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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.
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.”
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...
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.
“I expect to refine and polish Santa Fe Opera, as much as I can – though it is fine shape right now – but my mission is to help continue the successful tradition established by founder John O. Crosby and continued by Richard Gaddes. My first interest in opera was developed by Crosby, who gave me as a youngster, jobs at Santa Fe Opera. Gaddes, who retires in 2008, has been my friend for years and predecessor at Opera Theatre of St. Louis,” MacKay told this reporter.
Susan F. Morris, prominent New York philanthropist and society figure, board chairman of the Santa Fe Opera, headed the search team that rather promptly identified MacKay as the successor general manager and announced in recent weeks his appointment, effective October 2008. “Charles has had an extraordinarily successful, debt and deficit-free, 22-year career at Opera Theatre of St Louis...and high artistic and musical standards have marked Charles’s career there,” Mrs. Morris said recently.
Perhaps repertory is the place where MacKay will eventually make his most distinctive mark. “Look for more American opera; keep in mind I love French opera, and I admire Britten, also Wagner, though he is difficult to present in an outdoor theatre,” the New Mexico-born intendant said. “I similarly love Mozart and Strauss, and so do audiences; we will not be abandoning those traditions at Santa Fe Opera, not under my direction.”
“Der Rosenkavalier” is mentioned in conversation with MacKay, but so is “Anthony and Cleopatra,” the 1966 opera of Samuel Barber. Barber revised and refined the opera after its initial failure at the Metropolitan Opera, and when MacKay was on the staff of the Spoleto Opera Festival in South Carolina, the piece enjoyed a successful revival there, which was recorded. MacKay also admits to interest in unusual repertory such as “King Roger,” a little-known 1926 work of Polish composer Karol Scymanowski.
“I wont be reaching my full profile with Santa Fe until the 2011 and 2012 seasons,” MacKay noted, “as artists are contracted for specific roles so far ahead, and have to be.” MacKay, 57, will “support commitments for new commissions and other plans put in place by Gaddes, including a commissioned opera based on Somerset Maugham’s short novel The Letter, which is also famous as a motion picture. The new opera is scheduled for season 2010 with music by New York composer Paul Moravec, and libretto by journalist Terry Teachout.
MacKay has western American heritage, and strong musical roots, as the son of two amateur musicians and singers, who were natives of Colorado and Wyoming respectively, John and Margaret MacKay. He grew up surrounded by vocal music, both at home and from his boyhood years attending Santa Fe Opera, where he remembers hearing top rank singers. “It marked me for life,” he laughs. Santa Fe Opera remains in safe hands and in the Crosby tradition. One can look forward to innovative repertory now and then, but the old maxim “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” will surely apply to the upcoming
© 2007 J.A. Van Sant
