Puss perfect
Xavier Montsalvatge is best known in these parts for the songs of his “Antilles” period in the 1940s, the exquisite “Cinco Canciones Negras” and so on, making use of rhythms and melodies with a Caribbean flavor.
Neal Goren
14 pieces since 2010 — at 2 companies, most often at Gotham Chamber Opera.
14
pieces
2
companies
17
years
By company
6 pieces as Gotham Chamber Opera — stats above show all coverage for Neal Goren.
View all
Martinu, very dry
Gotham Chamber Opera, which began to operate twelve years ago with a double bill of Bohuslav Martinu’s quirky little pieces, opened its 2014-15 season with two more, Alexandre bis (Alexander, twice) and Comedy on the Bridge.
Orpheus goes downtown
Marc-Antoine Charpentier came along at the wrong time for a composer of French opera.
Fleur du mal
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the repentant Puritan—that is, he repented that his family had once been Puritans—describes the voice of Rappaccini’s Daughter, Beatrice, as “rich as a tropical sunset, … which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable.”
Room for improvement
It’s hard to think of a rare work by a great composer more tailor-made for a twenty-first century reexamination than Mozart’s Il Sogno di Scipione.
Dark side of the moon
Gotham Chamber Opera presented Haydn’s Il Mondo della Luna on Tuesday evening at the Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, in a production that took advantage of the museum’s NASA constellations and a multitude of other more economical yet impressive stage and lighting effects. Despite cramped quarters and inhospitable acoustics, the company made a strong […]