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	<title>Peter Sellars Archives - Cultural Attaché</title>
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		<title>BEST BETS: OCTOBER 28th &#8211; NOVEMBER 3rd</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2024/10/28/best-bets-october-28th-november-3rd/</link>
					<comments>https://culturalattache.co/2024/10/28/best-bets-october-28th-november-3rd/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[What's Hot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[A Streetcar Named Desire]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew borba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brad Koed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Carnegie Hall]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Goldstein]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Ivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Día de Los Muertos with Dudamel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elinor Gunn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Gershwin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gustavo Dudamel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ira Gershwin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James russell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joan Rivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Adams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Land of Gold]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Los Angeles Philharmonic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lucy Owen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mallory Portnoy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MasterVoices]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nick Westrate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PBS Great Performances]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Francisco Opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Silvestre Revueltas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South Coast Repertory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Strike Up the Band]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Sperling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tennessee Williams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tessa Auberjonois]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zachary Prince]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://culturalattache.co/?p=20676</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>MasterVoices opens their season with a concert version of the Gershwin's Strike Up the Band</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2024/10/28/best-bets-october-28th-november-3rd/">BEST BETS: OCTOBER 28th &#8211; NOVEMBER 3rd</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>Welcome back to Cultural Attaché and to our Best Bets: October 28th &#8211; November 3rd. For this week&#8217;s Best Bets I have for you two plays (one of which is a world premiere), a concert presentation of a Gershwin musical, a celebration of Día de los Muertos and a documentary about the making of a John Adams opera.</p>



<p>Here are my Best Bets: October 28th &#8211; November 3rd:</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20682" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/South-Coast-Repertorys-22Joan22-Courtesy-South-Coast-Repertory.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">South Coast Repertory&#8217;s &#8220;Joan&#8221; (Courtesy South Coast Repertory)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>JOAN</em></strong>&nbsp;– South Coast Repertory – Costa Mesa, CA – Now – November 24<sup>th</sup></p>



<p>Playwright Daniel Goldstein’s play, having its world premiere at SCR, is about Joan Rivers. The play looks at both the professional and personal life of the woman who made outrageous jokes and suffered enormous tragedies.</p>



<p>Tessa Auberjonois, who has appeared in nearly a dozen other productions at South Coast Rep, takes on the dual roles of Joan and Mrs. Molinsky. Andrew Borba plays multiple roles including Dr. Molinsky, Edgar Rosenberg and Johnny Carson. Elinor Gunn plays Melissa (her daughter) and Young Joan. Zachary Prince plays at least five roles including Jimmy, Blake, Harold and Chet.</p>



<p>David Ivers directs. Opening night is November 1<sup>st</sup>. The show is recommended for audiences age 16 and older.</p>



<p>For tickets and more information, please go&nbsp;<a href="https://www.scr.org/plays/productions/24-25-season/joan/">here</a>.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20678" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Brad-Koed-performing-22A-Streetcar-Named-Desire22-Photo-by-Walls-Trimble.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Brad Koed in &#8220;A Streetcar Named Desire&#8221; (Photo by WallsTrimble)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE &#8211;&nbsp;</em></strong>Frogtown area of Los Angeles – October 28<sup>th</sup>&nbsp;– October 30<sup>th</sup>/Venice, CA – November 1<sup>st</sup>&nbsp;– November 3<sup>rd</sup></p>



<p>Tennessee Williams’ classic play has been performed more times around the world than one could possibly calculate. So there must be something unique about this production to warrant inclusion in our best bets. And there is.</p>



<p>Four actors, without a set or props, perform the unabridged text of&nbsp;<em>A Streetcar Named&nbsp;</em>Desire in unique locations. These are fully realized performances, not a reading. By all accounts of previous performances on the East Coast, this is a production not-to-be-missed.</p>



<p>Williams’ poetic language will be front and center in this production. Might it lead to a new understanding of&nbsp;<em>Streetcar</em>? There’s only one way to find out.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Co-creator Lucy Owen plays Blanche DuBois. Brad Koed is Stanley Kowalski. Mallory Portnoy is Stella DuBois. James Russell plays Harold Mitchell. Co-creator Nick Westrate directs.</p>



<p>For tickets and more information for the Frogtown dates, please go&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thestreetcarproject.com/tickets/p/tickets-venice-beach-november-1-3">here</a>. For the Venice dates, please go&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thestreetcarproject.com/tickets/p/tickets-venice-beach-november-1-3">here</a>.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20683" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Gordon-Smith-and-Doris-Carson-in-the-1930-Broadway-production-of-22Strike-Up-the-Band22-Photo-courtesy-of-New-York-Public-Library-Archives-1.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Gordon Smith and Doris Carson in a scene from the 1930 Broadway production of &#8220;Strike Up the Band&#8221; (Courtesy New York Public Library Archives)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>STRIKE UP THE BAND – MasterVoices</em></strong>&nbsp;– Carnegie Hall – New York, NY &#8211;&nbsp;&nbsp;October 29<sup>th</sup></p>



<p>George and Ira Gershwin’s 1927 musical had a rocky start. It played in Philadelphia but didn’t make it to Broadway until 1930 when the original book, by George S. Kaufman, was revised by Morrie Ryskind. Many songs appear in both versions, but there are differences.</p>



<p>MasterVoices Artistic Director <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2021/04/22/ted-sperling-returns-to-myths-and-hymns/">Ted Sperling</a> has collaborated with writer Laurence Maslon to create a new version which combines “the best of the 1927 and 1930 version for the show.”</p>



<p>Joining MasterVoices are Shereen Ahmed, Phillip Attmore, Victoria Clark, Lissa deGuzman, Claybourne Elder, Christopher Fitzgerald, Bryce Pinkham and David Pittu.</p>



<p>This is precisely the kind of one night only events in New York that makes any serious fan of musical theater and/or the Gershwins wished they lived there.</p>



<p>For tickets and more information, please go&nbsp;<a href="https://www.carnegiehall.org/calendar/2024/10/29/mastervoices-0700pm">here</a>.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20680" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Tambuco-Percussion-Ensemble-Courtesy-Los-Angeles-Philharmonic.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Tambuco Percussion Ensemble (Courtesy Los Angeles Philharmonic)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS WITH DUDAMEL</em></strong>&nbsp;– Walt Disney Concert Hall – Los Angeles, CA &#8211;&nbsp;&nbsp;November 1<sup>st</sup>&nbsp;– November 3<sup>rd</sup></p>



<p>Latin American music is on the program for these three concerts celebrating Día de Muertos.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos’&nbsp;<em>Chôros No. 10</em>, “Rasga o Coração” opens the concert. That is followed by&nbsp;<em>Yanga</em>&nbsp;by Gabriela Ortiz – a work that was commissioned by the LA Phil and had its world premiere performance in 2019.</p>



<p>The second half of the program, and my personal favorite, is&nbsp;<em>La noche de los Mayas</em>&nbsp;by Silvestre Revueltas.</p>



<p>Joining Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic are the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.</p>



<p>For tickets and more information, please go&nbsp;<a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/3007/2024-11-01/dia-de-los-muertos-with-dudamel">here</a>.</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-20681" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Paul-Appleby-and-JNai-Bridges-in-rehearsal-with-Peter-Sellars-Courtesy-PBS.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Paul Appleby and J’Nai Bridges in rehearsal with Peter Sellars (courtesy PBS)</em></figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>LAND OF GOLD</em></strong>&nbsp;– PBS Great Performances – November 1<sup>st</sup>&nbsp;(check local listings)</p>



<p>This is a behind-the-scenes documentary into the premiere of <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2023/01/26/john-adams-revisits-an-old-friend/">John Adams</a>’ opera&nbsp;<em>Girls of the Golden West</em> which has a libretto by <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/03/15/director-peter-sellars-revisits-insanely-hard-work/">Peter Sellars</a>. The premiere took place at San Francisco Opera in November 2017.</p>



<p>Appearing in this 90-minute documentary are Adams, Sellars and singers Paul Appleby, <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/05/31/jnai-bridges-enters-peter-lorraine-hunt-liebersons-world/">J’Nai Bridges</a> and <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/11/02/soprano-julia-bullock-wants-to-rock-your-soul/">Julia Bullock</a>.</p>



<p>The world premiere of any opera is a daunting task. This documentary allows viewers to get a sense of how demanding it is, particularly when you are putting a more honest spin on a part of history.</p>



<p>Check your local listings or go to PBS.org to watch&nbsp;<em>Land of Gold</em>.</p>



<p>That completes my Best Bets: October 28th &#8211; November 3rd.  Enjoy your week!</p>



<p>Main Photo: Concept art for MasterVoices&#8217; <em>Strike Up the Band</em> (Courtesy MasterVoices)</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2024/10/28/best-bets-october-28th-november-3rd/">BEST BETS: OCTOBER 28th &#8211; NOVEMBER 3rd</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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			</item>
		<item>
		<title>John Adams Revisits an Old Friend</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2023/01/26/john-adams-revisits-an-old-friend/</link>
					<comments>https://culturalattache.co/2023/01/26/john-adams-revisits-an-old-friend/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jan 2023 21:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Classical: Metronome]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opera: Bravo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[What's Hot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[contemporary classical music]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Davóne Tines]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elliot Madore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Girls of the Golden West]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hye Jung Lee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Adams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Julia Bullock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Los Angeles Philharmonic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Appleby]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ryan McKinny]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Francisco Opera]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://culturalattache.co/?p=17791</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>"In some ways it's the most personal piece of mine because of that resonance with the land and with the history."</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2023/01/26/john-adams-revisits-an-old-friend/">John Adams Revisits an Old Friend</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17802" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Composer/Conductor John Adams (Photo ©Riccardo Musacchio/Courtesy John Adams)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>&#8220;</strong>I couldn&#8217;t imagine being just a composer and letting somebody else perform and never, ever being a performer myself. I love the thrill of walking on stage now and sort of getting nervous. It&#8217;s really wonderful.&#8221; That&#8217;s how composer (and obviously conductor) John Adams describes his ongoing relationship with his music.</p>



<p>It&#8217;s a relationship that he&#8217;s been cultivating for decades. Adams is a Pulitzer Prize winner (<em><em>On the Transmigration of Souls</em></em>), an Erasmus Prize winner and the recipient of five Grammy Awards. </p>



<p>For over a dozen years he&#8217;s held the position of Creative Chair with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.</p>



<p><a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/1838/2023-01-27/john-adams-girls-of-the-golden-west" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">This weekend</a> Adams will conduct the LA Phil in a concert version of his 2017 opera <em>Girls of the Golden West</em>. He collaborated with <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/03/15/director-peter-sellars-revisits-insanely-hard-work/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Peter Sellars</a> on this opera that is set during the Gold Rush in California in the 1850s. Most of the cast that appeared in the opera&#8217;s world premiere at San Francisco Opera are returning for these two concerts. This includes Paul Appleby, <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/11/02/soprano-julia-bullock-wants-to-rock-your-soul/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Julia Bullock</a>, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/01/31/ryan-mckinny-celebrant-bernsteins-mass/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Ryan McKinny</a> and <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2021/11/04/baritone-davone-tines-speaks-boldly-about-julius-eastman/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Davóne Tines</a>.</p>



<p>Last week I spoke by phone with Adams about the opera, his career and the future of classical music. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.</p>



<p>This area of California where the gold rush was centered was an area that resonated with you as soon as you came to California. How has your relationship with that area of the state where you live and its history evolved over that time? </p>



<p><strong>I&#8217;m an immigrant. Like all the people came out here looking for gold in the 1850s. I came out here in 1971. I suppose California was a sort of dream at the end of the rainbow for me. I was born in New England and actually had never been anywhere else. I didn&#8217;t expect to stay here, but I never went back. Not too long after I arrived I started going up to the Sierras and I eventually bought a cabin up there at about 6700 feet. So it&#8217;s pretty high up. I have a very deep feeling for the land. </strong></p>



<p><strong>I did not know a lot about the gold rush history until I started researching for this opera and these stories really became intensely important to me. Making this particular piece was very special. In some ways it&#8217;s the most personal piece of mine because of that resonance with the land and with the history.</strong></p>



<p>After the premiere in San Francisco you reworked the opera and made some cuts. How much does this revised version, which I assume is the version that&#8217;s being performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, reflect a clarification of what you wanted to accomplish?</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17801" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Davone-Tines-and-Julia-Bulllock-in-22Girls-of-the-Golden-West22-Photo-by-Cory-Weaver-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera_-1.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock in San Francisco Opera&#8217;s production of &#8220;Girls of the Golden West&#8221; (Photo by Cory Weaver/Courtesy San Francisco Opera)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>Well, it&#8217;s actually the third version of it. This particular version I had to prepare because I have this extraordinary opportunity to record it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And I can tell you for any composer alive to get the chance to get a good recording of an opera is extremely rare and I&#8217;m just very fortunate. But all of my operas have been recorded.</strong> </p>



<p><strong>We had to squeeze it into a regular subscription week, which is very limited rehearsal time and the orchestra obviously has not seen it before. So I did have to make a compressed version of it. But I like this version because it&#8217;s focused very, very intensely on the narratives of the characters. The original version had a lot of songs, a lot of entertainment. Things that I&#8217;m sort of sorry to go, but really weren&#8217;t entirely germane to the story. It was really long.</strong></p>



