American Opera Projects Presents Georgia Shreve and Alvin Singleton in Concert, 4/26

AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) will present an evening of new music from two New York composers, Georgia Shreve and Alvin Singleton, including new works that explore the global and local ramifications of significant moments in history.

The concert will be held on Monday, April 26, 2010 at 7:30pm at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Tickets are $40/$20 at www.carnegiehall.org or by phone (212) 247-7800.

Georgia Shreve's compositions Triptych, Trio, and Oratorio: Portraits of the 20th Century (Depression, War and Environment) will be performed by ensemble and chamber chorus featuring soloists tenor Michael Slattery (National Symphony Orchestra, Kennedy Center, Glimmerglass Opera) and soprano Erin Stewart (A Little Night Music, Broadway), led by music director Howard Cass. Shreve mines the works of several past centuries to tie their significance and timeliness to some of the dark moments of our last century. The three movements from Portraits will feature texts from James Agee's classic depression era Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Sun Tzu's highly influential 6th century B.C. guide to combat The Art of War, and the religious figure Hildegard of Bingen's 12th century visionary writings on the environment. The evening then continues its travel back in time to the founding of our country with Alvin Singleton's Brooklyn Bones: Requiem for the Revolutionary War Prison Ship Martyrs. Composed for the 100th anniversary and dedication of the Fort Greene Park Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, Brooklyn Bones is a eulogy for the 11,000 men and boys who died in horrid conditions on British Prison Ships harbored in New York City's East River during the Revolutionary War. The work will be performed by choral group Cantori New York and orchestra, tenor Cameron Smith, and conducted by Mark Shapiro.

Reflecting on tragedies closer to our collective memories, the evening begins with the triple-themed works of Georgia Shreve. Triptych is a work for cello and piano. Like a three-paneled painting from the renaissance, it is divided into three parts. Trio, for violin, cello, and piano, works within a traditional form to explore contemporary musical elements. Oratorio: Portraits of the 20th Century focuses on themes from the past and how they continue into the recent present. The year 2000 closed not just a century but a millennium, and the maladies and horrors of our civilization stood out in stark relief. James Agee's more recent text vividly chronicles the poignant experiences of the depression. The ironic setting of The Art of War by Sun Tzu from the 6th century evokes the decades of gruesome war. The 12th century writings of Hildegard of Bingen contain early warnings about the desecration of the environment. In the last decade alone we have witnessed the return of all these nightmares. Each of the three texts in Oratorio: Portraits of the 20th Century speaks not just to the last century, but to all centuries. AOP has been involved in this oratorio since its inception, performing its first three movements in the mid-1990s.

The evening will close with Alvin Singleton's Brooklyn Bones. Famed historian and author David McCullough has called Fort Greene Park and its Martyrs Monument "one of the most sacred historical sites in America." Barely mentioned in history books, the number of prisoners of war who died on the ships in Wallabout Bay, not just from the thirteen colonies but from all around the world, totaled more than all the combat fatalities in the American Revolution combined. Alvin Singleton's Brooklyn Bones was written to give voice to these thousands whose role in American history has been inexplicably forgotten.

Brooklyn Bones librettist Patricia Hampl (The Florist's Daughter, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime) states, "The forgetting began early and the resistance toward acknowledging and commemorating their sacrifice has been chronic. Walt Whitman was arguing passionately for a memorial before the Civil War when he was the editor of The Brooklyn Eagle in the 1840s." Whitman's pleas to find a suitable tomb for the thousands of bones that were washing up on the Brooklyn waterfront went unheard for many years. Though Whitman didn't live to see it, a 148 ft. monument was finally erected in Fort Greene Park in 1908 by the prestigious architectural firm of McKim, Meade and White. "The story of the "Martyrs" (and even that antique term) has been lost in the footnotes of history," writes Hampl. A detailed account of the prison ship martyrs can be found at www.fortgreenepark.org/pages/prisonship.

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Georgia Shreve's music has been performed at Weill Hall, CAMI Hall, Steinway Hall, Florence Gould Hall, American Opera Projects, Merkin Concert Hall, Daryl Roth 2, Heckscher Theater, Theatre Row Kirk Theatre and Theatre Row Studio Theatre. Her Piano Quartet was awarded first prize in the Contemporary Recording Society's Composition Competition and was later issued by them on CD. Her music has been performed by the Ahn Trio, Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, and the Universalist Church Choir. Shreve studied Creative Writing at Stanford, Brown, and Columbia. Her fiction and poetry have been published in the New Yorker, New Republic, and New Criterion magazines, among others, and recently won the Stanford University Fiction Award.

Alvin Singleton melds improvisatory techniques and rhythmic inventiveness with classical structures in his music which often deals with a wide range of contemporary issues of topical importance. Sing to the Sun, a collection of selected chamber works released in February 2007, was named Album of the Year by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In 1989 the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra released a recording of Singleton's orchestral music on Nonesuch records which included his After Fallen Crumbs, A Yellow Rose Petal and Shadows. Other recent compositions include After Choice which was premiered by the Orchestra of the League of Composers in June, 2009 in New York City and Almost a Boogie which saw its debut by the Walden Chamber Players in Brookline, Massachusetts in March, 2010. Full bio: www.alvinsingleton.com.

For over 20 years, American Opera Projects (AOP) has been creating, developing and presenting exclusively new American opera and music Theatre Projects. AOP, based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has presented over 15 world premiere operas including Lee Hoiby's This is the Rill Speaking (2008), Stefan Weisman's Darkling (2006), and Paula Kimper's Patience & Sarah (1998). Upcoming productions of AOP-developed projects include Séance on a Wet Afternoon, the first opera by Stephen Schwartz, at New York City Opera in April 2011 and the world premieres of Jorge Martín's Before Night Falls at Fort Worth Opera in 2010 and Tarik O'Regan's Heart of Darkness at The Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio in 2011. www.operaprojects.org