Category Archives: Opera

New Music Bake Sale: Music, Conversation, Beer and, yes, actual baked goods!

Arturo en el Barco's Bake Sale table featured cupcakes and particularly tasty flan de queso. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

The 2nd Annual New Music Bake Sale took over the decrepitly beautiful Irondale Center’s space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, on Saturday, Sept. 25 for more than six hours.

The concept was pretty simple: Bring together a bunch of people who make new music — performers, producers, record companies and the like — in a place where they can make music, talk about music, drink beer and sell sweet and savory baked goods to raise money for their efforts.

Kathleen Supové at her Bake Sale table.

We don’t know how successful the financial part of the evening was, but the place was constantly full of people and activity throughout the event. We sampled the food, beer and music and found it excellent — especially the Sixpoint Sweet Action!

Many of our favorite New Music folks were there throughout the evening, including, but hardly limited to, Todd Reynolds, Matt Marks, Mellissa Hughes, Courtney Orlando, Ken Thomson, Jessica Schmitz, Ted Hearne, David T. Little, Steven Swartz, Glenn Cornett, Franz Nicolay, Caleb Burhans, Kathleen Supové and Oscar Bettison.

Todd Reynolds and Ken Thomson perform Ken's "Storm Drain."

We can hardly wait for next year’s event.

But enough words. Let’s get to the images. Click through to the jump for more photos. Continue reading

New life for Matt Marks’ The Little Death

Composer Matt Marks and soprano Mellissa Hughes are Boy and Girl in the Incubator Arts Project presentation of The Little Death: Vol. 1 on Thursday, July 8. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Something magical happened to Matt Marks‘ post-Christian nihilist pop opera The Little Death: Vol. 1, when it was preparing for its current staging at Incubator Arts Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. What had been a great collection of smart, sometimes silly, pop songs in the guise of a gently confusing pop opera has evolved into a smartly staged, well focused piece of musical theater.

The stars of the show sell lemonade and cookies before the performance.

While Marks’ excellent music provided the building blocks, director Rafael Gallegos has built a solid foundation and has cemented the building block  together to form an elegant theatrical environment for the Marks’ eerie love story.

A little less wholesome.

Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? was blown away (pun intended) by Thursday night’s premiere performance of the staged version. That’s quite a contrast to my reaction to the semi-staged version presented by Marks’ label, New Amsterdam Records, in March. Although I loved the sample- and hymn-heavy music, the overall feel of the piece left me a bit uneasy. It was hard to discern what Marks was trying to do. Was he making fun of Christianity or exploring the quirks and limitations of the faith context in which he was raised? Songs like “I Like Stuff,” are the types of catchy tunes that every producer wants in a musical — ones that the audience can easily hum on the way out of the theater. The lyrics are no less catchy, but that where things became a bit unsettling — when the singers compare liking hamsters and ice cream and rainbows to liking Jesus.

The piece uses recognizable samples and large chunks of Christian hymnody as the basis for some of its songs that loosely tell the story of a blossoming love affair between Boy (Marks) and Girl (soprano Mellissa Hughes), backed up by a four-member choir. Another thing that left me feeling uneasy in that early viewing was the fact that the story starts with Boy shooting Girl before time-traveling back to the start of their relationship. Marks describes Vol. 1 as “the first half of our story.”

The last temptation of Christ?

Continue reading

Signal plays Philip Glass

Brad Lubman conducts Signal with Michael Riesman. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Signal, the stunning young contemporary chamber ensemble, did a great job performing some of the works of Philip Glass at Manhattan’s (Le) Poisson Rouge on Sunday evening. They gave the New York premiere of Glassworks, the 1981 suite that in a recorded version became ubiquitous to the point of absurdity in its day as it seemed to be on everyone’s cassette Walkman during that time. Other works performed included Music in Similar Motion and selections from the opera La Belle et la Bête and Anima Mundi.

Michael Riesman, longtime keyboardist and musical director for the Philip Glass Ensemble joined Signal for Sunday’s two shows, and made new arrangements of some of the works.

Sadly, Glass himself did not show up for the early show, which many fans hoped would happen. But the heavy-lidded senior statesmen of minimalism did make it to the second set, to the apparent delight of that audience.

More photos after the jump. Continue reading

Missy Mazzoli’s making an uproar

Composer and performer Missy Mazzoli. (Photo by Stephen Taylor)

Composer Missy Mazzoli‘s having a great year — and it’s only February. She’s been working hard to get her music heard, and it’s really coming together.

Tomorrow night and Sunday, her chamber opera Song from the Uproar is being performed by students from the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program, run by the estimable soprano Dawn Upshaw. It’s part of an opera triple bill, which also includes Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera, a world premiere by David T. Little, and L’Enfant et les sortilèges by Maurice Ravel  in the amazing Sosnoff Theater on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson. For more info about those shows and to buy tickets, priced from $20-$75, click here. If you’re willing to take a randomly assigned seat, you can pay just $10 by clicking here and using the password “triplebill.”