<p><strong>I had no idea I&#8217;d written so much music. It was 600 pages of score. Even when it was revised for Amsterdam, it was still too long.<em> </em>Particularly my musical language, which is sort of wry and tight and economical &#8211; the way you might pack a backpack to go hiking in the Sierras. I really felt that this story needed to be told in a more compact, shorter version.</strong><em> </em></p>



<p>I would assume that even squeezing in these performances as part of the season, it must be a blessing to have all but one of your original cast members back.</p>



<p><strong>Of course. I don&#8217;t want to use the word squeezing it in. The Philharmonic has given me as much time as they can. I would say that of all the orchestras in the world, and I have conducted most of them, the LA Phil was the ideal orchestra for this because they have one of the fastest learning curves of any group of musicians in the world. And they know my music. They play it every year and I&#8217;ve been conducting them since the 1980s &#8211; back when they were at the Music Center. So this is the ideal situation if I&#8217;m going to work with an orchestra</strong>.</p>



<p><a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/03/17/grant-gershon-20-years-with-the-los-angeles-master-chorale/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Grant Gershon</a> conducted the premiere in San Francisco. How do you think your approach to this opera, from the conductor&#8217;s point of view, will differ from his? In what areas might it be the same?</p>



<p><strong>You know, it&#8217;s not like </strong>[German conductor Wilhelm] <strong>Furtwängler versus</strong> [Italian conductor Arturo] <strong>Toscanini or something like that. Obviously when Grant conducted that he had singers on the stage and they were doing all kinds of physical activity. And they were singing off book, which puts such a huge responsibility on the conductor. Here I&#8217;ve asked the singers to use music because we just want to get it as good as it can. Obviously this is a concert performance with no action on stage. My goal is to just get as good a performance and tight of performance as much as possible.&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>But do you feel that you conduct your music differently than others do?</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17805" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Composer-Conductor-John-Adams-Photo-©Riccardo-Musacchio-Courtesy-John-Adams.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Composer/Conductor John Adams (Photo ©Riccardo Musacchio/Courtesy John Adams)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>Well, sure. I&#8217;m very, very lucky. I&#8217;ve had the best conductors on the planet doing my music. That&#8217;s a real luxury. But I stay in touch with all my pieces. I conduct them regularly and I think I&#8217;m a good conductor &#8211; at least for my own music. I work regularly with the best orchestras in the world. That&#8217;s a plus that most composers can&#8217;t do. </strong></p>



<p><strong>You know I saw Aaron Copland conduct when I was a kid. The Boston Symphony loved him, but he was barely able to conduct. It&#8217;s a rare group of people who can conduct and compose:</strong> [Leonard] <strong>Bernstein and</strong> [Pierre] <strong>Boulez and Esa-Pekka</strong> [Salonen]. <strong>But most composers just don&#8217;t have the experience.</strong></p>



<p>By having that continued relationship with the vast number of your works that you conduct, how does that fuel your ideas for what you want to do moving forward?</p>



<p><strong>Of course it does fuel it. When I do my pieces I really understand what is right about them and what&#8217;s not right. So I&#8217;ve had the benefit of doing various pieces many, many times. It&#8217;s interesting because I was having to make some programs this week for various orchestras because they&#8217;re all ready to announce their seasons. I was looking at scores of </strong>[composer]<strong> Charles Ives that in the past I&#8217;ve conducted. I think Ives, whom I love on a certain level as a wonderful human being and a kind of visionary, but there&#8217;s something very unsatisfying about most of his orchestral pieces. The reason is that he never heard them played. So they were all kind of speculative. Then you look at a composer like Ravel or Mahler or Richard Strauss who are just constantly sharing their pieces and refining them. The ideal is to have a hands-on experience with your work.</strong></p>



<p>You and Peter Sellers did an interview at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFygj4EyVTs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Guggenheim Works in Progress</a> in September of 2017. He described the music that you wrote for Scene five of Act two as of <em>Girls of the Golden West</em> as being able to perfectly give voice to what was happening at the time and that historians will be able to look back at that music and see that you had &#8220;actually touched what&#8217;s going on.&#8221; When art and current events collide in the way that he&#8217;s describing, is there a part of it that feels like it&#8217;s perfect planning or is it the world working in mysterious ways? How do you view that kind of synchronicity?<em> </em></p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17799" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Peter-Sellars-and-John-Adams-Photo-by-Jacklyn-Meduga-Courtesy-San-Francisco-Opera-1.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Peter Sellars and John Adams (Photo by Jacklyn Meduga/Courtesy San Francisco Opera)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>I think I&#8217;m more modest in my expectations. I mean, it really sounds great, very grandiose what he said. But I&#8217;m always a little skeptical of language like that. I think basically people have very intimate experiences with a work of art. They may be sitting in a big crowd with thousands of people. But how you respond to something is a very intimate experience. I don&#8217;t think you can really predict how people are going to react.</strong> </p>



<p><strong>Even though a lot of my pieces deal with historical events, when I&#8217;m composing I never feel that I&#8217;m preaching to people. I never want to preach or think that I&#8217;m going to grab them by the lapel and give them a lecture.</strong></p>



<p>You&#8217;re also heavily involved with L.A. Philharmonic&#8217;s New Music Group. You have <a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/1870/2023-03-14/la-phil-new-music-group-with-john-adams" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a concert coming up </a>with them in March. What gives you the most optimism about the contemporary classical music that we&#8217;re going to discover in the next few years? Do you think that there are composers who are on the cusp of having a breakthrough the way you did with <em>Phrygian Gates</em>?</p>



<p><strong>I think it&#8217;s always been the case that there&#8217;s never been more than a handful of truly great composers at any particular time. If you look at the era of Beethoven there were all the other composers, his contemporaries, but we only listen to them out of historical curiosity. There was a period around the turn of the 20th century when there were an amazing number of really great composers all alive and working: Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius. But that was rare.</strong></p>



<p><strong>With that said, I think that this is a much healthier time to be a composer than when I was in my 20s or 30s. Back then that was what I call the bad old days of extremely obscure approaches to composition. Whether it was serialism or chance music, various systems that created a kind of music that was absolutely inaccessible to most listeners. I have no idea why it became so prestigious. But it did. When I was in college in the late sixties, early seventies, that&#8217;s the music that was treated seriously. And of course, one of the things that did was it frightened audiences away. </strong></p>



<p><strong>Even to this day I still suffer from that. If a piece of mine is on the program and your average concertgoer doesn&#8217;t know who John Adams is and looks at the program and sees Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Adams, the first thing they think is that it&#8217;s a new piece. It&#8217;s going to be unpleasant. That&#8217;s the long tail off of what happened back in the sixties and seventies. Now composers are not driven by style and they are very conscious about whom they&#8217;re writing for and what they&#8217;re writing about.<em> </em></strong></p>



<p><strong>I think there&#8217;s a lot of interest in encouraging young composers. Virtually every orchestra program I see these days, at least by American orchestras, has a piece by an emerging composer. It&#8217;s astonishing because you never saw that 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. So there is interest, but the issue is writing a piece that&#8217;s going to have legs that people want to hear. That other orchestras and performers and pianists want to share. That&#8217;s really where the dividing line is, because there are very, very few pieces that have legs. </strong></p>



<p>Do you think that that the world is is catching up to what you have been doing throughout your career?</p>



<p><strong>Well, you know, I&#8217;m like any contemporary composer except maybe John Williams. I have a modest audience and I say modest compared to a pop musician. But I have what I think is a quality audience who appreciates deeply what I do and loves my work. The reason we call it classical is because we always feel what we&#8217;re doing is going to have a very long shelf life, hundreds of years. We&#8217;re making something that is not just for now, but for many, many generations ahead.&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p><a href="https://bachtrack.com/classical-music-statistics-2022" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bachtrack</a> had you as number three on the top ten contemporary composers whose works were performed last year.<em> </em>[Arvo Pärt and John Williams were in the first and second position.]</p>



<p><strong>I guess maybe it&#8217;s just because I&#8217;m a Yankee at heart. I&#8217;m just very skeptical of grandiose language and things like that. But maybe that&#8217;s healthy because I still keep doing very original things. You know, I came back to this opera, <em>The Girls of the Golden West</em>, thinking it had been a failure. I hadn&#8217;t even listened to it or looked at the score in five years. </strong>[When I did]<strong> I thought, not bad.</strong></p>



<p>Main Photo: John Adams (Photo ©Riccardo Musacchio/Courtesy John Adams) </p>



<p> </p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2023/01/26/john-adams-revisits-an-old-friend/">John Adams Revisits an Old Friend</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Soprano Julia Bullock Wants to Rock Your Soul</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>"I made a lot of peace with who I am and how I also am expanding in the various roles that I can take on and feel comfortable in."</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/11/02/soprano-julia-bullock-wants-to-rock-your-soul/">Soprano Julia Bullock Wants to Rock Your Soul</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17279" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-2-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></figure></div>


<p>This year is going out with a bang for soprano Julia Bullock. She&#8217;s curated the <a href="https://www.laphil.com/concerts-and-events/festivals/rock-my-soul-festival" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><em>Rock Your Soul Festival</em> </a>with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that starts in earnest on November 5th and runs through November 22nd. She has her first solo recording coming out from Nonesuch Records. It&#8217;s called <em><a href="https://www.nonesuch.com/albums/walking-in-the-dark" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Walking in the Dark</a></em>. Finally she and pianist/conductor husband Christian Reif are expecting their first child any day now.</p>



<p><em>Rock Your Soul</em> <em>Festival</em> was originally conceived by the LA Phil as a celebration of the work and friendship of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. The title harkens back to a spiritual (<em>Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham</em>) and a book by noted author and activist Bell Hooks (<em>Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem</em>).</p>



<p>Amongst the artists Bullock has assembled for the festival are soprano Michelle Bradley, mezzo-soprano <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/05/31/jnai-bridges-enters-peter-lorraine-hunt-liebersons-world/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">J&#8217;Nai Bridges</a>, pianist Michelle Cann (look for our interview with her later this week), singer/composer Rhiannon Giddens, conductor Jeri Lynn Johnson, singer/songwriter <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2019/07/11/meshell-ndegeocello-unplugged-and-unmasked/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Meshell Ndegeocello</a> and mezzo-soprano Jasmine White.</p>



<p><em>Walking in the Dark</em> finds Bullock performing works by John Adams, Samuel Barber, Oscar Brown Jr., <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDdUOXpp6Zc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Connie Converse</a> and Sandy Denny. It&#8217;s a beautiful record that is set for release on December 9th. Reif plays piano on the recording and leads the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as well.</p>



<p>Bullock&#8217;s pregnancy precludes her from performing in <em>Rock Your Soul Festival</em>, but it did allow for other opportunities which she described in our conversation recently. What follows are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and for clarity.</p>



<p>I want to start by asking you about something you told <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/arts/music/julia-bullock-zauberland-lincoln-center.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Zachary Wolff</a> in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> in 2019. It was advice your mother gave you: &#8220;Make sure that your work is making a difference for the betterment of the world.&#8221; You seem to have taken up that challenge and made it your mission. How do you think that has made your career different than others and, by extension, more fulfilling for you?&nbsp;</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17280" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></figure></div>


<p><strong>Well, I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s made it so much different from other people&#8217;s. I think every artist has a call in one way or another to have a mission or have their their passion realized. I don&#8217;t have a casual relationship with music. In fact, my desire to sing and also share music is because I know the impact that it&#8217;s had on my life and also how it&#8217;s enriched my life and helps me feel more interconnected and engaged. </strong></p>



<p><strong>I guess I&#8217;m always looking for ways to deepen that exploration and enjoy it in the process. I find that most of the artists whose work I really love also have this sort of mission. They&#8217;re very much conscious of the world that was going on around them and trying to make sense of it or call out hypocrisies. I&#8217;m not sure if I feel it&#8217;s so different than what other artists are doing. I guess I&#8217;ve just given myself permission to expand that in as many directions as I can imagine.</strong></p>



<p>I would assume that in doing that, when someone like Peter Sellars says &#8220;Her path is going to be our path,&#8221; that&#8217;s got to be both hugely flattering and also a bit of a mantle to take on on a certain level.</p>



<p><strong>I truthfully don&#8217;t like to be positioned in any capacity. I appreciate that Peter feels that the way that I work, the reflections that I have, and just the fact that I&#8217;m really dedicated to my craft and my own development and learning, is something that he wants to celebrate. I guess I celebrate that, too. That would be part of why, in the performing arts in particular, I don&#8217;t take that pressure on because that&#8217;s just a projection of something. The work that I do is not trying to live into some projection of Julia.&nbsp;</strong></p>



<p>In the liner notes for <em>Walking in the Dark</em> you conclude your statements in the liner notes with &#8220;If our intentions are translated well enough and are clearly in focus, it may lead to some moments of illumination.&#8221; What has been the process of making your intentions perfectly clear with the <em>Rock Your Soul Festival</em>?</p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17275" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Florence-Price-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Florence Price (Courtesy New York Public Library Archive)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>It was their idea, not the title or anything like that, but just the proposal to curate a program that was focusing on the relationship between Margaret Bonds and Florence Price. Other than their vocal music and really just their songs, I was not too familiar with a lot of their repertoire &#8211; the breadth of their repertoire. It was an opportunity for me to again delve into some research and take six, seven months to consider the work of composers that I had not had the time or had this opportunity to look at. </strong></p>



