco for a workshop designed to put the score in final form for the Houston premiere.
Heggie is pleased with the results. “Everything looks right, and the work is really in good shape,” he says. And he’s pleased with his decision to score “Last Act” for two pianos and eight further instruments. “The pianos are just right for the piece,” he says. “They create a chamber-music atmosphere and they can be lyric, percussive and orchestral.” HGO music director Patrick Summers will conduct from one piano; Heggie will be at the other.
McNally wrote “Some Christmas Letters” for a New York AIDS benefit in 2001. The play explores the dysfunctional relationship between a mother and her daughter and gay son through letters and phone calls. In New York Julie Harris played veteran actress and mother Madeleine. “I read ‘Letters’ seven years ago and I was in tears,” Heggie recalls. “I fell in love with it and I said to myself: ‘This needs to be set to music!’” He has worked with Sheer to make it operatic by adding story lines to the plot. (Scheer, author of librettos for two operas by Tobias Picker, has collaborated with Heggie on the song cycles “Statuesque” and “Rise and Fall” and on “To Hell and Back,” premiered by the Bay-Area Philharmonic Baroque earlier this season.)
In “Last Acts” Heggie has moved in a direction more lyrical than in earlier works. “It’s really music theater,” he says. “The music serves the characters in the drama.” And there’s even a bit of autobiography in the story. “My father died when I was a kid,” Heggie says. “This could be my life. There’s so much in it that any family can relate to.” He sums it up as “a heavy story with a light feel - a tragic tale with a lyric undertow.”
Last Acts in rehearsal (Keith Phares (Charlie), Frederica von Stade (Madeline), Kristin Clayton (Beatrice))
“Flicka” von Stade, who goes “way back” with Heggie, shares his enthusiasm about “Last Acts.” “I had met Jake in Los Angeles early on,” says the most popular - and enduring - mezzo of her generation. “But it was in the ‘80s, when he worked in the press room at the San Francisco Opera that I really got to know him. “One day he showed me some of this songs, and I flipped. They were incredible - simply marvelous!” Von Stade estimates that she has now performed over 100 Heggie songs in recital. For the premiere of “Dead Man Walking” Heggie had suggested that she sing Sister Helen, the lead in the opera, but von Stade felt this should be left to a younger singer, and Susan Graham was cast in the part. Offered her choice of supporting roles, von Stade opted for the mother of Joseph De Rocher, the man on Death Row.
On the heels of the December workshop, the singer finds Heggie “in a whole new place.” “‘Last Acts’ is more in a ‘pop’ vein - more like Broadway,” she says. “Yet it’s not a Broadway show – it’s different. And the melodies are incredible.” And after two complete run-throughs in San Francisco, she finds the score perfect. “There’s not one wrong step in it,” she says. “It’s always the right thing at the right time. “It’s exactly what Jake wanted it to be - and it’s touching!”
And although stories about dysfunctional families are hardly rare these days, von Stade is struck by the universality of the story. “It rings so true,” she says. “This could be any family anywhere. “It’s Terrance at his best.” Turning to the challenge of her role, the singer comments that it’s difficult to find a redeeming quality in Maddie. “She’s so impossible!” she says. “But then you realize that people become who they are for a reason. “And what has happened to Maddie become clear as the work ends.”
Von Stade turns to the genesis of the work, in which she was involved from the outset. “When Jake first talked to me about it years ago, he was thinking of something for Berkeley Rep. “Terrence was excited about the project, and we were all feeling good.” Then things got out of hand. McNally wanted to add characters, and Heggie began talking of a full-scale Broadway production. It was von Stade who brought the two back to the original plan. And Maddie, she says, was “totally tailor made” for her. “She’s somewhere between my mother and me,” she says, “and she strikes very close to home. “She’s a woman deeply involved with her children, and her problems are very pertinent to any woman in show business.” She calls the role both demanding and very taxing emotionally and sees Maddie as a “springboard” from which the daughter and son develop. And she’s hit hard by a late line in the text when she says: “I think these two are going to be okay.”Maddie has a good deal in common with von Stade, who made an extreme effort to balance her own life between her career and her two daughters.
Last Acts in rehearsal (Jake Heggie in center)
The HGO premiered Heggie’s second major opera, “End of the Affair,” in 2004, when David Gockley was still general director.Anthony Freud, who succeeded Gockley in 2005, met Jake Heggie during an early visit to Houston. “Jake told me about this idea that had been washing around, but hadn’t yet found a home,” he says. “Flicka too has a long relationship with the HGO, and I had been talking to her about a small-scale work just for her. I loved this story immediately.” “We then brought in Leonard Foglia, who has worked with both Jake and McNally, to create an in-the-round production that Freud defines as “cabaret style.”
Freud, who has obviously seen a lot of opera, admits that he cried at the end of the San Francisco run-throughs. “It’s wide ranging and very human,” he says. “Everyone will find in it something that triggers the trauma of recollection. “It will touch the sensitivity of every member of the audience.” “The intimacy of the piece is its strength,” he says. “Jake has a unique ability to celebrate the circumstances of a situation. “This is very sophisticated writing.’
“Last Acts” will be performed in the HGO’s 1065-seat Cullen Theater with the ensemble on stage with the singers. “There are no sets,” von Stade says. “Just an occasional chair and a mirror. “Effects are achieved with light, and the scenes flow together easily. Lighting designer is Brian Nason. (“Last Acts,” in three acts without intermission, lasts 90 minutes.) Heggie has recently set the final monologue of McNally’s "Master Class" for Joyce DiDonato, who has recorded it for release next year. “Last Acts” is a co-commission with the San Francisco Opera.
“Last Acts” by Jake Heggie and Gene Sheer opens at the Houston Grand Opera on February 29; eight performances run through March 15. For information and tickets starting at $50, call 1-800-626-7372 or visit www.houstongrandopera.org.
Footnote on “Flicka”: “Retirement” is not a word in the vocabulary of Frederica von Stade, born in 1945. Asked about future plans, Frederica von Stade speaks of “la sistema,” the Venezuelan program that provides every kid in the country with music lessons. It has been brought to the attention of the world in the past year by superb Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra and its conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old who has been named music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Plans are being made by several American communities to “clone” the system, and von Stade has organized an inner-city children’s choir in Oakland. (She makes her home in the East Bay.) “I work with them twice a week,” she says. “They’re building a new cathedral in Oakland, and I hope to have the choir ready to perform there when it is finished.”
Wes Blomster