The lyrical piece examines the life of 19th Century Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, with text inspired by and responding to her journals, which Missy set to music for soprano and small ensemble, against a backdrop of film by Stephen Taylor. A 40-minute version of the piece presented last May at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn was enchanting and provocative entertainment.

Missy’s opera will be heard again in New York City in the spring, when it’s presented as part of New York City Opera’s Vox showcase of new operas. Although Vox hasn’t formally announced its season yet, Time Out New York‘s Olivia Giovetti reveals in an interview with Missy that it’ll be held April 30 and May 1 this year. Although the venue has not been announced, Vox has been presented for the past four years at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.

Missy Mazzoli and her quintet Victoire.

Then, in her rock-club guise as leader of the quintet Victoire, Missy will be performing in March and April with American Composers Orchestra.

The first show is at 4 pm Sunday, March 21, at Dweck Center at the Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.  Admission is free. Call (718) 230-2100 or click on www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org for more information.

The second show (on a bill also featuring Arp & Anthony Moore) is presented as part of the Wordless Music Series at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, April 7 at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan.  Tickets are  $15. Call (212) 505-FISH or click here.

Radical opera defies definition

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It seems to me that the only thing The New Yorker Festival’s Radical Opera panel settled last Sunday afternoon at City Winery was that nobody’s quite sure exactly what radical opera really is.

The 90 minute discussion featured director Peter Sellars — who’s so deeply involved with John Adams‘ operas that he’s not limited to directing in the most conventional sense. He helped create the libretto for Doctor Atomic — along with performer-composers Nico Muhly, Rufus Wainwright, and Lisa Bielawa. Nico and Lisa are closely associated with Philip Glass, one of the world’s leading composers of opera, while Rufus, who’s primarily a pop musician, has no prior formal connection to the opera world.

I was hoping that The New Yorkers’ brilliant music writer, Alex Ross, would encourage some spirited debate. (Secretly, I was hoping for some bitch-slapping, if not actual fisticuffs.) Alas, that was not to be. It turned into a very un-radical love-fest and discussion of upcoming projects. I had a livelier discussion with the young composer at my table than anything I heard coming from the stage that afternoon. Continue reading

Directors Sher and Chéreau talk talk about what they know

Bartlett Sher rehearses at the Met in 2006.

Bartlett Sher rehearses at the Met in 2006.

Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb has enlisted some of the world’s greatest directors to shake up Met productions and make them more theatrical.

Patrice Chéreau

Patrice Chéreau

Two of them,  Bartlett Sher (director of the hit revival of South Pacific) and Patrice Chéreau, will join Gelb for a conversation on opera, theater, and the art of directing at the New York Public Library tomorrow evening. Both directors have new productions on the schedule at the Met this season. The talk is called Cognitive Theater.

The talk starts at 7 pm in the South Court Auditorium at the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets. Tickets $25, available online.

Discuss: Twitter at the opera?

OperaHouse

Nashville Opera is encouraging audience members to use Twitter to comment on its performances of Tosca tomorrow and Saturday, and promises to project the Tweets in the lobby of the Tennessee Performing Arts Center’s Andrew Jackson Hall during the show’s two intermissions. (Click here for a full report.)

“Social networking has become an integral part of Nashville Opera’s marketing efforts,” says Carol Penterman, the company’s executive director. “The use of Twitter and Facebook has been the ticket sales catalyst for this production, and we see this unique program of projecting ‘tweets’ in the lobby as a natural extension of our networking strategy.”

The marketing strategy makes sense. Whether you think facebook and Twitter are useful tools or huge time-wasters, there’s no denying their popularity and impact on our culture. Social networks help build buzz about shows, boost sales and clue people in on things the might not have even noticed in the arts pages of the local paper or in other old media.

But it seems to me that this is another example of an arts presenter encouraging its audience to not pay attention to the very thing they’ve come to see. The only way there will be Tweets to project at the intermissions would be if patrons are Twittering during the performance.

Does that make sense? Won’t it be a distraction? I’m a big fan of Twitter and facebook. But I find it terribly distracting to sit in a darkened theater and see audience members’ faces glowing with the reflection of their cell phone and BlackBerry screens as they text or Tweet or send facebook messages. And the clicking of the tiny keys adds another dimension to the distraction.

What do you think about this development? Please weigh in!

Buying time at New York City Opera

City Opera revives the Mark Lamos production of Chabrier's comic opera L'Etoile.

City Opera revives the Mark Lamos production of Chabrier's comic opera L'Etoile.

I know, I know. New York City Opera announced its comeback season long ago — on April Fools Day.

But Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? didn’t exist at that time — although the name and the idea had been kicking around for a year. So please forgive me for jumping into the pool a bit late.

I was reminded that WYMMWIG? hadn’t weighed in on the NYCO when the subscription notice arrived in my mailbox yesterday. I had been looking forward to its return after a year without City Opera — the only opera company to which I’ve ever subscribed.

It was a big envelope. Black and white logo, very frugal. That seemed good. And the envelope seemed thin. A sign, it seemed, of a sensible frugality in these trying economic times. Continue reading