Corigliano and Adamo, who have been together personally for 26 years, wrote The Lord of Cries specifically for Costanzo. When I spoke to Corigliano recently he said, “When you see a countertenor in a modern role it’s very interesting. I think it’s important for someone like Anthony, who is a star, to be in a big real piece and a modern piece.”

“It was really exciting,” Costanzo told me via a Zoom call last week. “I’ve always had the utmost respect for his music. John, and he’ll say this, likes to work with abstraction. He doesn’t like to work with 1990s New York. He likes smoke and ghosts and things like that. This sat in a world of abstraction that worked for his music. But it also had concrete dramatic themes that I felt would really speak to an audience.”

In short, The Lord of Cries uses characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to tell the story Euripides wrote in Bacchae. If that sounds confusing, it initially was for Costanzo as well.

“At first I thought I don’t sort understand the combination of these two disparate works. Within five minutes of talking to them about it, immediately it became clear that it was actually kind of a brilliant way of seeing the underpinnings of the story of Dracula that we all know in this Greek tragedy.” (To see how Corigliano and Adamo describe their opera, please go here.)

Costanzo, who became one of the best known opera singers in the world through his performance in Akhnaten by Philip Glass, regularly worked with the creators to help them fully realize the role, just as opera singers have done for centuries.

“I did go in at different points and try things out and sing things through and let John hear it. I think that gave him something for his inner ear as he was composing to hear it be realized. If you think about the history of opera, a lot of these roles were written with a specific singer in mind. Then other singers went and did it. But that specificity you hear in your mind helps the music take on a shape that I think makes it very singable and very accessible in the best sense.”

The themes Costanzo felt were relevant today tackle both repression and one’s place in society.

“This is an opera about repressed desire and what that does. But even more topical in some ways is this idea of place that’s really in the Euripides as well as the Stoker. One line in the opera they say a lot is ‘Deny him not his place.’ And I think what the repressed Victorian London is kind of saying is ‘He has no place here. You have no place here. There’s no place for an outsider.’

“There are a lot of different things happening in our world and reckonings about identity, whether that be sexual identity or gender identity or racial identity. There is this problematic sense of whether somebody has a place or doesn’t have a place. And 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. We come from distinct backgrounds, but we share this communal psychology and I think that’s a powerful message for now.”

As Costanzo was coming of age and becoming aware of his own sexuality, he was very supported by his parents. As he told me, he didn’t have to struggle as much as others with being gay. He did, however, have his own hurdles to climb within the world of opera.

“I had a fairly easy time of it all because my parents are both psychologists and they were very accepting. That said, within the field of opera sometimes I felt that I should fit into a mold, a pre-determined mold. It took a while for me to feel like I could fully actualize my own concept of self in something like Akhnaten which has a gender fluidity and queerness, but also a real sort of powerful beauty and mystery in it. It took me a while to understand I could forge my own path. Now I think that’s a really crucial for art and for our platform as we move forward.”

His increasing fame came along with greater opportunities and greater responsibilities.

“I’m going to be the artist-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic next season and the pillar of the programming I have curated is called Authentic Selves. My work over the pandemic creating and producing Bandwagon was both a joy and an education. It was an initiative which first brought a pickup truck to all different neighborhoods. As an extension of that we created partnerships with different institutions. Rather than say we are the New York Phil and we will tell you what we want to do and if you want to participate great. Instead we would go to the National Black Theatre, El Puente Arts, Casita Maria, Flushing Town Hall and say ‘We’ll pay you, we’ll pay the artists, we’ll give you the stage. What do you want to do?’ How can we hand over control in small ways until these seismic changes of representation happen within the field. I think we have to be thinking both micro and macro at all times and working very hard and tirelessly to implement those changes.”

Of course, the classical music world and opera in particular move at pretty slow paces. With the clock ticking ever more loudly about representation in front offices and on-stage, Costanzo feels there’s no time to waste.

“I agree that life is short and opera is long as they say. But I think it is crucial that we be thinking about this all the time. There’s no time to waste. And I think that in the past year we have seen some progress which is encouraging. But I think we are in danger of losing the momentum as we return from COVID and crave the comfort of things going back to the way they were. It’s very important; however, as Masha Gessen said in The New Yorker, not to rebuild what we have lost. We have a chance here to rebuild and we better increase the momentum as opposed to letting it wane in our search for quote unquote comfort.”

For tickets to The Lord of Cries please go here. There are performances on August 5th, 11th and 17th.

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with artists performing at Santa Fe Opera this season.