<p><strong>I was reading about their personal lives and also this relationship of mutual support. They had this teacher</strong> (Price)<strong>/ student</strong> (Bonds) <strong>relationship.</strong> <strong>When there were really troubling times for Florence Price in her personal life she went and lived with Margaret Bonds for a period of time. That really communicated this beautiful thing. It wasn&#8217;t just about their artistic output. It was also about nurturing and respecting each other as human beings and fully supporting each other that way. That was something I really wanted to celebrate and acknowledge besides just sharing their repertoire. </strong></p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17276" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Margaret-Bonds-Courtesy-New-York-Public-Library-Archive.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Margaret Bonds (Courtesy New York Public Library Archives)</figcaption></figure></div>


<p><strong>Every single artist that was invited into the festival there is this feeling of mutual support. Every single composer that I know, that I work with personally and also the composers that I either read their letters or biographies, they openly admit how influenced they are by the people who are around them. And they seek out guidance and advice. They are influenced by what&#8217;s going on socially, politically.</strong> </p>



<p>I think we can learn a lot from what Florence Price and Margaret Bonds did in terms of shared experiences as musicians and as human beings. Because it goes without saying that a lot of people care more about ideologies and less about each other as human beings right now. Perhaps the festival can find a way to bridge that divide.</p>



<p><strong>It can be very closed and people can get very closed. Growing up listening to recordings, my family had vinyls or cassettes playing all the time. A lot of the time we listened to music together. Even if I was alone I was still playing music, not locked into an earphone or earbuds privately, it was something that was heard in the house &#8211; the shared space. I think music can foster some really beautiful acknowledgment of each other.&nbsp;It&#8217;s not just some theoretical exercise. It&#8217;s like actually putting it into practice. I think that&#8217;s probably what drove me and that&#8217;s what drives most musicians to make music. Because you&#8217;re wanting a shared experience and wanting to share your own experience as well.<em>&nbsp;</em></strong></p>



<p>Once you became pregnant and knew that being here for the festival wasn&#8217;t going to be possible did that give you any opportunities to make changes or add other things that maybe couldn&#8217;t fit into the program because you were a part of it at one point and now you were not?<em>&nbsp;</em></p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="169" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-300x169.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17282" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Julia-Bullock-4-Photo-by-Allison-Michael-orenstein-Courtesy-Askonas-Holt-1.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></figure></div>


<p><strong>I&#8217;m sad. I&#8217;m just not going to be there. Obviously I&#8217;m growing a human being. So that&#8217;s what it is.</strong><em>&nbsp;</em></p>



<p><strong>I was supposed to perform <a href="https://juliabullock.com/met-residency-historys-persistent-voice/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">History&#8217;s Persistent Voice</a>, which featured a lot of  contemporary composers who are all Black women. That was an hour-and-a-half program.<em>&nbsp;</em>I decided to save this for another season and think about another program. </strong></p>



<p><strong>That was a great opportunity to perform one of <a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/1796/2022-11-11/bryan-bonds-price" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Florence Price&#8217; full symphonies</a>. It was also an opportunity then for me to think about the composers who were associated with <em>History&#8217;s Persistence Voice</em> and look at some of their other pieces and see if there was a way to feature their work.</strong>&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>I&#8217;m really excited Courtney Brian&#8217;s <em>Sanctum</em> is included. Her work is just super powerful and I&#8217;m so glad that that is going to have a premiere at the LA Phil. Valerie Coleman&#8217;s selections from her <em>Phenomenal Women</em> will be featured as well. It&#8217;s the first time that she will have anything performed at the Phil.</strong></p>



<p>Your first album is going to be something that was to be considered carefully. Now that you&#8217;ve recorded it, and I know from earlier in this conversation you haven&#8217;t listened to it recently, but what would you like listeners to know about you from hearing the choices that you made for <em>Walking in the Dark</em> and the performances you give? </p>



<p><strong>What do I want them to know about me? I really hope it is just an invitation. All of the music that&#8217;s on this is material I&#8217;ve lived with for honestly two decades and some of it I&#8217;ve performed for a decade. The chance to lay it down and be a part of a recording legacy of some of these pieces that have also been recorded by so many different artists was a rare and wonderful opportunity. It&#8217;s not one that I take for granted. </strong></p>


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignleft size-medium"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300" height="300" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-300x300.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-17277" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-300x300.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-150x150.jpg 150w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-768x768.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-696x696.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-1068x1068.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover-420x420.jpg 420w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Walking-in-the-Dark-Album-Cover.jpg 1080w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></figure></div>


<p><strong><em>Walking in the Dark</em>, I mean the title of it. I didn&#8217;t write this in the liner notes and I&#8217;ve only brought it up to a few people, but I want to make it very clear that darkness is not something that should have, in fact, any kind of negative association. I feel in some ways that darkness, or blackness even, has been conditioned in certain parts of societies or cultures to have negative connotations and somehow promotes the idea of a white supremacist ideology. That really is not something that I can tolerate. </strong></p>



<p><strong>I guess it&#8217;s been something I have grappled with &#8211; a collective question about identity or I have felt that I have had to question my identity for a very, very long time. I made a lot of peace with who I am and how I also am expanding in the various roles that I can take on and feel comfortable in.</strong></p>



<p>James Agee, who probably needs no introduction to you since his poetry inspired Samuel Barber&#8217;s <em>Knoxville Summer of 1915</em> (which Bullock performs on <em>Walking in the Dark</em>), is quoted as saying, &#8220;Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don&#8217;t.&#8221; I feel like in watching your career over the last number of years that you&#8217;re actively working through your art and through your activism to get the world to where you hope it will be. As a soon-to-be mother, what is the world you&#8217;d like to see your child living in and how do you think your art can pave a path for that to be a reality?&nbsp;</p>



<p><strong>Well, I hope that this child will feel safe. That the child will not be limited in anything that they want to invest in and enjoy. That there will be not be a lot of assumptions made or anticipated projections of this child and what they feel they have to represent so that they can just live their lives. But there&#8217;s something in safety that feels really important right now.</strong></p>



<p>Photos of Julia Bullock (By Allison Michael Orenstein/Courtesy Askonas Holt)</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2022/11/02/soprano-julia-bullock-wants-to-rock-your-soul/">Soprano Julia Bullock Wants to Rock Your Soul</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Celebrating American Composers &#8211; Week 68 at the Met</title>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 27 Jun 2021 19:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
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<p>This week leads up to the 245th birthday of America. Appropriately Week 68 at the Met will honor the July 4th holiday (which falls on Sunday) with a week of operas composed by American composers.</p>



<p>A pair of composers have two operas being shown this week: John Adams (<em>Doctor Atomic</em> and <em>Nixon in China</em>) and Philip Glass (<em>Akhnaten</em> and <em>Satyagraha</em>). Also represented are John Corigliano, Nico Muhly and Kurt Weill (technically German, but he ultimately became an American citizen).</p>



<p>Since the Met is re-running productions as the bulk of their weekly streaming schedule, I’m going to mix in interviews with the performers and creators in place of clips to avoid the redundancy of showing the same few clips available. Let me know your thoughts!</p>



<p>All productions become available at 7:30 PM EST/4:30 PM PST and remain available for 23 hours. Schedules and timings may be subject to change.</p>



<p>The Met is heavily promoting their Met Stars Live in Concert series and the planned resumption of performances in the 2021-2022 season, so you’ll have to go past those announcements and promos to find the streaming productions on the&nbsp;<a href="http://metopera.org/">Metropolitan Opera website</a>.&nbsp;</p>



<p>If you read this column early enough on June 28th, you’ll still have time to see the 2016-2017 season production of Verdi&#8217;s <em>La Traviata</em> that was part of <em><a href="https://culturalattache.co/2021/06/21/pride-week-week-67-at-the-met/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pride Week</a></em>.</p>



<p>Here is the full line-up for Week 68 at the Met:</p>



<p>Monday, June 28 – <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/02/22/composer-nico-muhly-registers-organ-concerto/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nico Muhly</a>’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Marnie&nbsp;</em></strong>&#8211; 3rd Showing &#8211; STRONGLY RECOMMENDED</p>



<p>Conducted by Roberto Spano; starring <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2021/05/20/operas-isabel-leonard-directs-her-future/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Isabel Leonard</a>, Iestyn Davies and Christopher Maltman. This Michael Mayer production is from the 2018-2019 season. </p>



<p>Muhly’s opera, with a libretto by Nicholas Wright, had its world premiere at the English National Opera in 2017. The opera is based on Winston Graham’s 1961 novel.</p>



<p>If the title,&nbsp;<em>Marnie</em>, sounds familiar, this is based on the same novel by Winston Graham that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film. The title character is a woman who steals from people, changes her identity and quickly moves on to other victims. Until an employer catches her and blackmails her.</p>



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<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/arts/music/marnie-opera-review-nico-muhly.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini</a>, in his review for the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, said of the opera, “<em>Marnie</em>&nbsp;benefits from the director Michael Mayer’s sleek and fluid staging, with inventive sets and projections designed by Julian Crouch and 59 Productions. (It was first seen last year in London for&nbsp;the work’s premiere&nbsp;at the English National Opera.) Scenery changes are deftly rendered through sliding and descending panels on which evocative images are projected.</p>



<p>“Mr. Muhly’s music could not have had a better advocate than the conductor Robert Spano, making an absurdly belated Met debut at 57. He highlighted intriguing details, brought out myriad colorings, kept the pacing sure and never covered the singers.&#8221;</p>



<p>Tuesday, June 29 – John Adams’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Doctor Atomic&nbsp;</em></strong>&#8211; 3rd Showing</p>



<p>Conducted by Alan Gilbert; starring Sasha Cooke, Thomas Glenn, Gerald Finley, Richard Paul Fink and Eric Owens. This Penny Woolcock production is from the 2008-2009 season. </p>



<p>This John Adams opera had its world premiere in 2005 in San Francisco and features a libretto by Peter Sellars. The main source of inspiration for the libretto was declassified government documents from individuals who worked at Los Alamos on the development of the atomic bomb.</p>



<p>Act one of&nbsp;<em>Doctor Atomic</em>&nbsp;takes place approximately one month before the first test. The second act takes place the morning of that test in 1945. At the center of it all is Robert J. Oppenheimer (Finley).</p>



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<p>In his review for the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>,&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/arts/music/15atom.html" target="_blank">Anthony Tomassini said</a>&nbsp;of Adams’s score: “This score continues to impress me as Mr. Adams’s most complex and masterly music. Whole stretches of the orchestral writing tremble with grainy colors, misty sonorities and textural density. Mr. Gilbert exposes the inner details and layered elements of the music: obsessive riffs, pungently dissonant cluster chords, elegiac solo instrumental lines that achingly drift atop nervous, jittery orchestral figurations.”</p>



<p>Wednesday, June 30 – John Corigliano’s&nbsp;<strong><em>The Ghosts of Versailles</em></strong> &#8211; 4th Showing &#8211; STRONGLY RECOMMENDED</p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Håkan Hagegård, Teresa Stratas, Renée Fleming, Gino Quilico and Marilyn Horne. This Colin Graham production is from the 1991-1992 season. </p>



<p>Beaumarchais is the playwright who wrote the plays that inspired Rossini’s&nbsp;<em>The Barber of Seville</em>and Mozart’s&nbsp;<em>The Marriage of Figaro</em>. His third play in that series,&nbsp;<em>The Guilty Mother</em>, serves as the inspiration for this opera by John Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman.</p>



<p>In the opera, ghosts occupy the theatre at Versailles. Marie Antoinette, not too happy about her execution, spurns the advances of Beaumarchais. He offers his new opera,&nbsp;<em>A Figaro for Antonia</em>, as a means to win her love and change her fate. Now an opera appears within the opera, utilizing the familiar Figaro characters.</p>



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<p>The Metropolitan Opera commissioned this work for its 100th anniversary in 1983. It wasn’t performed there until eight years after that centennial. This film is from those performances.</p>



<p>I interviewed&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://culturalattache.co/2015/02/04/award-winning-composer-john-corigliano-encounters-the-ghosts-of-versailles/" target="_blank">Corigliano</a>&nbsp;when LA Opera performed&nbsp;<em>The Ghosts of Versailles</em>. Here’s what he told me about how he handled opening night at the Met:</p>



<p>“The premiere of the opera, this is what I did. I sent out for a take-out chicken. I had a bottle of wine and ten milligrams of valium. I ate the chicken, took the valium and wine to the opening. If you’re asking about something that happened at opening night, I was a zombie. It&nbsp;was traumatizing. I’d never written an opera, it was overwhelming. I couldn’t face it without a little help.”</p>



<p>Both this Metropolitan Opera production and the more recent The LA Opera production were amazing and I personally think Corigliano had nothing to worry about. This is a terrific work.</p>



<p>Thursday, July 1 – Philip Glass’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Satyagraha&nbsp;</em></strong>&#8211; 3rd Showing &#8211; STRONGLY RECOMMENDED</p>



<p>Conducted by Dante Anzolini; starring Rachelle Durkin, Richard Croft, Kim Josephson and Alfred Walker.&nbsp;This is a revival of Phelim McDermott’s 2008 production from the 2011-2012 season. </p>



