Gregory Spears, whose newest opera Sleepers Awake opens this week at Opera Philadelphia, is reviving Romanticism
Pittsburgh Opera’s Fellow Travelers delivers a timely story with detail and care.
With tenth anniversary productions of Fellow Travelers, the heart wrenching gay romance opera by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce, due to grace several major U.S. companies next season, what better way to commemorate Pride Month than by reading Thomas Mallon’s 2007 historical novel on which it’s based?
On Friday, June 21st, Opera Parallèle – the Bay Area nomadic, contemporary opera company – together with the Presidio Theatre unveiled their final production of the season, the West Coast premiere of Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers, an adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel of the same name.
Over the weekend, Opera Parallèle, San Francisco’s contemporary opera company, stayed true to their mission of “merging tradition and innovation to re-invent opera for a modern world” as they presented a world premiere double-bill cheekily titled Birds & Balls at SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium.
Gregory Spears’ latest opera Castor and Patience, with a libretto by former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith, was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera to celebrate its centennial season in 2020.
A co-production of Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, and Los Angeles Opera, Fire Shut Up In My Bones blazed into Chicago as a stunning, highly emotional and moving performance.
I found Fellow Travelers intellectually and politically riveting, musically thrilling, and profoundly moving. It was a triumph.
Composer Gregory Spears is a unique example of this maxim that one must be “deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.”
The opera Patience and Sarah is a fantastic example of radical creativity.
Cincinnati Opera presented the world premiere Fellow Travelers Friday and I’m here to tell you that not only does the opera have legs, it has balls.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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