Composers Terence Blanchard, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Jack Perla will each premiere new works beginning in the 2013 season
October 29, 2012 –
Timothy O’Leary, General Director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis,
today announced a three-year cycle of world premiere operas by American
composers, beginning with the company’s 2013 festival season in May.
The new operas are
Champion by Terence Blanchard with libretto by Michael Cristofer (2013),
Twenty-Seven by Ricky Ian Gordon with libretto by Michael Korie (2014), and
Shalimar the Clown
by Jack Perla, based on the novel by Salman Rushdie (2015). The cycle
is underwritten in part by a $1 million challenge grant from The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation.
Casting for the cycle includes two of the world’s most acclaimed mezzo-sopranos, Denyce Graves in
Champion and Stephanie Blythe in
Twenty-Seven.
Champion is a co-commission with Jazz St. Louis. Casting and collaborators for
Shalimar the Clown will be announced at a later date.
“Opera
has lately entered an exuberant era of new works,” said Mr. O’Leary,
“and Opera Theatre is excited to build on a 37-year tradition of
adventurous programming. We call this cycle
New Works, Bold Voices recognizing these tremendous composers, librettists, and singers, as well as the courageous characters they will depict.”
Mr.
O’Leary continued, “Music Director Stephen Lord, Artistic Director
James Robinson, and I consider it central to Opera Theatre’s mission to
present American works, telling compelling stories of the modern era,
exploring our common humanity through the special power of music and
theatre. I am deeply grateful to Opera Theatre’s audience and generous
supporters who make this work possible.”
Champion is the
first opera for Mr. Blanchard and Mr. Cristofer. Mr. Blanchard is a
five-time Grammy Award-winning jazz, film, and theatrical composer. Mr.
Cristofer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, as well as an
award-winning filmmaker and actor. Mr. Gordon and Mr. Korie have
collaborated on operas before, including their acclaimed
The Grapes of Wrath
which was premiered at the Minnesota Opera and has been performed in
concert at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Perla is known for his wide-ranging
compositional style including symphonic, choral, and chamber music, as
well as work in multiple jazz idioms. His one-act opera
Courtside was presented by the Houston Grand Opera as part of its
Song of Houston project for HGOco, and his chamber opera
Love/Hate has been performed in a co-production by the Opera Center of San Francisco Opera and ODC Theater.
At
the completion of this cycle in 2015, Opera Theatre will mark its 40th
anniversary season having produced 25 world premieres and 24 American
premieres. England’s
Opera magazine recently described Opera
Theatre as “one of the country’s most enterprising, off-centre
festivals. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other major opera
festival on either side of the Atlantic that has so devoted itself to
new work.” Recent successes with works by composers John Adams, John
Corigliano, Peter Ash, and Unsuk Chin have helped expand Opera Theatre’s
audience, which is drawn from nearly 50 states and about a dozen
foreign countries in addition to every zip code in the St. Louis
metropolitan area.
CHAMPION (2013)
An opera in jazz
Music by Terence Blanchard
Libretto by Michael Cristofer
June 15, 19, 21, 25, 27, 30, 2013
The Story
Emile
Griffith was a three-time world welterweight champion and twice a world
middleweight champion, fighting from the late 1950s into the 1970s.
However, one of his greatest professional triumphs – winning back the
title from Benny “The Kid” Paret in 1962 – was also his greatest
personal tragedy. The seventeen punches he landed on Paret in seven
seconds resulted in not only a knockout, but also a coma from which
Paret would never recover. Paret would die ten days later. For
Griffith, who had never wanted to be a boxer, the impact of the fight
was devastating, and his career soon went downhill.
Before
that life-changing televised fight, in a room full of press and
officials, Paret had mocked Griffith with a derogatory term for
homosexual. Years later, Griffith’s sexuality was revealed after he was
nearly killed by a gang outside a gay bar in New York. “I kill a man,”
Griffith was quoted to have said, “and most people understand and
forgive me. I love a man, and to so many people this is an unforgiveable
sin.” Much later in his life, beginning to suffer from dementia,
Griffith met the son of his opponent, Benny Jr., who was two years old
at the time of the match, and who forgave the aging champion. In an
inspiring, moving, and painful journey of self-discovery,
Champion presents audiences with a contemporary tragic hero – a story of strength, courage, rage, regret, and compassion.