<p>This Philip Glass opera had its world premiere in 1980 in Rotterdam. The libretto was written by Glass and Candace DeJong. The title means “insistence on truth” in Sanskrit.</p>



<p>The life of Gandhi is depicted in a story that goes backwards and forwards through time as a way to examine his life in South Africa and leading to his belief in non-violent protests. Sung in Sanskrit with projected titles on the stage itself, this is one unique opera that is staged beautifully and powerfully.</p>



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<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/arts/music/satyagraha-by-philip-glass-at-met-opera-review.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">James R. Oestreich</a>, writing in the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, said of this revival (which took place during a celebration of the the composer’s 75th birthday):</p>



<p> “The singers were exceptionally fine and well matched, starting with the tenor Richard Croft, strong yet vulnerable as Gandhi. Like Mr. Croft, Rachelle Durkin as Gandhi’s secretary, Miss Schlesen; Maria Zifchak as his wife, Kasturbai; and Alfred Walker as his Indian co-worker Parsi Rustomji were veterans of the 2008 premiere, and all were excellent except for a bit of strain in Ms. Durkin’s sustained high work in the newspaper scene. Kim Josephson was also strong as Gandhi’s European colleague Mr. Kallenbach.”</p>



<p>I challenge anyone to get to&nbsp;<em>Satyagraha</em>‘s final aria, “Evening Song,” and not be utterly moved.</p>



<p>Friday, July 2 – John Adams’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Nixon in China&nbsp;</em></strong>&#8211; 4th Showing</p>



<p>Conducted by John Adams; starring Kathleen Kim, Janis Kelly, Robert Brubaker, Russell Braun, James Maddalena and Richard Paul Fink. This Peter Sellars production is from the 2010-2011 season. </p>



<p><em>Nixon in China</em>&nbsp;had its world premiere in Houston in 1987 in a production directed by Peter Sellars. Inspired by President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the opera features a libretto by Alice Goodman.</p>



<p>It was wholly unlikely that someone as anti-Communist as Nixon would make a trip to China. That trip forged new relations between the two countries and helped thaw the icy relationship the United States had with the then Soviet Union. Nixon and his wife Pat, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Henry Kissinger and Madame Mao all play prominent roles in the opera.</p>



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<p>This 2011 production, while a Met debut for&nbsp;<em>Nixon in China</em>, was not the New York debut of the opera. It was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 1987 following its premiere in Houston. Critical reaction upon its premiere was quite mixed. </p>



<p>By the time of this production (which found Sellars revisiting his original work and that of a 2006 revival),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/music/04nixon.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini&nbsp;</a>in the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>&nbsp;called it an “audacious and moving opera.”</p>



<p>Saturday, July 3 –Weill’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</em></strong> &#8211; 2nd Showing</p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Teresa Stratas, Astrid Varnay, Richard Cassilly and Cornell MacNeil. This John Dexter production is from the 1979-1980 season.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Kurt Weill’s&nbsp;<em>Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</em>&nbsp;had its world premiere in Leipzig in 1930. The libretto, of course, is by Bertolt Brecht.</p>



<p>Three fugitives and four lumberjacks make their way to Mahagonny. The fugitives are trying to elude the authorities and enjoy themselves in a city where men can get all their needs met. The lumberjacks are looking for opportunity.&nbsp;</p>



<p>A prostitute named Jenny is, at first, attracted by the presence of the fugitives and their money. But she finds herself falling for one of the lumberjacks, Jimmy, who gets more and more in debt as the opera progresses.</p>



<p>As both personal and city financial problems mount, the lives of all eight characters will be changed forever and the shining city will collapse into chaos.</p>



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<p>This was the first ever production of this opera at The Met.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/opera-mahagonny-at-the-met-the-cast.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Harold C. Schonberg</a>, writing in the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, opened his review this way: </p>



<p>“The Weill‐Brecht&nbsp;<em>Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny</em>&nbsp;came to the Metropolitan Opera Friday night, and at least one question about the work was answered. There were those who predicted that <em>Mahagonny</em> with its cabaret roots, smallish orchestra and jazz elements, would not ‘go’ in a house as big as the Met’s. It does. Whether or not it is an opera, and Weill strongly insisted that it is, it does use voices skillfully, it has a big chorus, and it was not lost on the stage of the big house.”</p>



<p>Sunday, July 4 – Philip Glass’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Akhnaten&nbsp;</em></strong>&#8211; 6th Showing &#8211; STRONGLY RECOMMENDED</p>



<p>Conducted by Karen Kamensek; starring Dísella Lárusdóttir, J’Nai Bridges, Anthony Roth Costanzo,&nbsp;Aaron Blake, Will Liverman, Richard Bernstein and Zachary James.&nbsp;This Phelim McDermott production is from the 2019-2020.&nbsp;</p>



<p><em>Akhnaten</em>&nbsp;is one of Glass’s three biographical operas (the others are&nbsp;<em>Einstein on the Beach</em>&nbsp;and Saturday’s opera,&nbsp;<em>Satyagraha</em>.) The composer also wrote the libretto with the assistance of Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel,&nbsp;Richard Riddell&nbsp;and&nbsp;Jerome Robbins.</p>



<p><em>Akhnaten</em>&nbsp;was a pharaoh who was controversial for his views on worshipping more than one God. He suggested just worshipping one – the sun. He was husband to Nefertitti and father of Tutankhamun. This opera does not have a linear storyline.</p>



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<p>In his&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>&nbsp;review,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/arts/music/review-akhnaten-philip-glass-metropolitan-opera.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini</a>&nbsp;praised&nbsp;the leads:</p>



<p>“Wearing gauzy red robes with extravagantly long&nbsp;trains, Mr. Costanzo and Ms. Bridges seem at once otherworldly and achingly real. His ethereal tones combine affectingly with her plush, deep-set voice. Ms. Kamensek, while keeping the orchestra supportive, brings out the restless rhythmic elements that suggest the couple’s intensity.”</p>



<p>I’ve seen this production with Costanzo singing the title role and cannot recommend taking the time to watch&nbsp;<em>Akhnaten</em>&nbsp;highly enough.&nbsp;</p>



<p>That&#8217;s the full line-up for Week 68 at the Met. At press time we had no details for next week.</p>



<p>Enjoy your week! Enjoy the operas! Happy Birthday America!</p>



<p>Photo: James Maddalena, Russell Braun and Janis Kelly in <em>Nixon in China</em> (Photo by Ken Howard/Courtesy Metropolitan Opera)</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2021/06/27/celebrating-american-composers-week-68-at-the-met/">Celebrating American Composers &#8211; Week 68 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Week 33 at the Met</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2020/10/26/week-33-at-the-met/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2020 07:01:23 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opera: Bravo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Streaming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adrianne Pieczonka]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Agrippina]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Aleksandrs Antonenko]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alfred Walker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boris Godunov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brenda Rae]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colin Graham]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dante Anzolini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David McVicar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Don Carlo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Duncan Rock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ekaterina Gubanova]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Evgeny Nikitin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Frideric Handel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Giancarlo del Monaco]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gino Quilico]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Giuseppe Verdi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Håkan Hagegård]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Bicket]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iestyn Davies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Levine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Maddalena]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Morris]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janis Kelly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Adams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Corigliano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Dexter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joyce DiDonato]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Lindsey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Kim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kim Josephson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marcello Giordani]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marilyn Horne]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Matthew Rose]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Metropolitan Opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mikhail Petrenko]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Modest Mussorgsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon in China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oleg Balashov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Plishka]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Phelim McDermott]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Philip Glass]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Plácido Domingo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rachelle Durkin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Renata Scotto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[René Pape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Renée Fleming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richard Croft]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richard Paul Fink]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Brubaker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russell Braun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Satyagraha]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sherrill Milnes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Simon Boccanegra]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stephen Wadsworth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tatiana Troyanos]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Teresa Stratas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Ghosts of Versailles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Valery Gergiev]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Metropolitan Opera Website<br />
<br />
October 26th - November 1st</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/10/26/week-33-at-the-met/">Week 33 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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<p>As befits the final week of campaigning prior to the November 3rd elections, Week 33 at the Met features <em>Politics in Opera</em>.</p>



<p>The politics in these operas include challenges and imbroglios in Spain, Russia, Italy, France, finds an American President making a truly historic trip to China and a non-violent resistance leader in India finding his voice. (Can you guess all seven operas?)</p>



<p>Each production becomes available at 7:30 PM EDT/4:30 PM PDT on the Metropolitan Opera&nbsp;<a href="https://www.metopera.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website</a>. Every opera remains available for 23 hours. They are heavily promoting their Met Stars Live in Concert series and recently announced the cancellation of the full 2020-2021 season, so you’ll have to go past those announcements and promos to find the streaming productions. Schedules and timings may be subject to change.</p>



<p>If you read this column early enough on October 26th, you might still have time to catch the 2016-2017 season production of&nbsp;<em>Der Rosenkavalier</em>&nbsp;that concludes last week’s&nbsp;<em><a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/10/19/week-32-at-the-met/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Operatic Comedies</a></em> week.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Here is the line-up for Week 33 at the Met:</p>



<p>Monday, October 26 – Verdi’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Don Carlo</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Renata Scotto, Tatiana Troyanos, Vasile Moldoveanu, Sherrill Milnes and Paul Plishka. This John Dexter production is from the 1979-1980 season. </p>



<p><em>Don Carlo</em>&nbsp;had its world premiere in 1867 in Paris. Friedrich Schiller’s play&nbsp;<em>Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien</em>, served as the basis for the libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle<em>.&nbsp;</em>The opera was originally performed in French. Three months after its debut in Paris,&nbsp;<em>Don Carlo</em>&nbsp;was performed in Italian. First at Covent Garden in London and later in Bologna. It is most frequently performed in Italian.</p>



<p>Don Carlo of Spain and Elisabetta of Valois are betrothed to one another. They have never met. Don Carlo sneaks away to meet this unknown woman. They fall in love. However, their happiness is quickly ruined when Carlo’s father, Filippo, announces that he’s in love with her and she is to be his bride.</p>



<p>Even though she is now his stepmother, Don Carlo tries multiple times to woo Elisabetta away from his father. With the Spanish Inquisition ongoing, the affairs of all three and the appearance of a mysterious monk lead to murder plots, revenge, unrequited love, thievery and more being played out in Verdi’s longest opera.</p>



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<p>Rather than offer a critic&#8217;s opinion of this production, I found this information about which version of <em>Don Carlo</em> was being performed interesting. This is from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/06/archives/opera-new-production-of-don-carlo-at-the-met.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Harold C. Schonberg</a>&#8216;s review in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>.</p>



<p>&#8220;Musically this was not the <em>Don Carlo</em> of 1950. The last three decades have seen a burgeoning of Verdi scholarship, and today matters of authenticity are taken much more seriously than they used to be. Thus the Metropolitan Opera is now staging Verdi&#8217;s original Act I, the Fontainebleau act that he wrote for the original production in Paris, 1867. In the years following the Paris premiere, Verdi spent much time on <em>Don Carlo</em>, and a revised version was given at La Scala in 1884 &#8211; without the Fontainebleau act. Only two years after that, Verdi had additional thoughts, and restored Fontainebleau. This new Metropolitan Opera version is a substantially complete 1886 <em>Don Carlo</em>. It started last night at 7:15 and ended after 11:30, which puts it into <em>Gotterdammerung</em> length.&#8221;</p>



<p>Tuesday, October 27 – Handel’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Agrippina</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Harry Bicket; starring Brenda Rae, Joyce DiDonato, Kate Lindsey, Iestyn Davies, Duncan Rock and Matthew Rose. This David McVicar production is from the 2019-2020 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was made available on August 8th.</p>



<p>George Frideric Handel’s&nbsp;<em>Agrippina</em>&nbsp;has a libretto by Cardinal&nbsp;Vincenzo Grimani. The opera had its world premiere in 1709 in Venice at the Teatro S Giovanni Grisostomo which was owned by Grimani.</p>



<p>Agrippina is the Roman empress who is fixated on the idea of having her highly unqualified son, Nerone, take over the throne. To do that, she will stop at nothing to get her husband, Claudio, to cede it to him.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Agrippina: “Come nube che fugge dal vento”" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jufAkHxgEmw?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>Though McVicar’s production was first staged in Brussels in 2000, this marked the first ever Metropolitan Opera production of&nbsp;<em>Agrippina</em>. Conductor Harry Bicket lead from the harpsichord and audiences and critics were enthralled.</p>



<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/arts/music/met-opera-agrippina-review.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Zachary Woolfe</a>,&nbsp;in his review&nbsp;for the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>&nbsp;said, “Three centuries on,&nbsp;<em>Agrippina</em> remains bracing in its bitterness, with few glimmers of hope or virtue in the cynical darkness. But it’s irresistible in its intelligence — and in the shamelessness it depicts with such clear yet understanding eyes.”</p>



<p>Wednesday, October 28 – Verdi’s<strong><em>&nbsp;Simon Boccanegra</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Adrianne Pieczonka, Marcello Giordani, Plácido Domingo and James Morris. This revival of Giancarlo del Monaco’s 1995 production is from the 2009-2010 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was made available on August 21st.</p>



