CCO Presents Feldman's NEITHER With Libretto By Samuel Beckett 5/13-5/14

The Center for Contemporary Opera (CCO), dedicated to the development and production of new opera and music-theater, presents Morton Feldman's Neither with libretto by Samuel Beckett, Wednesday, May 13 and Thursday, May 14 at 8pm at the cell, 338 West 23 Street, New York.

This opera has never had a full production in the U.S. and will also be presented at Wien Modern in November 2009.
Directed by Viennese composer/director Thomas Desi, with musical direction by Patrick Grant, founder and artistic director of Strange Music, Inc., Neither features soprano Kiera Duffy, winner of a 2008 Sullivan Foundation grant and finalist in the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, whose sparkling career spans Handel and Praetorius to the new sounds of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.
In 1976 American composer Morton Feldman met Samuel Beckett in Berlin hoping to convince the writer to provide text for a work commissioned by the Rome Opera. The two discussed their mutual disdain for traditional opera, groping for a possible middle ground?Feldman didn't want to use any existing text, and Beckett wasn't fond of having his words set to music. Eventually, Beckett agreed to elaborate on what he called "the theme of his life," the result being Neither.

Neither is the product of two like-minded visionaries focused on a single theme: the endless and often hopeless quest for understanding of the self and the universe, as carried out within the flash of a single life.
This dramatic work is filled with passages that evoke numerous visions?machines churning away in subterranean depths, interstellar spaces haunted by distant sirens, wheels within wheels grinding down time and space in slow revolutions.

Although Neither is frequently called an opera, it bears more relation to a "monodrama" than any conventional opera, rather than relying on the unfolding of a story to provide a sense of drama, Neither draws its authority from escalating musical tension, cycling between Beckett's stanzas as it spirals toward its "unspeakable home."
Common to both Beckett and Feldman is a pared minimalism grounded in a less-is-more aesthetic, an implicit demand on a receptive audience for patience and open-mindedness, and a fixation on extended repetition and minute variation.

CCO TICKETS AND MORE INFORMATION
Tickets to Neither are $30 and include a post-performance reception available through www.brownpapertickets.com or 1-800-838-3006. For more information on the cell: www.thecelltheatre.org. All performances: the cell, 338 West 23 Street, New York City.

The Center for Contemporary Opera is a performing arts organization devoted to the development and production of new opera and music theater works and, working with a community of artists and a committed public, to the development and encouragement of a new operatic and music-theater culture in this country.

the cell 338 West 23 Street New York NY 10011 (347) 265-8943 www.conopera.org

www.conopera.com

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