About Terence Blanchard
Renowned
for his work as a composer of hauntingly beautiful jazz pieces for
small ensembles, symphonic settings, film, and stage, Terence Blanchard
has received five Grammy Awards, including the 2007 Large Ensemble
Grammy for “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).” Most
recently for film, he wrote the score to Lucasfilm’s
Red Tails,
which chronicled the story of the Tuskegee pilots and starred Cuba
Gooding, Jr. His music was also recently represented on Broadway with
the score to Emily Mann’s new production of
A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Blair Underwood.
Champion is Mr. Blanchard’s first opera.
About Michael Cristofer
For playwright, filmmaker, and actor Michael Cristofer, the
Champion libretto is also a first. In 1977, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for
The Shadow Box. Mr. Cristofer’s other plays include
Breaking Up,
Black Angel,
The Lady and the Clarinet which starred Stockard Channing, and
Amazing Grace starring Marsha Mason, which received the American Theater Critics Award for Best Play in 1997. His work on such films as
The Witches of Eastwick,
Falling in Love,
The Bonfire of the Vanities, and HBO’s
Gia
has earned him a Golden Globe, a Writer’s Guild Award, two Emmy
nominations, and a best director award from the Director’s Guild of
America. Currently, he appears on the NBC drama
Smash.
More information on
Champion,
including the cast and artistic team, is available at
http://www.opera-stl.org/about/news-press/2012/10/29/national-and-local-funders-provide-major-support-for-three-year-cycle-of-new-american-operas-in-st-louis/
The commissioning and development of Champion were made possible with a leadership gift from the Whitaker Foundation and with major support from the National Endowment for the Arts and OPERA America’s Opera Fund.
The production of Champion is made possible with a leadership gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous support from the Whitaker Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Phoebe Dent Weil. New Voices for Opera, the audience development programming surrounding the project, is made possible by OPERA America’s Opera Fund and PNC Arts Alive.
TWENTY-SEVEN (2014)
Music by Ricky Ian Gordon
Libretto by Michael Korie
June, 2014
The Story
Twenty-Seven
explores the story of Gertrude Stein’s life in Paris between World War I
and World War II at her famous home at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Destined to
become a legendary author, poet, raconteuse, and patroness of the arts,
Stein established in Paris one of the great salons of all time, hosting
the most influential artists and personalities of her day. She was
particularly fond of those she dubbed “the lost generation” – a group of
artists who came of age during World War I. While they suffered its
ravages, they also rose to the challenges of the interwar period to
create many of the great works that defined the advent of Modernism.
The
role of Gertrude Stein will be the centerpiece of the opera, sung by
renowned mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe. Ms. Blythe will be joined by a
cast of four virtuosic singing actors who will change identities
fluidly to portray those who surround Stein – from her brother Leo and
her companion Alice B. Toklas to Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernest
Hemingway, Juan Gris, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
About Ricky Ian Gordon
American
composer Ricky Ian Gordon has quickly emerged as a leading writer of
vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr.
Gordon’s songs have been performed and/or recorded by such
internationally renowned singers as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Nathan
Gunn, Deborah Voigt, Elizabeth Futral, Judy Collins, Kelli O’Hara, Audra
MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Nicole Cabell, the late Lorraine Hunt
Lieberson, Frederica Von Stade, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell,
and Betty Buckley, among many others. Recent productions of his work
include
Rappahannock County with libretto by Mark Campbell,
Sycamore Trees for which he is the composer and lyricist,
The Grapes of Wrath with libretto by Michael Korie and
Orpheus and Euridice (OBIE Award) for which he is the librettist. Renee Fleming premiered the orchestral version of his
Night Flight To San Francisco, a setting of Harper’s final monologue from Tony Kushner’s
Angels In America in March, and his
Green Sneakers for Baritone, String Quartet, Empty Chair, and Piano, for which he is also the librettist, will have its New York premiere at Lincoln Center on April 6th, 2013.
About Michael Korie
Michael Korie writes librettos to operas and lyrics to musicals. His libretto to composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s
The Grapes of Wrath premiered
to acclaim at Minnesota Opera followed by productions at Los Angeles
Disney Concert Hall, Utah Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, and Carnegie Hall.
Librettos with composer Stewart Wallace include
Harvey Milk (San Francisco Opera),
Kabbalah (BAM Next Wave Festival) and
Where’s Dick? (Houston Grand Opera). Lyrics include award-winning Broadway musical
Grey Gardens, and this season’s
Far From Heaven (Playwrights Horizons) and the UK production of
Finding Neverland,
all with composer Scott Frankel. He teaches lyric-writing at Yale
Drama School, and serves as an artistic advisor to emerging opera and
theater composers and librettists at the American Lyric Theater and The
Dramatists Guild.
