James O'Neal News
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2024-04-24
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-03-25 20:45:39
Atmospheric But Not Dreary
Odyssey Opera, in partnership with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), presents the New England premiere of Dominick Argento’s opera The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, on Friday, April 5, 2024, ay the Huntington Theater in Poe’s birthplace of Boston. For one-night only, the Grammy Award-winning conductor Gil Rose leads a formidable cast including tenor Peter Tantsits as Poe, the Odyssey Opera chorus, the acclaimed BMOP orchestra in a semi-staged version. A world premiere studio recording will follow on BMOP/sound. Synopsis and history HERE. Tickets HERE An interview with the conductor follows. FLE: We’ve talked many times, but I’ve never actually delved into your biography at all. So what guru or mentor formed your interest in in looking up unjustly neglected works? GR: Oh, Wow, it’s a good question. You stumped me right out of the gate. One person that had a big effect on me was the author Joe […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-02-29 22:25:01
Visiting Aucoin’s Underworld
Boston area favorite-son composer Matthew Aucoin reached a pinnacle of recognition in November of 2021 at the Metropolitan Opera, where his opera Eurydice (book and libretto by Sarah Ruhl) vividly and artfully retold the Orpheus-plus myth from the tragedienne’s perspective. The underworld has never since been the same. “It’s not surprising that a tale about the greatest musician in history, a man who could make the very stones weep when he performed, keeps appealing to his descendants. The scenario offers composers a wedding party, a tragic death, an evocation of what lies beyond, an attempt at resurrection, a plangent lament — opportunities to shine, and to place themselves in a grand tradition.” NYT 2021 For the Boston Lyric Opera’s production, Aucoin reduced the orchestration demands considerably, but according to our interview subject, award-winning bass-baritone Mark S. Doss*, who plays the newly added role of Eurydice’s father, “…the sound is quite […]
2024-02-18 17:00:58
Omar
Jamez McCorkle, Cierra Byrd, Daniel Okulitch, Brianna J. Robinson, and Neal Ferreira in a broadcast of Rhiannon Giddens’s and Michael Abels’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera from Boston last spring
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-02-17 13:50:36
On a Saturday evening some 70 years ago I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live for the first time. Melville Smith, then director of the Longy School, had given me two tickets he couldn’t use. Charles Munch conducted. Before the intermission came Honegger’s Symphony no. 1; the program notes mentioned harmony that “trends toward C major,” which amused me and my 9th-grade classmate George Nelson — it must have meant that the symphony was “modern.” After the intermission we heard Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C Major, a work I had never heard before, but George knew it well. “This symphony begins with a solo horn,” he said. (Actually it turned out to be two in unison.) I was deeply impressed by the experience, and especially by the slow movement, but never imagined that I would write a book about this symphony a few years later (2011). Eventually I began to […]
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