<p>Giuseppe Verdi’s opera is based on a play by Antonio García Gutiérrez, the same playwright whose work inspired&nbsp;<em>Il Trovatore</em>. &nbsp;Francesco Maria Piave wrote the libretto.&nbsp;<em>Simon Boccanegra</em>had its world premiere in its first version in Venice in 1857. Verdi re-worked the opera and the revised version (with assistance from Arrigo Boito) was first performed at La Scala in Milan in 1881.</p>



<p>Simon Boccanegra is the Doge of Genoa. As the opera begins politics surround him and threaten to envelop him as rumors about his past follow him. But they are not just rumors. Twenty-five years ago Maria, his lover, died and their daughter disappeared.</p>



<p>Maria’s father and his adopted daughter are plotting to overthrow Boccanegra. Simultaneously the Doge is going to finally discover the whereabouts of his missing daughter. But will his enemies and the rising political storm make him another casualty?</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Placido Domingo As Simon Boccanegra At Met 2010 - High Definition" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ldq5naMzTok?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>This production marked the first appearance by Plácido Domingo in a baritone role at the Met. He sings the title character. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/arts/music/20simon.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini</a>, writing for&nbsp;the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>&nbsp;said of his performance:</p>



<p>“But he sounded liberated as Boccanegra, a tormented doge in 14th-century Genoa. At times his voice had a worn cast. And when he dipped into the lower baritone register, he had to fortify his sound with chesty, sometimes leathery power. Still, this was some of his freshest singing in years.”</p>



<p>Thursday, October 29 – John Adams’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Nixon in China</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by John Adams; starring Kathleen Kim, Janis Kelly, Robert Brubaker, Russell Braun, James Maddalena and Richard Paul Fink. This Peter Sellars production is from the 2010-2011 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that streamed on April 1st and September 2nd.</p>



<p><em>Nixon in China</em>&nbsp;had its world premiere in Houston in 1987 in a production directed by Peter Sellars. Inspired by President Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the opera features a libretto by Alice Goodman.</p>



<p>It was wholly unlikely that someone as anti-Communist as Nixon would make a trip to China. That trip forged new relations between the two countries and helped thaw the icy relationship the United States had with the then Soviet Union. Nixon and his wife Pat, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Henry Kissinger and Madame Mao all play prominent roles in the opera.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Nixon in China: Banquet Scene excerpt (Met Opera)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XdJtrWz-dak?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



<p>This 2011 production, while a Met debut for&nbsp;<em>Nixon in China</em>, was not the New York debut of the opera. It was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 1987 following its premiere in Houston. Critical reaction upon its premiere was quite mixed. By the time of this production (which founds Sellars revisiting his original work and that of a 2006 revival),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/music/04nixon.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini&nbsp;</a>in the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>&nbsp;called it an “audacious and moving opera.”</p>



<p>Friday, October 30 – Mussorgsky’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Boris Godunov</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Valery Gergiev; starring Ekaterina Semenchuk, Aleksandrs Antonenko, Oleg Balashov, Evgeny Nikitin, René Pape, Mikhail Petrenko and Vladimir Ognovenko. This Stephen Wadsworth production (taking over from Peter Stein who quit a few months prior to opening) is from the 2010-2011 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was made available on April 14th.</p>



<p>This opera by Modest Mussorgsky had its world premiere in St. Petersburg in 1874. The libretto, written by the composer, was based on Aleksandr Pushkin&#8217;s <em>Boris Godunov</em>. Mussorgky completed an earlier version of the opera in 1869, but it was rejected. He revised the opera and included elements from <em>History of the Russian State</em> by Nikolay Karamzin to gain approval and ultimately a production in 1874.</p>



<p>In the opera, a retired and very reluctant Boris Godunov assumes the throne as Tsar. He is bedeviled by a constant foreboding and hopes his prayers will help him navigate what lies ahead. An old monk named Pimen discusses the murder of Tsarevich Dimitri with Gregory, a novice. Had he lived, Dimitri might have ascended to the throne. Godunov was implicated in his murder years ago. What follows is one man&#8217;s pursuit of forgiveness, his being haunted by the Dimitri&#8217;s ghost and the Russian people who demand justice.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="René Pape (Boris Godunov)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JWL4LMPQnJo?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/arts/music/13boris.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini</a>, writing in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, spent a considerable amount of his review discussing Pape in the title role.</p>



<p>&#8220;With his towering physique and unforced charisma, Mr. Pape looks regal and imposing. Yet with his vacant stare, the haggard intensity in his face, his stringy long hair and his hulking gait, he is already bent over with guilt and doubt. Mr. Pape has vocal charisma as well, and his dark, penetrating voice is ideal for the role. Not knowing Russian, I cannot vouch for the idiomatic quality of his singing. But his enunciation was crisp and natural. And in every language, Mr. Pape makes words matter.</p>



<p>&#8220;During the coronation there is a soul-searching moment when Boris removes his crown and voices his remorse to himself. Some great Borises have conveyed the character as beset with internalized torment. Mr. Pape’s anguish is always raw, fitful and on the surface. But the volatility is balanced by the magisterial power he conveys.&#8221;</p>



<p>Saturday, October 31 – John Corigliano’s&nbsp;<strong><em>The Ghosts of Versailles</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Håkan Hagegård, Teresa Stratas, Renée Fleming, Gino Quilico and Marilyn Horne. This Colin Graham production is from the 1991-1992 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was made available on June 11th.</p>



<p>The Metropolitan Opera commissioned this work for its 100th anniversary in 1983. It wasn’t performed there until eight years after that centennial. This film is from those performances.</p>



<p>Beaumarchais is the playwright who wrote the plays that inspired Rossini’s&nbsp;<em>The Barber of Seville</em>and Mozart’s&nbsp;<em>The Marriage of Figaro</em>. His third play in that series,&nbsp;<em>The Guilty Mother</em>, serves as the inspiration for this opera by John Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman.</p>



<p>In the opera, ghosts occupy the theatre at Versailles. Marie Antoinette, not too happy about her execution, spurns the advances of Beaumarchais. He offers his new opera,&nbsp;<em>A Figaro for Antonia</em>, as a means to win her love and change her fate. Now an opera appears within the opera, utilizing the familiar Figaro characters.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Marilyn Horne as &quot;Samira the Turkish Entertainer&quot;" width="696" height="522" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JAPcrAzUswg?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>I interviewed&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://culturalattache.co/2015/02/04/award-winning-composer-john-corigliano-encounters-the-ghosts-of-versailles/" target="_blank">Corigliano</a>&nbsp;when LA Opera performed&nbsp;<em>The Ghosts of Versailles</em>. Here’s what he told me about how he handled opening night at the Met:</p>



<p>“The premiere of the opera, this is what I did. I sent out for a take-out chicken. I had a bottle of wine and ten milligrams of valium. I ate the chicken, took the valium and wine to the opening. If you’re asking about something that happened at opening night, I was a zombie. It&nbsp;was traumatizing. I’d never written an opera, it was overwhelming. I couldn’t face it without a little help.”</p>



<p>Both this Metropolitan Opera production and the more recent The LA Opera production were amazing and I personally think Corigliano had nothing to worry about. This is a terrific work.</p>



<p>Sunday, November 1 – Philip Glass’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Satyagraha</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Dante Anzolini; starring Rachelle Durkin, Richard Croft, Kim Josephson and Alfred Walker.&nbsp;This is a revival of Phelim McDermott’s 2008 production from the 2011-2012 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that streamed on June 21st.</p>



<p>This Philip Glass opera had its world premiere in 1980 in Rotterdam. The libretto was written by Glass and Candace DeJong. The title means &#8220;insistence on truth&#8221; in Sanskrit.</p>



<p>The life of Gandhi is depicted in a story that goes backwards and forwards through time as a way to examine his life in South Africa and leading to his belief in non-violent protests. Sung in Sanskrit with projected titles on the stage itself, this is one unique opera that is staged beautifully and powerfully.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Филип Гласс   Сатьяграха  2011 Act II Отрывок" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/twS59uI0JD4?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/arts/music/satyagraha-by-philip-glass-at-met-opera-review.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">James R. Oestreich</a>, writing in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, said of this revival (which took place during a celebration of the the composer&#8217;s 75th birthday), &#8220;The singers were exceptionally fine and well matched, starting with the tenor Richard Croft, strong yet vulnerable as Gandhi. Like Mr. Croft, Rachelle Durkin as Gandhi’s secretary, Miss Schlesen; Maria Zifchak as his wife, Kasturbai; and Alfred Walker as his Indian co-worker Parsi Rustomji were veterans of the 2008 premiere, and all were excellent except for a bit of strain in Ms. Durkin’s sustained high work in the newspaper scene. Kim Josephson was also strong as Gandhi’s European colleague Mr. Kallenbach.&#8221;</p>



<p>I’ve also seen this production and would challenge anyone to get to&nbsp;<em>Satyagraha</em>‘s final aria, “Evening Song,” and not be utterly moved.</p>



<p>Which opera will you vote to watch this week? Just one? Or will multiples of these candidates earn your attention? You have great choices during Week 33 at the Met.</p>



<p>Enjoy the operas and enjoy your week.</p>



<p>Photo: Janis Kelly and James Maddalena in <em>Nixon in China</em> (Photo by Ken Howard/Courtesy Metropolitan Opera)</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/10/26/week-33-at-the-met/">Week 33 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Week 25 at the Met</title>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2020 07:01:26 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opera: Bravo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Streaming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adrianne Pieczonka]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alan Oke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alban Berg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alek Shrader]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alfred Walker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Angel Blue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anthony Dean Griffey]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anthony Michaels-Moore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Audrey Luna]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Britten]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Brenna]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Robertson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Denyce Graves]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Donovan Singletary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elektra]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Owens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Esa-Pekka Salonen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Franz Grundheber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Frederick Ballentine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[George Gershwin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Golda Schultz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ira Gershwin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Isabel Leonard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Maddalena]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Robinson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Janis Kelly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Johan Reuter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Adams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Doyle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Kim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Latonia Moore]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Lulu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marlis Petersen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Metropolitan Opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nina Stemme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon in China]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Metropolitan Opera Website<br />
<br />
August 31st - September 6th</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/08/31/week-25-at-the-met/">Week 25 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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<p>Happy Monday and welcome to Week 25 at the Met. This week finds another &#8220;theme&#8221; week. All of this week&#8217;s operas are arguably 20th Century classics. The operas range from <em>Elektra</em> which debuted in 1909 to <em>The Tempest</em> which had its world premiere in 2004.</p>



<p>I suppose one could also argue that an opera that wasn&#8217;t seen until 2004 isn&#8217;t truly a 20th Century classic, but what is four years amongst opera aficionados?</p>



<p>This week&#8217;s programming reflects a departure from the Metropolitan Opera norms as one opera, Gershwins&#8217;s <em>Porgy and Bess</em>, will be available for two days instead of just one.</p>



<p>Each production becomes available at 7:30 PM EDT/4:30 PM PDT on the Metropolitan Opera&nbsp;<a href="https://www.metopera.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">website</a>. Every opera remains available for 23 hours. They are heavily promoting their Met Stars Live in Concert series so you’ll have to go past those promos to find the streaming productions. Schedules and timings may be subject to change.</p>



<p>If you read this preview early enough on Monday, August 31st, you might still have time to catch the 2013-2014 season production of <a aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)" href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/08/24/week-24-at-the-met/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Giuseppe Verdi&#8217;s <em>Falstaff</em></a>.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s the full line-up for Week 25 at the Met:</p>



<p>Monday, August 31 – R. Strauss’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Elektra</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; starring Nina Stemme, Adrianne Pieczonka, Waltraud Meier, Burkhard Ulrich and Eric Owens. This Patrice Chéreau production is from the 2015-2016 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was streamed on April 20th.</p>



<p>Richard Strauss&#8217;s <em>Elektra</em> had its world premiere in Dresden in 1909. The libretto was written by&nbsp;Hugo von Hofmannsthal and was based on his 1903 drama of the same name.</p>



<p>For a one-act opera, <em>Elektra</em> has a tangled web of intrigue at its core. Simply put, Elektra is enraged by the murder of her father, King Agamemnon. Elektra&#8217;s mother, Klytämnestra, convinced her lover, Aegisth, to kill her husband. Once Elektra finds out, she is out for nothing short of total revenge and enlists her brother, Orest, to kill their mother.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Elektra: Recognition Scene (Nina Stemme)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jFzZMoX7rok?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>When <em>Elektra</em> was first presented, critics were deeply divided. Perhaps none more so than Ernest Newman, then London&#8217;s most important former music critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Newman found the opera abhorrent. Shaw fiercely defended it. Their argument about the merits of Strauss&#8217;s opera were published in a series of letters in <span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Nation</span><em>.</em></p>



<p>Of this production,&nbsp;The New York Times‘&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/arts/music/review-elektra-at-the-met-does-full-justice-to-strausss-masterpiece.html?searchResultPosition=3" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini</a>&nbsp;said, “…nothing prepared me for the seething intensity, psychological insight and sheer theatrical inventiveness of this production on Thursday night, conducted by the brilliant&nbsp;Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mr. Chéreau’s partner in this venture from the start. A superb cast is headed by the smoldering soprano&nbsp;Nina Stemme&nbsp;in the title role.&#8221;</p>