SHALIMAR THE CLOWN (2015)
Music by Jack Perla
Based on the novel by Salman Rushdie
June, 2015
The Story
Shalimar the Clown
is based on Salman Rushdie’s acclaimed novel of the same title. Its
themes of personal and political power and betrayal are played against
the story of three generations of women, beginning in the “paradise
lost” of rural Kashmir and culminating in late 20th century Los
Angeles. Shalimar is a young Muslim Kashmiri known for his gregarious
personality and his skill as a tightrope walker. His Romeo-and-Juliet
romance with a Hindu girl named Boonyi manages to meet with approval
from their families and their village, but the romance is shattered when
an American ambassador begins an affair with Boonyi. Shalimar goes on
to train as an assassin and seeks revenge not only on the ambassador but
also the child of the affair, a daughter named India, who lives in
California.
Mr. Rushdie’s novel was a finalist for the 2005
Whitbread Book Awards, and has been described as “Rushdie’s greatest
novel since
The Satanic Verses” by
The Los Angeles Times. The
novel’s magic-realist world incorporates Mr. Rushdie’s signature humor,
balanced by a thrilling, sinister ending, which offers a glint of hope
in the form of an unanswered question. Mr. Perla has recorded and
performed with many well-known artists in the Indian tradition, and
plans to create a score that blends the contemporary Western opera
tradition with that of traditional Indian sounds, employing the tabla
and sitar in the orchestra and the exuberance of Bollywood films for
large choral scenes.
About Jack Perla
San Francisco-based composer Jack Perla has forged a reputation for
writing engaging, sophisticated, and accessible works using a palette
that includes symphonic, operatic, choral, and chamber music, as well as
multiple jazz idioms. In 2010, Mr. Perla was commissioned by the
Houston Grand Opera for a one-act opera with playwright Eugenie Chan,
for
Song of Houston.
Courtside was the first in that
series and led to a second commission for the final opera of the series,
with author Chitra Banerjee Divarakuni.
Love/Hate,
commissioned by American Opera Projects, premiered in 2012 in a
co-production with the Opera Center of San Francisco Opera and ODC
Theater. Other commissions include
Belongings, a new one act opera for the Seattle Opera with Atlantic writer Jessica Murphy Moo, and
Pretty Boy,
commissioned by the Paul Dresher Ensemble. Mr. Perla has received
awards from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, American
Composers Forum, Zellerbach Fund, Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music
Fund, James Irvine Foundation, American Music Center, Meet the Composer
and Civic Orchestra of Chicago. He is the 1997 recipient of the
Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Composers Award, and earned his DMA at
the Yale School of Music.
About Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Opera
Theatre of Saint Louis is one of the leading American opera companies,
known for a spring festival of inventive new productions, sung in
English, featuring the finest American singers and accompanied by
members of the St. Louis Symphony. As of 2012 Opera Theatre has
presented 22 world premieres and 23 American premieres – which may be
the highest percentage of new work in the repertory of any U.S.
company. Described by
The Sunday Times of London as “one of
the few American companies worth the transatlantic fare,” Opera Theatre
of Saint Louis annually welcomes visitors from nearly every state and
close to a dozen foreign countries. Although the size of the theater
typically limits box office income to less than a quarter of the budget,
the company has consistently produced work of the highest quality while
never accumulating a deficit.
Opera Theatre also has a long
tradition of discovering and promoting the careers of the finest
operatic artists of the current generation. Among the artists who had
important early opportunities at Opera Theatre are Christine Brewer,
Susan Graham, Nathan Gunn, Patricia Racette, Thomas Hampson, Jerry
Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, Sylvia McNair, Erie Mills, Dwayne Croft, Kelly
Kaduce, and Lawrence Brownlee. Opera Theatre has always been known for
distinguished leadership: founding general director Richard Gaddes was
succeeded in 1985 by general director Charles MacKay, with famed British
stage director Colin Graham as artistic director and Stephen Lord (1992
– present) as music director. Timothy O’Leary was named general
director in October 2008 with acclaimed stage director James Robinson
succeeding Colin Graham. For more information, visit
ExperienceOpera.org.
Opera Theatre gratefully acknowledges season presenting sponsor Wells Fargo Advisors.
Opera
Theatre is a sustaining member of the Arts and Education Council of
Greater Saint Louis, and receives major support from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Regional Arts Commission, and the Missouri
Arts Council.
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