Opera Vista

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.

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 Katarzyna Brochocka and her opera Happy Garden of Life.

Katarzyna Brochocka

The works of Katarzyna Brochocka (b. 1982) have been performed in Poland, Germany, Romania and the United States. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed by the State Philharmonic Orchestras of several Polish cities, including Olsztyn, Walbrzych, Wroclaw and Kalisz. The International Academy of Marimba (Wroclaw) and the National Chamber Piano Competition (Jelenia Gora) have also featured her works. As a composer with wide-ranging skills and a special interest in theatrical music, Ms. Brochocka has also collaborated with the Dramatic Theater of Opole, the “Studio” Theater in Warsaw, and the State School of Drama in Wroclaw. Her talents have been recognized as she has continued to hone her compositional craft in several countries. She was a recipient of the European “Socrates-Erasmus” Scholarship, studying with Prof. Doina Rotaru at the Music University in Bucharest (2005/2006). In 2007, she completed her Master of Art degree with Distinction at Karol Lipinski’s Academy of Music in Wroclaw, Poland in the composition studio of Prof. Jan Antoni Wichrowski. After being invited to continue her studies in the United States by Oklahoma City University, she has been a graduate composition student of Dr. Edward Knight at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music since 2008. Recently Ms. Brochocka’s works have been awarded the Grand Prize in the chamber division of 2008 David Walter/ISB International Composition Competition as well as a Special Commendation from Vienna Masterworks (a BMI Publisher) at the 2008 Nancy Van de Vate International Composition Prize for Opera.

Katarzyna on Happy Garden of Life
Happy Garden of Life is a one-act chamber opera based on the satirical short story “2BRO2B” by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), which was first published in the science fiction digest Worlds of If (January, 1962). In this lesser-known work, Vonnegut describes the individual tragedies of people living in a utopian society where human life is a limited good. Death and disease have been cured and each new birth must be accompanied by volunteer’s suicide in order to keep the world’s population constant. The fresh peculiarity of the story is exciting not only because of its tragic and expressive potential, but also because of its dramatic construction. It shares all the qualities of the Greek tragedy: unity of time, place, and action, as well as an unsolvable conflict of values that makes each character choice morally questionable. At the same time, the story is also humorous and touching. While writing this opera I tried to preserve the author’s original idea as much as I could, paying special attention to its spirit, structure and his brilliant text. At each stage of my process, I hoped to create an interpretation that Vonnegut himself might have enjoyed.

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 í and his opera Joc de Mans.

Alberto García Demestres

Alberto García Demestres (b. Barcelona 1960)
“He has an excellent command of technical and an expressive resource of all kinds, and thanks to his eclectic language, Demestres filters diverse influences, does not avoid lyricism, which he practices without complexes or concessions. He has never lost his rebellious and nonconformist spirit, which appears in his music as freshness, communicativeness and brilliance, and also a great imagination as far as pitch is concerned and has never stopped searching for surprising contrasts which keep audience’s interest alive, without banalities and with one clear objective: not to be boring. Demestres combines his career as a composer with the spreading of contemporary music and the support of young performers by means of his radio program Tutto Demestres at COM Ràdio.”
–Ana María Dávila and Javier Pérez Senz, Guia de la música contemporània a Catalunya.

Alberto on Joc de Mans (Game of Hands)
The five fingers represent the means of communication and the new technologies. Some fingers decide to abandon their “brothers” and proceed towards the world of selfishness, no solidarity, trash-tv, gambling. The Hand of the Knowledgeable, instead, advises them that some times it is better to be educated bending, work together, have fun and learn everything playing, and also share the emotions of these “multiple screens” with all those alike elsewhere. We will go, then, into a fascinating ethical-musical GAME OF HANDS, suitable for all kind of publics, especially families.

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 Joseph Eidson and his opera Bamboo Cutter and the Moon.

Joseph Eidson

Joseph Eidson (b.1981) holds degrees in composition from the University of Kansas and the University of Texas. His music contains rhythmic drive, crisp harmonies, and a preference for lyrical melodies. His music has been performed throughout North America and abroad. Awards include the Dallas Wind Symphony fanfare competition (winner), ASCAP / CBDNA Frederick Fennell award for concert band (honorable mention), the Penn State trombone choir composition competition (winner), and a Presser scholarship at the University of Kansas. Major teachers include Dan Welcher, James Barnes, Donald Grantham, and Forrest Pierce. Mr. Eidson and girlfriend Julia currently live in Lawrence, Kansas with their feisty cat Gabby, who enjoys sleeping on top of any available manuscript paper.

Joseph on Bamboo Cutter and the Moon
The original 10th century narrative that provides the basis of Bamboo Cutter and the Moon is incredibly intriguing, with elements ranging from classical Japanese imagery to proto-science fiction. The moon princess Kaguya-hime is an ingénue of the purest form who is raised by her adopted mother Také. Entering the picture with an exaggerated amount of machismo is the Emperor Mikado, but even he is made pure by Kaguya’s presence. The innocence and magic inherent in the story shapes the music in an organic way, from the haunting initial landscape to the emotional night interlude and finally the frenzied excitement of Kaguya’s return to the moon. All of these elements combine to transport the audience from the concert hall to the bamboo forest so they may experience Kaguya’s brief stay on our planet.

