BBC Radio 4 presents
COMPOSING NEW YORK

Featuring AOP Resident Composer Tarik O'Regan (Heart of Darkness, The Wanton Sublime)!

New York City has always drawn composers from the Old World - from Dvorak and Mahler to Kurt Weill, Rachmaninov and Benjamin Britten. Some, like Puccini, crossed the Atlantic to premier new works, others like Gustav Mahler and Bela Bartok stayed for longer periods to compose, study and conduct. But all were shaped by the energy of New York, just as the city's musical culture was shaped, in turn, by them.

Behind this extraordinary cultural exchange lay a deeper question: what should a truly American "classical" music sound like? Did it lie outside the concert hall and with the Broadway musical, as envisaged by Kurt Weill? Or was it Dvorak's iconic New World symphony, with its powerful invocations of the black American spiritual, that pointed the way?

Filled with the sounds of NYC, British composer and New York resident Tarik O'Regan presents a vivid portrait of the city which electrified these great composers and, through their works composed and premiered in New York, transformed the wider world of classical music.

Wolf Trap Opera presents

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears
Libretto adapted from Williams Shakespeare

Britten’s enchanting setting of Shakespeare’s tale of mischief, fickle teenage love, magic and comedy premiered 50 years ago at the U.K.’s Aldeburgh Festival. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is possibly the most beguiling of all Britten's operas, a work with a spellbinding atmosphere that inhabits a truly unique dreamlike world. The already magical ambiance of The Barns takes on deeper meaning as fairies and imps play with human hearts.

Conducted by Steven Osgood (former AOP Artistic Director)
Directed by Patrick Diamond (director, Paul's Case - March 2010 workshops)

ADMISSION: $32 - $72

Approximate running time 3 hours

City Opera presents the New York premiere of the first opera by Oscar and Grammy-winning composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz, whose previous credits run from Godspell to Wicked and Enchanted. Based on the novel by Mark McShane and its 1964 film noir adaptation, the opera focuses on Myra Foster, a trance medium who involves her passive husband in a plot to kidnap the daughter of a neighboring family. Myra intends to find the girl through psychic communication with her own dead son, and so gain the fame she craves—but the plot goes awry, as her fragile sanity begins to break down. 

Soprano Lauren Flanigan is Myra Foster, and baritone Kim Josephson makes his company debut as Bill Foster. Excerpts from Séance on a Wet Afternoon were presented at City Opera’s VOX showcase in 2009. The opera had its world premiere on September 26, 2009, at Opera Santa Barbara in California. City Opera music director George Mahanan conducts the production, directed by Scott Schwartz, with sets by Heidi Ettinger, costumes by Alejo Vietti and lighting by David Lander, all making their City Opera debuts.  The work will be performed in English with supertitles. more...

Developed by American Opera Projects! (click here for info)