Opera Vista

Opera Vista is pleased to announce the rules and application procedures for the 2011 Vista Competition for New Opera are now available. Please visit the Competition Information page for more details.

Congratulations to Lembit Beecher of Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose opera And Then I Remember was voted by the audience as the winner of the 2010 Vista Competition of New Opera. 2nd place went to Alberto Garcia Demestres of Santa Maria de Palautordera, Spain, and his opera Joc de Mans. Beecher received a check for $1,500 and will have his opera fully staged at the 2011 Opera Vista Festival in Houston during Spring 2011, while Demestres received $1,000.

Winning the inaugural Artistic Director’s Prize was Katarzyna Brochocka of Lidzbark Warmiński, Poland, for her opera Happy Garden of Life.

The results from the voting Wednesday are in, and the four finalists are (in no order):

• Happy Garden of Life, Music by Katarzyna Brochocka, Lidzbark Warmiński, Poland
• And Then I Remember, Music by Lembit Beecher, Ann Arbor, MI
• Joc de Mans, Music by Alberto Garcia Demestres, Santa Maria de Palautordera, Spain
• The Yellow Wallpaper, Music by Catherine Reid, Glens Falls, NY

You can buy tickets for the Finals online now.

Tickets available – buy now!

Daron Hagen

The music of Daron Aric Hagen is notable for its warm lyricism, but his style defies easy categorization. While his works demonstrate fluency with a range of twentieth century compositional techniques, those procedures are secondary to his exploitation and expansion of the possibilities of tonal harmony, giving his music an immediacy that makes it appealing to a wide spectrum of audiences. His music is broadly eclectic, drawing on a variety of styles as diverse as jazz, Broadway, Latin music, Italian verismo, and soft rock. While Hagen works with consistent success in a number of genres, the foundation of his oeuvre is the art song, a form that highlights his melodic and dramatic talents, exemplified by “Dear Youth” (based on American Civil War stories) and “Songs of Madness and Sorrow.” His teacher Ned Rorem famously stated of him, “Daron is music.”

Born in Milwaukee in 1961, Hagen began his musical studies at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, continuing his education at the University of Wisconsin, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School. Hagen’s teachers include such prominent composers as Ned Rorem, Joseph Schwantner, David Diamond, Witold Lutoslawski, and Leonard Bernstein. Already known for song cycles composed in the 1980s that demonstrated his gift for lyrical and dramatically astute text setting, Hagen turned to opera with “Shining Brow” (1990-1992), a musical evocation of the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with a libretto by poet Paul Muldoon. Other stage works include “Vera of Las Vegas” (a “nightmare cabaret opera”), “Bandanna” (an opera scored for wind ensemble, loosely based on Othello), and he has received a commission from the Seattle Opera for a new work, “Amelia.” Other commissions include pieces for the New York Philharmonic, the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Wisconsin, the King’s Singers, pianist Gary Graffman, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson.

In the late ’80s and throughout the ’90s, Hagen gained a reputation as an enthusiastic mentor, teaching at Princeton University, the Curtis Institute, Bard College, New York University, and the City College of New York. Hagen’s numerous honors and awards include the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Opera America’s “Next Stage” Award, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residencies, and the Barlow International Composition Prize for Chamber Music.

The 2010 Opera Vista Festival is March 20-27 (you can buy tickets for the Festival online now). Over the next three weeks, we’ll be posting profiles of the competitors in the 3rd Annual Vista Competiton for New Opera. Today’s profile is on Lembit Beecher and his opera And Then I Remember.

Lembit Beecher

Lembit Beecher’s music focuses on themes of storytelling, memory and nature. Born of Estonian and American parents, Lembit grew up under the redwoods in Santa Cruz, California, a few miles from the wild Pacific. Since then he has lived in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Berlin and New York. This varied background has made him particularly sensitive to place, ecology and the strong emotional relationships that people forge with patterns in nature. He is also interested in memory and the various ways we tell stories, from emotional personal narratives to crisp and clean documentaries. Recent pieces have focused on integrating recorded interviews with music. While a fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (2008 – 2009), Lembit wrote And Then I Remember, a multi-media, documentary oratorio based on the World War II stories of his grandmother. Active also as a pianist, conductor and concertinist, Lembit graduated with his D.M.A. in composition from the University of Michigan, studying with Evan Chambers and Bright Sheng. He earned his B.A. from Harvard College, studying composition with Kurt Stallmann and Bernard Rands and his M.M. from Rice University, studying with Karim Al-Zand and Pierre Jalbert. Continually trying to expand his musical and artistic vocabulary, Lembit has studied jazz piano, modern dance, ethnomusicology and participated in workshops and master classes with Stephen Schwartz, Evelyn Glennie, Bobby McFerrin and Paul Berliner. Lembit was appointed a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University for the fall of 2009 and is currently a freelance composer living in New York City.

About And Then I Remember

My grandmother, Taimi Lepasaar, was born in Estonia in 1922. Four years earlier, in the aftermath of World War I, Estonia had achieved independence for the first time. This independence was short lived. During World War II, Estonia was occupied first by the Russians (1940 – 41) and then the Germans (1941 – 44). In 1944, as the Red Army was encroaching once more, my grandmother escaped Estonia along with her mother and father, husband Ants and two-year old daughter, Merike (my mother). My grandmother left on the last ship out of the country before the Russians returned and sealed the borders. The boat brought her to Germany and as the war was ending she gradually made her way west. After the end of the war, she spent four years in displaced person camps before immigrating to the United States and beginning a new life here. She found work as a church organist and later also as a music teacher. For 35 years she taught music to middle school students in Providence, RI, where she still resides.

My grandmother has often told me stories about these experiences. She is a marvelous storyteller. A few years ago I asked my grandmother if I could record her stories with the idea of possibly building a piece around them. She kindly agreed to many interviews over several years as the project gradually took shape. During the summer of 2008, as I began to work intensely on this piece, I traveled to Estonia to conduct interviews with family members and old friends of my grandmother’s, and to do archival research. My original intent was to emphasize the documentary side of the stories, including text from newspaper clippings and war time documents (like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). But as I thought more and more about the project, I began to feel that what was really important was my grandmother’s voice and her way of telling stories to me, not the historical details of the events described. The text of the interviews with my grandmother is the core of the piece. Portions of the interviews are played back as recorded audio and I have condensed other parts of the interviews into poems of sorts, which are sung by a solo soprano.

To supplement the English language interviews texts, I have set portions of the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg, for a female duo and male chorus to sing. Both Kalevipoeg and my grandmother’s stories are about a wandering journey of epic nature. Both are permeated by an intense love of homeland, of Estonia, and the ruminations on memory, storytelling and the passage of time that are contained within Kalevipoeg seem to be echoed by my grandmother. I sometimes feel that I understand my grandmother’s stories in the way that Estonians of an older generation understood Kalevipoeg. The experiences my grandmother describes are so far removed from mine, in terms of time, place and intensity, that they acquire the sheen of a fantastic saga, yet at the same time, the stories feel so very personal, emotional and deeply true.