Project

JUDGMENT OF MIDAS
Music by Kamran Ince
Libretto by Miriam Seidel

About Judgment of Midas

Judgment of Midas takes as its starting point a series of mythical musical contests said to have taken place on Mount Tmolus, near Sardis, Turkey, between the two gods Pan and Apollo and witnessed by King Midas. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the singing contest is between Pan, maker of "street" music—music of the people—and Apollo, maker of the Gods' music—the spiritual or "high" music. The opera's musical language will exploit popular, ethnic, and folk musical styles side by side with serious music of epic proportions, effecting a vivid blaze of musical contrast.

Kamran Ince's compositional style naturally synthesizes folk instruments into the traditional Western orchestra and is well suited to portraying the pleasures of the musical contest at hand. The drama unfolds amid a wonderland of sound made even more magical by the brilliant interplay of vivid musical color and contrast.

Judgment of Midas is being commissioned and developed in part with a generous grant from Mr. Crawford Greenewalt to mark the 50th anniversary of Sardis/Lydia excavations (sponsored by Harvard and Cornell Universities) and is slated for production in 2010.

About the Creators

KAMRAN INCE (composer)
Kamran Ince has been hailed by The Los Angeles Times as "that rare composer able to sound connected with modern music, and yet still seem exotic." Ince was born in Montana in 1960 to American and Turkish parents. He holds a Doctorate from Eastman School of Music, and currently serves as Co-Director of MIAM (Center for Advanced Research in Music) at the Istanbul Technical University and Professor of Composition at University of Memphis.His works are performed by the leading orchestras of the world. Concerts devoted to his music have recently been heard at the Holland Festival, CBC Encounter Series (Toronto), the Istanbul International Music Festival, Estoril Festival (Lisbon), TurkFest (London), and Cultural Influences in Globalization Festival (Ho Chi Minh City). His Waves of Talya was named one of the best chamber works of the 20th Century by a living composer in the Chamber Music Magazine. Among upcoming projects is an orchestral work commissioned to celebrate Istanbul's 2010 European Capital of Culture tenure, and a Piano Quartet for the Los Angeles Piano Quartet commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. For more information, visit www.kamranince.com

MIRIAM SEIDEL (librettist)
Miriam Seidel conceived and wrote the libretto for Violet Fire, a multimedia opera about Nikola Tesla, with score by Jon Gibson. Following a workshop production at Temple University in Philadelphia, Violet Fire received its world premiere at the National Theater Belgrade, Serbia, and its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Other dramatic works of hers include the radio play Interference, with sound score by John Phillips, broadcast by New American Radio; and The Big Picture, produced as part of the 2000 Voices series at InterAct Theater in Philadelphia. Seidel’s short fiction has been seen in Exquisite Corpse, Washington Square, Phoebe, First Intensity and elsewhere, and her writing on the arts has appeared in journals including Art in America (as a Corresponding Editor), the Philadelphia Inquirer, Public Art Review and Dance Magazine. She is also Curator of the Galleries at the Gershman Y, an arts and culture center in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.miriamseidel.com

AOP Presentations

May 9 & 11, 2009
South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Concert reading of opera
MUSIC DIRECTION: J. David Jackson (5/9) and Jonathan Khuner (5/11)
PIANO: Charity Wicks
PERFORMANCES BY: John Duykers, Abigail Fischer, Jeremy Milner, Matt Morgan, Nicholas Probst, and Michael Redding. Also featuring Sarah Nelson Craft, Heather Michele Meyer, Sarah Moulton, and Margaret O'Connell.

November 16-18, 2007
South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Libretto developmental reading of opera
DIRECTION: Ned Canty
PERFORMANCES BY: Richard Bolster, Patrick Porter. Ricardo Perez-Gonzalez, Eric Starker, Jessica Bates, Andy Waldschmidt, Dina Rose Rivera, Kate Graham.