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 Jonathan Kupper and his opera The Monkey’s Paw.

Jonathan Kupper

Jonathan N. Kupper is a composer whose musical endeavors have taken him from concert music to opera, musical theater to film-scoring. Born in Providence, RI, he was raised near Rochester, NY, and began to study music from an early age—most notably in the Preparatory Division of the Eastman School of Music. Mr. Kupper went on to pursue undergraduate studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, and graduate studies at New York University (graduate music theater writing program) and the University of Southern California (scoring for motion pictures).

Mr. Kupper’s music has been recorded and/or performed across North America and Europe. He is the recipient of several awards and honors, including: merit-based scholarships, grants, a 2002 fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center, a scholarship for study at the Aspen Music Festival & School, the 2003 Pete Carpenter Fellowship from BMI, and private funding & professional support from Mike Post Productions. He has completed residencies at the Musica d’Estate Festival in Italy, and the 2005 Oregon Bach Festival. In 2008, Mr. Kupper was selected to participate in the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra’s “New Directions” concert series, and in 2009, he was thrilled have his one-act opera, The Monkey’s Paw, selected as a semi-finalist in the Opera Vista Competition & Festival.

In addition to composition, Mr. Kupper is a fine pianist, having toured throughout the United States and Italy, and having worked as a professional music director for the theater. He is an avid creative writer, and a lover of all things Italian: language, food, and (of course) music.

Jonathan on The Monkey’s Paw
For the most part, this operatic adaptation of The Monkey’s Paw directly follows W.W. Jacob’s original, chilling tale.

PROLOGUE
The StoryTeller sets the scene, giving fair warning to anyone seeking a simple, sweet love story… Throughout the piece, this character will assume two additional identities: that of the Sergeant, and the Messenger.

SCENE I
It is a blustery, stormy night. Mr. & Mrs. White and their son, Herbert, await the arrival of a guest to their modest, country home: Sergeant-Major Morris. The Sergeant finally arrives, seeking refuge by the fire, and conversation soon turns to his adventures, his travels throughout India in particular. It is eventually revealed that Morris brought back a very unusual artifact from his days abroad: the mummified paw of a monkey. According to the Sergeant, an Indian holy-man cast a magic spell on the paw: three separate men can each wish upon it three times. However, the Sergeant also makes it clear that while the wishes are granted, calamity is sure to ensue. He claims to have come across the paw by way of its first owner—whose third and final wish was for death. The Sergeant also explains that he himself had three wishes, thus leaving one more set of wishes to be granted. Impulsively, the Sergeant tries to destroy the paw, but it is quickly salvaged by Mr. White who urges his old friend to accept thirty-five cents in exchange for the ‘exotic oddity’… The Sergeant is more than reticent, but with final admonition, sells the paw to Mr. White. Herbert retires as he must get up at the crack of dawn to go to work. The Sergeant takes his leave as well, and Mr. and Mrs. White are left to ponder the events of the evening. Believing the Sergeant’s story was little more than entertainment, the couple eventually decides to wish on the paw, if only for a good cause: they want to take the burden off Herbert of having to pay down their mortgage. To Mr. White’s great surprise, however, the paw writhes in his hand like a snake upon making a “not too greedy” wish for 350 dollars. He shrieks aloud, throwing it to the floor. Mrs. White attempts to comfort her husband by convincing him that his imagination simply got the better of him. The couple goes to bed.

INTERLUDE
Just before dawn. A quiet moment with Herbert as he sleepily prepares for yet another day of manual labor…

SCENE II
It is the next day. Mr. & Mrs. White enjoy a good laugh at how silly they were acting the evening prior. This is short-lived however, as The Messenger comes to their door to deliver some bad news: Herbert was hurt in a work-related accident, ‘but is not in any pain.’ The couple finally comes to understand what the messenger is getting at, and he proceeds with the last order of business: the company Herbert worked for wishes to offer the family a certain sum as compensation for their terrible loss… $350.

SCENE III
Mrs. White is crippled by suffocating grief. She and her husband alternate between blaming and consoling one another… But eventually she remembers: the paw; they still have two wishes left! Despite his initial protestations, Mr. White relents and makes another wish: “I wish my son alive again. I wish him to walk through the door!” At first nothing happens, and Mrs. White considers that perhaps Herbert is on his way from the cemetery. But eventually, there are—once again—three, sharp wraps at the door of the White’s humble home. Mrs. White is ecstatic, and runs to the door in an attempt to fling it open. Mr. White, finally understanding how the paw works, tries to stop her. She fights past him, struggling with the latch which has become stuck. Mr. White knows what he must do—the only thing left to do… He grabs the paw one last time and makes his final wish: “I wish my son dead! I wish him dead and at peace”… The knocking ceases just as Mrs. White succeeds in opening the door.

EPILOGUE
The Storyteller reenters to pose his final questions to the audience. Mr. White, Mrs. White, and Herbert conclude the opera in a ghostly canon…