<p>Tuesday, September 1 – Britten’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Peter Grimes</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles; starring Patricia Racette, Anthony Dean Griffey and Anthony Michaels-Moore. This John Doyle production is from the 2007-2008 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that was streamed on May 14th.</p>



<p>Benjamin Britten&#8217;s <em>Peter Grimes</em> had its world premiere in London in 1945. The libretto was written by Montagu Slater who based it on a poem in <em>The Borough</em> by George Crabbe.</p>



<p>In <em>Peter Grimes</em>, the title character is facing intense questioning after his apprentice has died. The townsfolk believe him to be responsible, the coroner rules he was not. Shortly afterward, Grimes recruits another apprentice, John. Ellen, the only person in town who believes Grimes, later finds herself questioning Grimes when she finds that John has intense bruising on his neck. Word spreads quickly about the boy&#8217;s injuries and the people in town want an investigation. What follows is tragic on multiple levels.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Peter Grimes (Britten) - Metropolitan Opera - &quot;In dreams I&#039;ve built&quot; - Anthony Dean Griffey" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y3GLH-JQ_1M?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



<p>The title role was written by Benjamin Britten for his partner, Peter Pears. In the mid 60s, Jon Vickers’s performance has been considered definitive for quite some time.</p>



<p>John Doyle, best known for his minimalist productions of Stephen Sondheim musicals, made his Met Opera debut with this production of&nbsp;<em>Peter Grimes</em>. Griffey, having sung this opera a few times before this production, finally found his way into a lead role at the Met.</p>



<p>Anthony Tommasini, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/arts/music/01grim.html" target="_blank">writing in the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span></a>, found some unique qualities in how Griffey tackled the part: “Mr. Griffey, even though his voice has heft and carrying power, is essentially a lyric tenor. And it is disarming to hear the role sung with such vocal grace, even sweetness in places. Every word of his diction is clear. You sense Grimes’s dreamy side struggling to emerge. The moments of gentleness, though, make Mr. Griffey’s impulsive fits of hostility, his bursts of raw vocal power, seem even more threatening.”</p>



<p>Wednesday, September 2 – John Adams’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Nixon in China</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by John Adams; starring Kathleen Kim, Janis Kelly, Robert Brubaker, Russell Braun, James Maddalena and Richard Paul Fink. This Peter Sellars production is from the 2010-2011 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that streamed on April 1st.</p>



<p><em>Nixon in China</em> had its world premiere in Houston in 1987 in a production directed by Peter Sellars. Inspired by President Nixon&#8217;s trip to China in 1972, the opera features a libretto by Alice Goodman.</p>



<p>It was wholly unlikely that someone as anti-Communist as Nixon would make a trip to China. That trip forged new relations between the two countries and helped thaw the icy relationship the United States had with the then Soviet Union. Nixon and his wife Pat, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Henry Kissinger and Madame Mao all play prominent roles in the opera.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Nixon in China: &quot;I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung&quot; -- Kathleen Kim (Met Opera)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tOM3lUImsZA?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>This 2011 production, while a Met debut for <em>Nixon in China</em>, was not the New York debut of the opera. It was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 1987 following its premiere in Houston. Critical reaction upon its premiere was quite mixed. By the time this production (which founds Sellars revisiting his original work and that of a 2006 revival), <a aria-label="undefined (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/music/04nixon.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anthony Tommasini </a>in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> called it an &#8220;audacious and moving opera.&#8221;</p>



<p>Thursday, September 3 – Berg’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Lulu</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Lothar Koenigs; starring Marlis Petersen, Susan Graham, Daniel Brenna, Paul Groves, Johan Reuter and Franz Grundheber.&nbsp;This William Kentridge production is from the 2015-2016 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that streamed on June 2nd.</p>



<p>Alban Berg used two Frank Wedekind plays,&nbsp;<em>Erdgeist</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Die Büchse der Pandora</em>, as the inspiration for this opera. The plays were both about the title character, Lulu. The composer died before finishing the final act of the opera. It’s debut in 1937 in Zurich was of the incomplete opera. In 1979 Friedrich Cerha’s orchestration of the act 3 sketches were added to the work Berg had completed and that version is commonly performed.</p>



<p>Lulu (Petersen) is the engineer of her own destruction. She’s a mysterious young woman whose fall from grace is depicted over the course of three acts.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Lulu: Trailer" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/n5GoAnCaq9U?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>Kentridge received wide praise from audiences and critics alike. What drew many people to this particular production was that soprano Petersen, who had performed&nbsp;<em>Lulu</em>&nbsp;for nearly twenty years, retired the role after these performances at the Met.</p>



<p>Friday, September 4 and Saturday, September 5th – The Gershwins’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Porgy &amp; Bess</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by David Robertson; starring Angel Blue, Golda Schultz, Latonia Moore, Denyce Graves, Frederick Ballentine, Eric Owens, Alfred Walker and Donovan Singletary. This James Robinson production is from the 2019-2020 season.  </p>



<p>DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel,&nbsp;<em>Porgy</em>, was the inspiration for a play written by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward. That play served as the inspiration for this opera by George Gershwin with a libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.&nbsp;<em>Porgy and Bess</em>&nbsp;had its world premiere in 1935 at Boston’s Colonial Theatre.</p>



<p>In the opera, Porgy lives in Charleston’s slums. He’s disabled and spends his time begging.&nbsp;He is enamored with Bess and does everything he can to rescue her from an abusive lover, Crown and a far-too-seductive drug dealer, Sportin’ Life.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Porgy and Bess: “My man’s gone now”" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/c9xbkTFdonQ?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>If you saw the Broadway version which went by the name&nbsp;<em>The Gershwins&#8217; Porgy and Bess</em>, that was a truncated version and it was also modified to fit more contemporary times. The Metropolitan Opera production is the full opera as originally written by George Gershwin, Dubose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin.</p>



<p>Gershwin’s score features such beloved songs as&nbsp;<em>Summertime</em>,&nbsp;<em>I Loves You Porgy</em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>It Ain’t Necessarily So</em>.</p>



<p>Anthony Tommasini, writing for the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span><em>&nbsp;</em><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/arts/music/porgy-bess-met-opera-review.html" target="_blank">raved about the production&nbsp;</a>and, in particular, its two stars:</p>



<p>“As Porgy, the magnificent bass-baritone Eric Owens gives one of the finest performances of his distinguished career. His powerful voice, with its earthy textures and resonant sound, is ideal for the role. His sensitivity into the layered feelings and conflicts that drive his character made even the most familiar moments of the music seem startlingly fresh. And, as Bess, the sumptuously voiced soprano Angel Blue is radiant, capturing both the pride and fragility of the character.”</p>



<p>Sunday, September 6 – Thomas Adès’s&nbsp;<strong><em>The Tempest</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Thomas Adès; starring Audrey Luna, Isabel Leonard, Alek Shrader, Alan Oke and Simon Keenlyside. This Robert Lepage production is from the 2012-2013 season. This is an encore presentation of the production that streamed on May 12th.</p>



<p><em>The Tempest </em>by Thomas Adés had its world premiere in London in 2004. The libretto, by Meredith Oakes, is inspired by William Shakespeare&#8217;s play, but is not slave to it. There are differences.</p>



<p>The Duke of Milan, Prospero, has been exiled and with his daughter, Miranda, they have been set to sea. They ultimately land on an island filled with spirits. Amongst those spirits are Ariel and the monster, Caliban. Prospero, who has magical powers, causes a ship carrying the King of Naples and his son Ferdinand to wreck during a storm Prospero created. Relations both personal and professional collide leaving each of the participants changed and one of the characters alone in the island.</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="The Tempest: &quot;Their Brains Are Boiled&quot; -- Simon Keenlyside (Met Opera)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KD04rPdrUhg?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>Between its London premiere and its debut at the Met in 2012, there had already been four other productions of <em>The Tempest</em>. Few contemporary operas get that many productions in so short a period of time.</p>



<p><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/01/rich-and-strange" target="_blank">Alex Ross</a>, writing for&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">The New Yorker</span>, said of Adés’ opera (one of at least fifty operas based on Shakespeare’s play), “<em>The Tempest&nbsp;</em>is the opposite of a disappointment; it is a masterpiece of airy beauty and eerie power. As if on schedule, Adès, at thirty-two, is now the major artist that his earliest works promised he would become.”</p>



<p>That&#8217;s a wrap on Week 25 at the Met. Next week will feature all French operas. </p>



<p>Photo: Nina Stemme in the title role of Strauss&#8217;s <em>Elektra</em>. (Photo byMarty Sohl/Courtesy of the Met Opera)</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/08/31/week-25-at-the-met/">Week 25 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Week 15 at the Met</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2020/06/22/week-15-at-the-met/</link>
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		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2020 23:23:09 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Opera: Bravo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Streaming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alan Gilbert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alice Coote]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bertrand de Billy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Camille Saint-Saëns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cendrillon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charles Castronovo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian Van Horn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Darko Tresnjak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Die Zauberflöte]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Doctor Atomic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elīna Garanča]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Owens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaetano Donizetti]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gerald Finley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Giuseppe Verdi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Golda Schultz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[James Levine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Adams]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Copley]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joyce DiDonato]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jules Massenet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Julie Taymor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Battle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathleen Kim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kathryn Lewek]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[L'Elisir d'Amore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[La Traviata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laurent Pelly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lisette Oropesa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Luciano Pavarotti]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Manon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mark Elder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Markus Werba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maurizio Benini]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Metropolitan Opera]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Fabiano]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nicola Luisotti]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Penny Woolcock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[René Pape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Richard Paul Fink]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Roberto Alagna]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Samson et Dalila]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sasha Cooke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sonya Yoncheva]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Stephanie Blythe]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Glenn]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Hampson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Willy Decker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]]></category>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Met Opera Website<br />
<br />
June 22nd - June 28th</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/06/22/week-15-at-the-met/">Week 15 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[
<p>Week 15 at the Met begins this week the way it was previously scheduled to end Week 14 yesterday. A shift in last week&#8217;s scheduled forced the moving of Verdi&#8217;s <em>La Traviata</em> to start this week&#8217;s offerings.</p>



<p>From my perspective two productions stand out as highlights this week. The first is Tuesday&#8217;s streaming production of John Adams&#8217;s <em>Doctor Atomic</em>. The other is Sunday&#8217;s Julie Taymor directed production of Mozart&#8217;s <em>The Magic Flute</em>.</p>



<p>All productions are available by going to the Met Opera <a href="https://www.metopera.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="website (opens in a new tab)">website</a>. Each production is scheduled to become available at 7:30 PM EDT/4:30 PM PDT for a period of 23 hours. As we learned last week, schedules are subject to change.</p>



<p>Here is the line-up for Week 15 at the Met:</p>



<p>Monday, June 22 – Verdi’s&nbsp;<strong><em>La Traviata</em></strong> (this is the production originally scheduled to conclude Week 14 at the Met)</p>



<p>Conducted by Nicola Luisotti; starring Sonya Yoncheva, Michael Fabiano and Thomas Hampson.&nbsp;This is a revival of the 2011 Willy Decker production from the 2016-2017 season.</p>



<p><em>La Traviata</em> is one of the world&#8217;s most performed operas. Verdi collaborated with librettist Francesco Maria Piave on this opera inspired by a play (<em>La Dame aux camélias</em>) that was itself inspired by the novel <em>fils</em> by Alexandre Dumas. The opera had its world premiere in 1853 in Venice.</p>



<p>Like many good love stories, this one does not end well. Violetta (Yoncheva) is in love with Alfredo Germont (Fabiano). His father (Hampson) demands that she give up on her one-true love and that leads to devastating consequences.</p>



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<p>Zachary Woolfe <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/arts/music/traviata-review-sonya-yoncheva.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="raved (opens in a new tab)">raved</a> about Yoncheva in the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> after seeing this production.</p>



<p>&#8220;Ms. Yoncheva is now the one I’d seek out, no matter what she does. (And she does most everything: This “Traviata” comes in the wake of both Bellini’s mighty “Norma” and&nbsp;a Handel album.)</p>



<p>&#8220;A few years ago, Ms. Yoncheva had an essentially slender soprano focused enough to penetrate the vast Met. Now she fills the opera house more easily, with a tone that’s simultaneously softer and stronger, less angled and more rounded. New strength in the lower reaches of her voice anchored “Addio del passato,” the final-act lament of the doomed courtesan Violetta.&#8221;</p>



<p>This is the second production of <em>La Traviata</em> shown by the Metropolitan Opera during these streaming productions. The previous production, starring Natalie Dessay in  2012, was also a revival of the 2011 production.</p>



<p>Tuesday, June 23 – John Adams’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Doctor Atomic</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Alan Gilbert; starring Sasha Cooke, Thomas Glenn, Gerald Finley, Richard Paul Fink and Eric Owens. This Penny Woolcock production is from the 2008-2009 season.</p>



<p>This John Adams opera had its world premiere in 2005 in San Francisco and features a libretto by Peter Sellars. The main source of inspiration for the libretto was declassified government documents from individuals who worked at Los Alamos on the development of the atomic bomb.</p>