All Photos: Anthony Roth Costanzo in The Lord of Cries (Photo by Curtis Brown/Courtesy Santa Fe Opera)

The post Anthony Roth Costanzo Defines His Place in Opera appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“When we talk about the twelve years,” John Corigliano says during a Zoom conversation recently, “Mark wrote the libretto twelve years ago. It took me that long to write the music. I’m a very slow composer. It took me twelve years to write this just as it did twelve years to write The Ghosts of Versailles.”

He’s talking about his new opera The Lord of Cries which is having its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera. Mark is his spouse of 26 years, librettist Mark Adamo (who is also a composer, but not on this opera.)

Corigliano is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning score for The Red Violin and his Symphony No. 1 written to commemorate the loss of friends due to AIDS. Adamo is the composer and librettist of the operas Little Women and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

The opera cleverly combines Euripides’ Bacchae with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If that sounds like solely an intellectual exercise, it actually works well.

“It’s seemed so simple if you knew both texts,” Adamo says. “It was Alexander Neef, who was leading the company here before he was summoned to Paris, who was discussing the piece with our assistant Peggy. He said, ‘What’s it about?’ Peggy took a breath and said it was Euripides told through the characters of Stoker. He said that was brilliant.”

Corigliano adds, “In some ways the project is very hard to describe, but very easy to see. If you see the opera it all makes sense. This one is intellectually complicated, but dramatically very simple. It makes perfect sense on the stage.”

Adamo comes up with perhaps the best possible description of their opera. “In the martini of this show, the gin is Euripides and a rinse of vermouth is Stoker; a very dry martini and a little will go a long way. It’s like a Victorian staging of the Bacchae with a little swirl of the Dracula.”

You add to that recipe Corigliano’s writing and you are set according to Adamo. “Everything that John does as a composer, the surrealism, the kind of way in which he finds himself in tonal and legible and formal music that is completely depraved and surreal…if Ghosts was based on the Met, this was really written on him.”

Starring as Dionysus in The Lord of Cries is counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. The role was written for him specifically because they knew the role would be set in that range.

“Once it was clear the best way of doing Dracula was going beneath the Stoker was to see what it had in common with Euripides,” offers Adamo, “the notion of the God who is disguised as a vampire in this case made sense for the characters and the story.”

“Anthony is petite, he’s not androgynous, he looks very male, but in the right costume he could be quite androgynous,” opines Corigliano. “That’s what Dionysus was and that’s what I wrote for.”

Adamo adds, “To be gender fluid is very modern, it’s very 2021, but it’s also very 455 B.C. In a certain way you just find the thread that connects the past to the present and do something interesting with it.”

At the core of The Lord of Cries is a story about repression that is as topical today as it was when Euripides first wrote Bacchae.

“It’s almost funny how many stories crop up in the news that could have been motivating this piece. Monsignor Burrill, who wanted to deny President Biden communion because he didn’t agree with his stance on certain sexual issues, had to end his career because he couldn’t tell the truth about who he is. Committing to a church who told him he shouldn’t exist. He becomes an enforcer of that. And lo, he spends the day upholding very brittlly that dogma and spends the night trolling the internet for sex. There’s not a lot you have to do to Euripides to make this contemporary.”

Corigliano summed up rather succinctly the theme of their opera. “If you are repressed and stay repressed and you don’t give into the animal urges ever, you’ll destroy yourself.”

For a composer who relied on take-out chicken, a bottle of wine and ten milligrams of valium* to get through the world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles at the Metropolitan Opera, he’s not giving into to his own urges to be anxious while attending to the debut of The Lord of Cries in Santa Fe.

“For the first time in my life I actually enjoyed listening to this. Partly because the performances were so secure from the first rehearsal. The orchestra is top-notch. When it got on the stage for some reason I was extremely confident and I went into it without any tension at all. This is the first time in my life. It’s a whole new me.”

“I have to say what have you done to my spouse of 26 years,” Adamo jokingly adds. “This is not John.”

I suggested that it was perhaps a result of working so closely with each other.

“Maybe that’s it,” Corigliano considers. “I don’t know the answer. I’ll know when I go to another performance of my music. This is, at 83, the first time I’ve been able to relax and enjoy the performance.”

Adamo certainly hopes so. “Let’s hope you’ve outlived your life-long anxiety. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

To which Corigliano responds simply, “How nice to let it go.”

This is the first in a week-long series of interviews with the artists participating in this year’s Santa Fe Opera season. Come back on Thursday for our interview with Anthony Roth Costanzo.

For tickets to The Lord of Cries, please go here. Three performances remain on August 5th, 11th and 17th.

Main photo: Jarrett Ott, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Matt Boehller and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The Lord of Cries (Photo by Curtis Brown/Courtesy Santa Fe Opera)

*Corigliano told me about this in a 2015 interview I did with him.

