A great way to become familiar with a composer's work is to perform it. Zachary Gordin, the General Director of Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, is intimately familiar with the work of composer Jake Heggie. Arguably Heggie's best-known work is the opera Dead Man Walking which was inspired by the same book by Sister Helen Prejean that inspired the...
"I think it was the start of me becoming more interested in works that had explicit theatrical elements and a legible kind of quasi-narrative element. And it was really a chance for me to really see how versatile I could be as a performer."
"The book is full of a sense of time and a sense of place. I think she talks about the feeling that time is shrinking and expanding. I think so much of it relates to how we feel about time and space and our bodies and sensation and memory."
"I do believe that there is still beauty and there is beauty we don't even know about yet from this pandemic...it's only just creeping out of the ground right now."
"I think people can see in art a reflection of themselves and of the moment that we live in. I think people will see in Onegin the difficulties we've been through in the last sixteen months."
"I think what Dionysus and Dracula both try and show through being the stranger and the outsider is that we are all the same basically. "
"The moment you hear this music it's gone. Nobody else will ever hear it again in this version. That's what's really special."
"Even Verdi when he was writing his Shakespeare operas he didn't dare actually take on Shakespeare's text. Britten is one of the few people in history that actually set Shakespeare's text and all but one sentence is the original Shakespeare."
""In the martini of this show, the gin is Euripides and a rinse of vermouth is Stoker. It's like a Victorian staging of the Bacchae with a little swirl of the Dracula."
""In the martini of this show, the gin is Euripides and a rinse of vermouth is Stoker. It's like a Victorian staging of the Bacchae with a little swirl of the Dracula."