<p>Act one of <em>Doctor Atomic</em> takes place approximately one month before the first test. The second act takes place the morning of that test in 1945. At the center of it all is Robert J. Oppenheimer (Finley).</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Am I In Your Light..." width="696" height="522" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lf8Z_ciROM4?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>In his review for the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span>, <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Anthony Tomassini said (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/arts/music/15atom.html" target="_blank">Anthony Tomassini said</a> of Adams&#8217;s score: &#8220;This score continues to impress me as Mr. Adams’s most complex and masterly music. Whole stretches of the orchestral writing tremble with grainy colors, misty sonorities and textural density. Mr. Gilbert exposes the inner details and layered elements of the music: obsessive riffs, pungently dissonant cluster chords, elegiac solo instrumental lines that achingly drift atop nervous, jittery orchestral figurations.&#8221;</p>



<p>Wednesday, June 24 – Saint-Saëns’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Samson et Dalila</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Sir Mark Elder; starring Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna. This Darko Tresnjak production is from the 2018-2019 season.</p>



<p>The biblical tale of Samson and Delilah serves as the inspiration for Saint-Saëns&#8217;s opera. With a libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire, <em>Samson et Dalila</em> had its world premiere in Weimar in 1877. Franz Liszt, who previously served as the Music Director at Weimar, was instrumental in getting the opera its world premiere there.</p>



<p>When the governor of the Philistines, Abimelech, belittles the Hebrews into believing that they are helpless to his power and that of the temple of Dagon. Everyone believes him except Samson, who leads a rebellion against Abimelech and kills him. He meets Dalila who tells Samson that his accomplishments have wooed her and that she&#8217;s in love with him. Though others try to warn him about Dalila, he succumbs to her charms. But is she truly in love with Samson or does she have other ideas in mind?</p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Samson et Dalila: “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix”" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zxY3gYX6mVs?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>This production marked the Metropolitan Opera debut of director Tresnjak who is best known for his work on Broadway with such shows as <em>A Gentlemen&#8217;s Guide to Love and Murder</em> (for which he won a Tony Award) and the musical <em>Anastasia</em>. He directed LA Opera&#8217;s award-winning production of John Corigliano&#8217;s <em>The Ghosts of Versailles</em>.</p>



<p>Thursday, June 25 – Massenet’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Manon</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Maurizio Benini; starring Lisette Oropesa, Michael Fabiano and Artur Ruciński. This is a revival of the 2011-2012 Laurent Pelly production from the 2019-2020 season.</p>



<p>Massenet’s opera was composed in 1883 and had its world premiere in January of 1884 in Paris. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac&nbsp;and&nbsp;Philippe Gille. They based the opera on the 1731 Abbé Prévost novel,&nbsp;<em>L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut</em>.</p>



<p>A young woman from a small town has an intense desire to lavish herself with all the riches and pleasures life has to offer her. Sounds like a story that could be written today.</p>



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<p>The main attraction of any production of <em>Manon</em> is the performance of the soprano singing the title role. Oropesa certainly didn&#8217;t disappoint.</p>



<p><a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Joshua Barone (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/arts/music/manon-met-opera-review.html" target="_blank">Joshua Barone</a>, writing for the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> said of Oropesa&#8217;s performance, &#8220;With a voice by turns brightly crystalline and arrestingly powerful, she persuasively inhabits the role of this chameleon coquette. When she blows a kiss at a crowd of men in Laurent Pelly’s often stylized production, their heads whip backward, as if feeling a sudden gust of wind. The audience can’t avoid catching a bit of the gale, too.</p>



<p>&#8220;Ms. Oropesa’s performance, her first at the Met since winning its Beverly Sills Artist Award as well as the prestigious Richard Tucker Award this spring, is alone worth the price of admission.&#8221;</p>



<p>This is the second production of <em>Manon</em> programmed by the Metropolitan Opera. The 2011-2012 production, with Anna Netrebko as Manon, was streamed on May 24th.</p>



<p>Friday, June 26 – Donizetti’s&nbsp;<strong><em>L’Elisir d’Amore</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Kathleen Battle, Luciano Pavarotti, Juan Pons and Enzo Dara. This John Copley production is  from the 1991-1992 season.</p>



<p>Gaetano Donizetti&#8217;s opera had its world premiere in 1832 in Milan. The libretto, by Felice Romani, was based on Eugène Scribe&#8217;s libretto for&nbsp;Daniel Auber&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>Le philtre</em>. </p>



<p>Poor Nemorino doesn&#8217;t have anything to offer the love of his life, Adina. Sergeant Belcore is also in love with Adina, but she spurns his offer of marriage. Knowing that Adina has read the story of Tristan and Isolde, Nemorino asks Dr. Dulcamara for the same love potion that Tristan used to win over Isolde. Will this elixir of love truly works its magic?  </p>



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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Prendi, per me sei liebero (L&#039;elisir d&#039;amore) - Kathleen Battle 1991" width="696" height="522" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OvawSfGu6xA?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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<p>Edward Rothstein, in his review for the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> had mixed feelings about certain performances and elements of the production, but he <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="singled out Battle for praise (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/26/arts/review-opera-the-true-elixir-of-love-is-in-the-music-not-the-bottle.html" target="_blank">singled out Battle for praise</a>. &#8220;Ms. Battle can send a note out into space, sustain it there, playing subtly with its shape and dimension, then call it back into her throat and gently bring it to a close so one awaits the next moment of sensuous sound. When Adina realizes that she really does love this slightly clumsy peasant, Ms. Battle&#8217;s sighs of recognition soared. Donizetti might have preferred a lighter timbre, but he would certainly have recognized his elixir in use.&#8221;</p>



<p>Saturday, June 27 – Massenet’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Cendrillon</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by Bertrand de Billy; starring Kathleen Kim, Joyce DiDonato, Alice Coote and Stephanie Blythe. This Laurent Pelly production is from the 2017-2018.</p>



<p>Charles Perrault&#8217;s 1698 version of the <em>Cinderella</em> fairy tale serves as the inspiration for Massenet&#8217;s opera. Henry Caïn wrote the libretto. The world premiere of <em>Cendrillon</em> took place in 1899 in Paris.</p>



<p>You may recall that <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="The Royal Opera (opens in a new tab)" href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/05/22/culture-best-bets-at-home-may-22nd-may-25th/" target="_blank">The Royal Opera</a> made its production of <em>Cendrillon</em> available for streaming in late may. This is the same production with Joyce DiDonato and Alice Coote playing the roles of &#8220;Cendrillon&#8221; and &#8220;Prince Charming.&#8221; </p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The MET: Live in HD 2018 - Excerpt from Cendrillon (Cinderella)" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RgT07qTmP1E?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



<p>Zachary Woolfe, in his <span style="text-decoration: underline;">New York Times</span> review praised DiDonato for the child-like wonder she brings to the role. &#8220;Ms. DiDonato does sincerity better than anyone since Ms. von Stade. At 49, she can still step on stage and, with modest gestures and mellow sound, persuade you she’s a put-upon girl. She experiences the story with an open face and endearing ingenuousness, a sense of wonder that never turns saccharine. In soft-grained passages, she is often simply lovely.&#8221;</p>



<p>Sunday, June 28 – Mozart’s&nbsp;<strong><em>Die Zauberflöte</em></strong></p>



<p>Conducted by James Levine; starring Golda Schultz, Kathryn Lewek, Charles Castronovo, Markus Werba, Christian Van Horn and René Pape. This revival of the 2004 Julie Taymor production is from the 2017-2018 season.</p>



<p>Mozart&#8217;s opera premiered in September 1791 in Vienna a mere two months before the composer died. It features a libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder.</p>



<p>Prince Tamino is asked by the Queen of the Night to free her daughter Pamina from Sarastro. Tamino, however, is impressed with Sarastro and the way his community lives in the world and wants to be a part of it. Both alone and together Tamino and Pamina endure multiple tests. If they succeed, what will happen to them? To the Queen of the Night?</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Die Zauberflöte: “Wie stark ist nicht dein Zauberton”" width="696" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCjVaJ3Mq0o?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div></figure>



<p>Anyone who has seen Taymor&#8217;s work for such shows as <em>Juan Darién</em> and <em>The Lion King</em> knows that she regularly employs puppets and wildly inventive staging. When <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Alex Ross (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/10/julie_taymors_e.html" target="_blank">Alex Ross</a>, writing for <em>The New Yorker</em> about the original 2004 production said, &#8220;The Met stage has never been so alive with movement, so charged with color, so brilliant to the eye. The outward effect is of a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together. Behind the surface lies a melancholy sense that history has never permitted such a synthesis—that Mozart’s theme of love and power united is nothing more than a fever dream. But Taymor allows the Enlightenment fantasy to play out to the end.&#8221;</p>



<p>That&#8217;s the complete line-up for Week 15 at the Met. Enjoy your operas and have a great week!</p>



<p>Photo: Markus Werba as Papageno in Mozart&#8217;s <em>Die Zauberflöte</em>. (Photo by Richard Termine/Courtesy of Metropolitan Opera)<br></p>



