New York City Opera's acclaimed series VOX 2008: Showcasing American Composers returns for its ninth
season on May 10 and 11, presented at the Skirball Center for the Performing
Arts at NYU (566 LaGuardia Place, Washington Square Park South). VOX
2008 will feature readings of ten new or previously unperformed American
operas of both emerging and established composers. All selections will be performed by City
Opera artists and accompanied by its orchestra.
Admission to all VOX
events is free and open to the public.
After last year's overwhelmingly strong response of over 1700 people in
attendance at the Skirball
Center, City Opera
returns. This year, VOX attendees can reserve their FREE tickets in advance by logging
on to VOX's new website: www.vox-nyco.com.
A record number of eighty works were submitted to the VOX selection committee, which is
comprised of five full-time City Opera staff from various disciplines of
artistic, music and dramaturgical departments, including City Opera Music
Director, George Manahan. Of those
submitted, only ten were chosen, including: John King's Dice Thrown, an
adaptation of Mallarmé's last poem, which is structured by chance operations,
therefore no two performances of the work will be alike. The young composer David T. Little uses his
experience with rock music to bring to life true interviews in Soldier Songs,
while Scott Davenport Richards' Charlie Crosses the Nation employs jazz to tell
the story of a mixed-race band leader during the Big Band era of the 20s and 30s. Alice Shields sets Criseyde, her feminist
interpretation of the Troilus and Cressida story, partly in Middle
English. Maestro Manahan is set to
conduct Little's Soldier Songs, Steve Potter's The Officers and Cary Ratcliff's
Eleni.
Like last year, each selection will be introduced by a video
featuring an interview with the composer and librettist. Audiences can view last year's introductions
at www.vox-nyco.com. This year, listeners
will also be able to leave feedback for composers of the 2008 selections on the
VOX website.
VOX 2008: Showcasing
American Composers has been made possible, in part, by the generous
leadership support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Helen F. Whitaker
Fund, The Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust.
Additional funding has been provided by The Amphion Foundation, The
ASCAP Foundation Irving Caesar Fund, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music,
Frederick S. Upton Foundation and Ms. Younghee Kim-Wait.
VOX 2008
SELECTION
DESCRIPTIONS
May 10 and 11, 2008
2 - 5:30 p.m.
Skirball
Center for the Performing
Arts
New York
University
566 LaGuardia
Place (Washington
Square Park
South)
New York,
NY 10012
The titles, composers and librettists selected for VOX 2008:
Showcasing American Composers are as follows.
May 10
12:00-1:30pm
Panel Discussion: Politically Engaged Music-Theater
Moderator: Yuval Sharon, VOX Project Director
Can opera act as the right platform for the depiction of
topical issues? A roundtable discussion with some of this year's VOX composers
focuses on this question and discusses the distinction between political and
socially engaged works.
2:00-3:10pm
Our Giraffe
Music by Sorrel Hays
Libretto by Charles Flowers
This satirical and imaginative historical fable uses the
arrival of the first giraffe in Paris
to show the clash of cultural expectations from different societies. Sorrel
Hays' eclectic, hybrid musical writing has earned her eight commissions from
the Westdeutscher Rundfunk's Experimental Drama department, with her subjects
ranging from the microtonal fluctuations of tone generators to a post-modern
opera on the life of bees.
Eleni
Music by Cary
Ratcliff
Libretto by Cary
Ratcliff, with Robert Koch
Based on the book Eleni by Nicholas Gage
During the Greek Civil War, 28,000 children were abducted to
Eastern bloc countries. Nicholas Gage, a New York Times reporter, returned to Greece in 1980
to uncover the story of his mother's defiance, and to track down her
executioner with a gun. Ratcliff is a pianist with the Rochester Philharmonic,
has taught orchestration and choral writing courses at Eastman School of Music,
and has created orchestral soundtracks for the Smithsonian's Einstein
Planetarium.
3:30-4:20pm
The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth
Music by Veronika Krausas
Libretto by Tom Pettit, after Shakespeare
Los Angeles-based composer Krausas telescopes Shakespeare's
play into an eerie, intense 25-minute chamber work for Lady Macbeth and the
Three Witches. Krausas has created multimedia events and concert pieces for the
Darmstadt New Music Festival, the Penderecki String Quartet, the Motion
Ensemble, and other ensembles in America,
Canada, Australia, the Netherlands,
and Romania.
