On Thursday, December 4 at 7:30 p.m. Carnegie Hall presents the New York premiere of Steven Stucky and Jeremy Denk's The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts), with Robert Spano conducting The Knights, together with soprano Jennifer Zetlan, mezzo-sopranos Rachel Calloway and Peabody Southwell, tenors Dominic Armstrong and Keith Jameson, baritone Kim Josephson, and bass-baritones Aubrey Allicock and Ashraf Sewailam. The work, a Carnegie Hall co-commission, is directed by Mary Birnbaum in Zankel Hall.
For his first libretto, Mr. Denk, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, adapts for the stage the late Charles Rosen's National Book Award-winning masterpiece with music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky. Rosen's immensely successful 1971 book The Classical Style examined the musical structures and concepts of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. An accomplished writer, Mr. Denk has written a libretto that parodies the art forms in the book as an opera buffa with a comic clashing of egos between the composers, and often the musical chords themselves.
Written for a cast of eight performers, roles range from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to "a preening musicologist," a bartender, and the personified Tonic (bass-baritone), Dominant (soprano), and Subdominant (mezzo) chords, which are involved in a love triangle. The work had its world premiere performance at the Ojai Music Festival on June 13. To open this performance, Mr. Denk will perform Mozart's Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor, K. 475/457.
This is also the first opera (of sorts) for Mr. Stucky, whose Second Concerto for Orchestra won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and whose evening-length concert drama August 4, 1964 was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2013 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
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