<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2020/06/22/week-15-at-the-met/">Week 15 at the Met</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>The LA Philharmonic Celebrates Stravinsky</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2019/04/09/the-la-philharmonic-celebrates-stravinsky/</link>
					<comments>https://culturalattache.co/2019/04/09/the-la-philharmonic-celebrates-stravinsky/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:48:43 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Classical: Metronome]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[What's Hot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Esa-Pekka Salonen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hadestown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Igor Stravinsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kate Burton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[LA Philharmonic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Walt Disney Concert Hall]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://culturalattache.co/?p=5022</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Walt Disney Concert Hall<br />
<br />
April 9th - April 20th</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2019/04/09/the-la-philharmonic-celebrates-stravinsky/">The LA Philharmonic Celebrates Stravinsky</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Igor Stravinsky famously celebrated the second season of the year with&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>The Rite of Spring</em>. So it is only appropriate that this spring, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be celebrating the Russian composer with a series of concerts that start this week and run through April 20th.</p>
<p><figure id="attachment_5023" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5023" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-5023" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-300x169.jpg" alt="The LA Philharmonic celebrates the work of Igor Stravinsky" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Igor-Stravinsky.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-5023" class="wp-caption-text">Russian Composer Igor Stravinsky</figcaption></figure></p>
<p>First up is&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>All Stravinsky</em> on Tuesday, <a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/287/2019-04-09/all-stravinsky/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 9th</a>. This concert features 18 members of the LA Phil under the direction of Stephen Mulligan. The program includes&Acirc;&nbsp;<span class="event-description__text-label no-modal-link"><em>Histoire du soldat</em> for violin, clarinet, and piano,&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Octet for Winds,</em></span><span class="event-description__text-label no-modal-link"><em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<span class="event-description__text-label value">Suite italienne for violin and cello&Acirc;&nbsp;</span></em><span class="event-description__text-label value">and&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>The Soldier&#8217;s Tale</em>. The narrator for the latter piece is actress Kate Burton.</span></span></p>
<p>Former LA Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who has passionately and persuasively lead the orchestra in performances of Stravinsky&#8217;s music, will return for the rest of the Stravinsky programs.</p>
<p>On <a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/189/2019-04-12/salonens-rite-of-spring/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 12th and 13th</a> Salonen leads a program that includes the composer&#8217;s little-known&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Funeral Song</em>, written for his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. That is followed by&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Agon</em> and then&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>The Rite of Spring</em>.</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SKBzztc44DU" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/247/2019-04-14/salonens-stravinsky-faith/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 14th</a> finds Salonen with the LA Phil and the LA Master Chorale, performing a series of sacred works written by the composer. These include&Acirc;&nbsp;<span class="event-description__text-label value"><em>Requiem Canticles,</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Introitus</em> <em>(TS Eliot in Memoriam),</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>In memoriam Dylan Thomas,</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Mass,</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Elegy for JFK,</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Chorale Variations on &acirc;&#128;&#156;Vom Himmel hoch, da komm&acirc;&#128;&#153; ich</em> <em>her&acirc;&#128;&#157;</em>&Acirc;&nbsp;and&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Cantata.</em></span></p>
<p><figure id="attachment_5040" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5040" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-5040" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-300x169.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-768x432.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-696x392.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-1068x601.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega-747x420.jpg 747w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Salonen-Photo-by-Benjamin-Ealovega.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-5040" class="wp-caption-text">Esa-Pekka Salonen (Photo by Benjamin Ealovega)</figcaption></figure></p>
<p><a href="https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/181/2019-04-18/salonens-stravinsky-myths/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">April 18th, 19th and 20th</a> will showcase two ballet scores by Stravinsky:&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Orpheus</em> and&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Persephone</em>. (Seems to be a popular pairing as there is a new musical officially opening April 17th on Broadway called <a href="https://www.hadestown.com/#home" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Hadestown</em></a> that combines those two myths. More on that next week.) These performances will be directed by Peter Sellars.</p>
<p>Salonen will also lead the LA Philharmonic in programs of the works of Respighi and Mozart in late April and early May. He will assume the role of Music Director for the San Francisco Symphony in September 2020.</p>
<p>For tickets and details of each concert, click on the dates of each description above.</p>
<p>Main photo by Mika Ranta/All Salonen images courtesy of the LA Philharmonic</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2019/04/09/the-la-philharmonic-celebrates-stravinsky/">The LA Philharmonic Celebrates Stravinsky</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>Conductor Jenny Wong&#8217;s Passion for Music</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2019/03/12/conductor-jenny-wongs-passion-for-music/</link>
					<comments>https://culturalattache.co/2019/03/12/conductor-jenny-wongs-passion-for-music/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Mar 2019 22:30:09 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Classical: Metronome]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dale Trumbore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Duruflé's Requiem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[How to Go On]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jenny Wong]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lagrime di San Pietro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Los Angeles Master Chorale]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maurice Duruflé]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Simon Rattle]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://culturalattache.co/?p=4839</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>"A work like Duruflé's Requiem, which has been performed so many times, how does that sound different now that we do it in 2019."</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2019/03/12/conductor-jenny-wongs-passion-for-music/">Conductor Jenny Wong&#8217;s Passion for Music</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This may be an unusual way to celebrate St. Patrick&#8217;s Day, but on <a href="https://lamasterchorale.org/durufle-requiem" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Sunday</a> the Los Angeles Master Chorale will be performing Maurice Duruflé&#8217;s <em>Requiem</em> and Dale Trumbore&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>How to Go On</em> at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Two emotional works that explore love and loss. Leading the Master Chorale for this concert is Associate Conductor Jenny Wong.</p>
<p><figure id="attachment_4841" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4841" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-4841" src="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-300x200.jpg" alt="Jenny Wong leads the LA Master Chorale this Sunday" width="300" height="200" srcset="https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-300x200.jpg 300w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-768x512.jpg 768w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-696x464.jpg 696w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-1068x712.jpg 1068w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong-630x420.jpg 630w, https://culturalattache.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jenny-Wong.jpg 1800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-4841" class="wp-caption-text">Conductor Jenny Wong (Photo by Arnaud Pyvka)</figcaption></figure></p>
<p>Wong was named Associate Conductor for the Chorale in 2017. Her role has recently found her traveling with the group to perform&nbsp;<em>Lagrime di San Pietro</em>. I recently spoke by phone with her about Duruflé&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>Requiem&nbsp;</em>and her approach to it, the thematic similarities it shares with&nbsp;<em>Lagrime</em> and how she personally approaches work with religious influences.</p>
<p>Conductor Simon Rattle said that &#8220;conducting was hard and that the more you know, the harder it gets.&#8221; Can you explain that observation and how does it apply to you and the work you do with LA Master Chorale?</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" src="//player.ooyala.com/static/v4/stable/4.31.17/skin-plugin/iframe.html?ec=9hMjZxYzE6BoI0EQaQXwUqVnyPM5nVMr&amp;pbid=ab76c1ef73e1464c9aaacc8b369f967e&amp;pcode=lybG4xOtZ5VVs97XtFOmFWfHkY5g" width="640" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>That&#8217;s a very interesting question. I think definitely for conductors, unlike the more you study about a certain composer, but the more you really dig into the score, more things begin to reveal themselves to you. It continues to opens doors into a&nbsp;universe that is, fortunately for us, quite endless.</strong></p>
<p><strong>A work like Duruflé&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>Requiem</em>, which has been performed so many times, how does that sound different now that we do it in 2019? Does that also inform how we perform it and how does it make a difference from our last performance which was 14 years ago?</strong></p>
<p>When you prepare for a concert, how much research do you do into its creation and the composer&#8217;s intent before relying exclusively on the score?</p>
<p><strong>I like to make, even some wrong decisions, just based on what is in the score first and find out how I connect to the music and how certain text and harmony surfaces and emerges before I figure out how the composer did it or other people have performed it. Of course, you find out you maybe make decisions not always in line&nbsp;with what you later find out something the composer might have said. You have to figure out if you still believe in it for this particular setting and performance and to see if&nbsp;that reason still stands. The historical context is very important and why Duruflé wrote this music and employed these kind of idioms that are central to the work. But personally I like to find how it speaks to me.</strong></p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KQC-naoKm7w" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>What did his&nbsp;<em>Requiem</em> reveal to you in preparation for these concerts that you hadn&#8217;t considered or realized before?</p>
<p><strong>The first time I sang it I was still an undergrad. I had no&nbsp;understanding of chants and really very little appreciation for this kind of work, I&#8217;m ashamed to say. Now that I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time with the score, you really find that what&#8217;s so special to me about Duruflé&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>Requiem</em> is that the statements of the deepest and most profound joy and faith are actually very quiet. All he wanted to do was allow this incredible text, text that has been with us for thousands of&nbsp;years, to just&nbsp;shine. It shows his own certainty of passing through this life and into paradise. It&#8217;s an overarching sense of certainty and comfort which is something I never understood ten&nbsp;years ago.</strong></p>
<p>You&#8217;ve been touring with the LA Master Chorale their production of&nbsp;<a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/10/19/like-sing-lagrime-di-san-pietro/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em>Lagrime di San Pietro</em></a>. Why do you think this piece has become so important for both the Chorale and for audiences around the world?</p>
<p><strong>I have to say a huge part is <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/03/15/director-peter-sellars-revisits-insanely-hard-work/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Peter Sellars</a> and the way he&#8217;s taken this sacred text and opened up universes of what it could mean to us, to people coming in to listen to the work. It&#8217;s become very clear they feel something unlike most performances they&#8217;ve been to. We very&nbsp;seldom talk about shame as individuals. We hide it. In music it is not simple to explain something as deep, loud, destructive and&nbsp;ambitious and hard to pinpoint what&nbsp;</strong><b>shame feels like. Yet with the text, and the way Peter has set it, it really begs us to cope as individuals. Peter encourages us to consider what it means to us as a community. How have we found ourselves as a community watching the news day after day, week after&nbsp;week, following things that break our heart.</b></p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tTO8n8dyKqY" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>When Mark Swed of the&nbsp;<span style="text-decoration: underline;">Los Angeles Times</span><em>&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-bach-christmas-review-20171212-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reviewed</a> the LA Master Chorale December 2017 concert you conducted he said, &#8220;You came down on the side of religion&#8230;with God at the top, Bach in the middle and the rest of us below.&#8221; How much does religion inform your approach to music with obvious religious influences?</p>
<p><strong>That&#8217;s a difficult question to answer. I&#8217;m a religious person. I believe in God. I can see for sure that it does add a dimension to how I absorb this music and how I share it with our&nbsp;performances and with audiences. For me it&#8217;s less a performance than a sharing of what I believe in &#8211; which is God, but it is also love and hope and peace. </strong></p>
<p><strong>At the same time, I never want people who are not religious to feel&nbsp;that they&nbsp;have to feel one way or the other coming into a performance of a religious work. &nbsp;We&#8217;re having this incredibly vulnerable and sacred, and I say the word sacred without the pretense of religiosity, this in a space that we want to set aside for everyone to come and participate. And the hope that it creates the freedom to feel what they feel and heal the way they need to be healed. And to express comfort or anger or confusion or chaos, to be able to feel those things. These are what make us the same which is such a deeply comforting thing.</strong></p>
<p>Main Photo courtesy of JennyWong-Conductor. com</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2019/03/12/conductor-jenny-wongs-passion-for-music/">Conductor Jenny Wong&#8217;s Passion for Music</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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		<title>What It&#8217;s Like to Sing &#8220;Lagrime di San Pietro&#8221;</title>
		<link>https://culturalattache.co/2018/10/19/like-sing-lagrime-di-san-pietro/</link>
					<comments>https://culturalattache.co/2018/10/19/like-sing-lagrime-di-san-pietro/#respond</comments>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Byrd]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Oct 2018 15:10:03 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Classical: Metronome]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[LA Master Chorale]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lagrime di San Pietro]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Luc Kleiner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Orlando di Lasso]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peter Sellars]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://culturalattache.co/?p=3887</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>"Sometimes you need to weep for 30 minutes after a performance."</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/10/19/like-sing-lagrime-di-san-pietro/">What It&#8217;s Like to Sing &#8220;Lagrime di San Pietro&#8221;</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
]]></description>
										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Last March we spoke with director <a href="http://culturalattache.co/2018/03/15/director-peter-sellars-revisits-insanely-hard-work/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Peter Sellars</a> who was at the helm of LA Master Chorale&#8217;s performance of Orlando di Lasso&#8217;s<em>&Acirc;&nbsp;</em><em>Lagrime di San Pietro</em>. It is a profoundly moving work and those who had a chance to see it at Walt Disney Concert Hall experienced an amazing performance of a rarely heard work. But fret not those who didn&#8217;t get a chance to experience LAMC&#8217;s brilliant production. There are <a href="http://thewallis.org/chorale" target="_blank" rel="noopener">two performances</a> this weekend at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. That venue&#8217;s relative intimacy, particularly when compared to WDCH, assures these will be two powerful performances.</p>
<p><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/196752931" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>I recently spoke with baritone Luc Kleiner (who ironically is singing a tenor part in&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Lagrime</em>) about what it&#8217;s been like to perform this extraordinary difficult composition as he and the LA Master Chorale have launched a tour that has taken them to Australia, Mexico and back in LA for these two performances.</p>
<p>What is it about this piece that speaks to you personally?</p>
<p><strong>There&#8217;s sort of this illusion of self in it and sort of this flipped script of looking at someone else realizing your own fault. You are blaming them and then you realize you are the one delivering the blows, the injury. This art slows down time and we&#8217;re experiencing these super painful emotions of remorse and regret and the pain of old age. What happens when you slow down anxiety and&Acirc;&nbsp;check it out &#8211; that makes the piece super important.</strong></p>
<p>Have you found yourself relating to the story in ways that surprise you?</p>
<p><strong>There are&Acirc;&nbsp;countless moments where I think about a&Acirc;&nbsp;friend I&#8217;ve lost or mentor or someone you dedicate the piece to. There are three people who I think of every time and I&#8217;ve&Acirc;&nbsp;written their names into my score.&Acirc;&nbsp;There&#8217;s a part where we lay down and die. We climb into our graves and kill the soul. Each time we do that, and then we come out of our graves, we take a moment and breathe and say a prayer or dedication. That&#8217;s when I honor my friends.</strong></p>
<p>Peter Sellars described this work as &#8220;insanely hard.&#8221; How hard is it apart from the way it is being performed?</p>
<p><strong>I think it is just&Acirc;&nbsp;technics and it&#8217;s kind of&Acirc;&nbsp;what we all have been trained to do. Which is sing these long phrases &#8211; elongate&Acirc;&nbsp;speech &#8211; and do that artistic goal of slowing down time. That translates technically into taking a huge breath and&Acirc;&nbsp;slowly expiring it through some vibrating vocal chords&Acirc;&nbsp;and making&Acirc;&nbsp;this beautiful Renaissance polyphony.</strong></p>
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<p>How much harder does it become because of the&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>way</em> you are performing it with choreographed movement?</p>
<p><strong>What we&#8217;re doing with the piece is adding two more&Acirc;&nbsp;dimensions which are emotion and movement and that&#8217;s a super hard part. But the emotional layer, that is intrinsic to the text. It&#8217;s all there. Peter doesn&#8217;t make anything up. If you watch the movement and the text and even reflect back on it later, it&#8217;s definitely within the work.&Acirc;&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>Given the emotional component of this story, what is it like for the singers after the performance?</p>
<p><strong>Sometimes you need to weep for 30 minutes after a performance &#8211; which definitely&Acirc;&nbsp;happened on tour. &Acirc;&nbsp;I think it could b</strong><strong>e this inter-penetration of your life into the&Acirc;&nbsp;performance of the work and the work into your memory and your life itself. There&#8217;s this sort of omni-directional truth or&Acirc;&nbsp;sort of synthesis of art and reality.&Acirc;&nbsp;</strong></p>
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<p>Sellers also told me that &#8220;the longer you live with the music, the more you see and hear in it and understand it.&#8221; What do you understand now about&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Lagrime</em> that you didn&#8217;t understand when you first performed it?</p>
<p><strong>And in the future because there are so many upcoming performances. I&Acirc;&nbsp;definitely had moments of&Acirc;&nbsp;doubt&Acirc;&nbsp;and a lapse of my faith in the piece. They are these real emotional experiences you are going through in performing it. A fear of mine was that it might be more shallow as we&Acirc;&nbsp;continue to perform the piece. We might get a little lazy or&Acirc;&nbsp;</strong><b>something. One of my fellow singers restored my faith by saying &#8220;I think every&Acirc;&nbsp;performance is going to get&Acirc;&nbsp;deeper and we will find unimaginable depths as we perform it.&#8221;&Acirc;&nbsp;</b></p>
<p><b></b>You are in the early stages of the tour having been to Australia and Mexico so far. Are you finding any common response to&Acirc;&nbsp;<em>Lagrime&Acirc;&nbsp;</em>and the way the LA Master Chorale is performing it?</p>
<p><strong>Each is super unique, but also they are really enthusiastic, really charged up and I think super grateful and so are we. Which is the awesome part. When we come&Acirc;&nbsp;to the front of the stage&Acirc;&nbsp;</strong>[at the end of the performance]&Acirc;&nbsp;<strong>and just beam, we get an audience that beams back and we all accomplished something. The people who come are totally in it. They are the Greek chorus. They know the truth of it and so by the end it&#8217;s totally a commonality between performers and audience. We all suffered and we were all healed.</strong></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://culturalattache.co/2018/10/19/like-sing-lagrime-di-san-pietro/">What It&#8217;s Like to Sing &#8220;Lagrime di San Pietro&#8221;</a> appeared first on <a href="https://culturalattache.co">Cultural Attaché</a>.</p>
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