The post John Corigliano and Mark Adamo’s 12-Year Journey with “The Lord of Cries” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

“When we talk about the twelve years,” John Corigliano says during a Zoom conversation recently, “Mark wrote the libretto twelve years ago. It took me that long to write the music. I’m a very slow composer. It took me twelve years to write this just as it did twelve years to write The Ghosts of Versailles.”

He’s talking about his new opera The Lord of Cries which is having its world premiere at Santa Fe Opera. Mark is his spouse of 26 years, librettist Mark Adamo (who is also a composer, but not on this opera.)

Corigliano is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning score for The Red Violin and his Symphony No. 1 written to commemorate the loss of friends due to AIDS. Adamo is the composer and librettist of the operas Little Women and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

The opera cleverly combines Euripides’ Bacchae with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If that sounds like solely an intellectual exercise, it actually works well.

“It’s seemed so simple if you knew both texts,” Adamo says. “It was Alexander Neef, who was leading the company here before he was summoned to Paris, who was discussing the piece with our assistant Peggy. He said, ‘What’s it about?’ Peggy took a breath and said it was Euripides told through the characters of Stoker. He said that was brilliant.”

Corigliano adds, “In some ways the project is very hard to describe, but very easy to see. If you see the opera it all makes sense. This one is intellectually complicated, but dramatically very simple. It makes perfect sense on the stage.”

Adamo comes up with perhaps the best possible description of their opera. “In the martini of this show, the gin is Euripides and a rinse of vermouth is Stoker; a very dry martini and a little will go a long way. It’s like a Victorian staging of the Bacchae with a little swirl of the Dracula.”

You add to that recipe Corigliano’s writing and you are set according to Adamo. “Everything that John does as a composer, the surrealism, the kind of way in which he finds himself in tonal and legible and formal music that is completely depraved and surreal…if Ghosts was based on the Met, this was really written on him.”

Starring as Dionysus in The Lord of Cries is counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. The role was written for him specifically because they knew the role would be set in that range.

“Once it was clear the best way of doing Dracula was going beneath the Stoker was to see what it had in common with Euripides,” offers Adamo, “the notion of the God who is disguised as a vampire in this case made sense for the characters and the story.”

“Anthony is petite, he’s not androgynous, he looks very male, but in the right costume he could be quite androgynous,” opines Corigliano. “That’s what Dionysus was and that’s what I wrote for.”

Adamo adds, “To be gender fluid is very modern, it’s very 2021, but it’s also very 455 B.C. In a certain way you just find the thread that connects the past to the present and do something interesting with it.”

At the core of The Lord of Cries is a story about repression that is as topical today as it was when Euripides first wrote Bacchae.

“It’s almost funny how many stories crop up in the news that could have been motivating this piece. Monsignor Burrill, who wanted to deny President Biden communion because he didn’t agree with his stance on certain sexual issues, had to end his career because he couldn’t tell the truth about who he is. Committing to a church who told him he shouldn’t exist. He becomes an enforcer of that. And lo, he spends the day upholding very brittlly that dogma and spends the night trolling the internet for sex. There’s not a lot you have to do to Euripides to make this contemporary.”

Corigliano summed up rather succinctly the theme of their opera. “If you are repressed and stay repressed and you don’t give into the animal urges ever, you’ll destroy yourself.”

For a composer who relied on take-out chicken, a bottle of wine and ten milligrams of valium* to get through the world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles at the Metropolitan Opera, he’s not giving into to his own urges to be anxious while attending to the debut of The Lord of Cries in Santa Fe.

“For the first time in my life I actually enjoyed listening to this. Partly because the performances were so secure from the first rehearsal. The orchestra is top-notch. When it got on the stage for some reason I was extremely confident and I went into it without any tension at all. This is the first time in my life. It’s a whole new me.”

“I have to say what have you done to my spouse of 26 years,” Adamo jokingly adds. “This is not John.”

I suggested that it was perhaps a result of working so closely with each other.

“Maybe that’s it,” Corigliano considers. “I don’t know the answer. I’ll know when I go to another performance of my music. This is, at 83, the first time I’ve been able to relax and enjoy the performance.”

Adamo certainly hopes so. “Let’s hope you’ve outlived your life-long anxiety. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.”

To which Corigliano responds simply, “How nice to let it go.”

This is the first in a week-long series of interviews with the artists participating in this year’s Santa Fe Opera season. Come back on Thursday for our interview with Anthony Roth Costanzo.

For tickets to The Lord of Cries, please go here. Three performances remain on August 5th, 11th and 17th.

Main photo: Jarrett Ott, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Matt Boehller and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The Lord of Cries (Photo by Curtis Brown/Courtesy Santa Fe Opera)

*Corigliano told me about this in a 2015 interview I did with him.

The post John Corigliano and Mark Adamo’s 12-Year Journey with “The Lord of Cries” appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

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