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BRAND NEW PHILIP GLASS OPERA FOR MUSIC THEATRE WALES IN 2013 |
Music Theatre Wales has announced that the American composer Philip Glass will write a new chamber opera expressly for the company, based on the Kafka short story, The Trial. The opera is due for production in 2013 – the year of the Music Theatre Wales’s 25th anniversary.Music Theatre Wales will also record its UK Premiere production of Glass’s opera, In the Penal Colony for the composer’s own music label, Orange Mountain Music, for future release. These are two further milestones for the innovative Welsh chamber opera company which has commissioned operas from leading names such as Michael Berkeley and Ian McEwan - their recent collaboration on For You created worldwide interest - as well as discovering new compositional talent, most notably the Welsh-based composer Lynne Plowman. Music Theatre Wales has also been responsible for landmark productions of classic contemporary operas by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and one of the leading voices of European new music, Philippe Boesmans. Music Theatre Wales’s relationship with the music of Philip Glass goes back to 1989, when the company gave the European Premiere of The Fall of the House of Usher, also revived in 1990 and 1993. The success of that production led to Music Theatre Wales’s decision to stage the UK Premiere of another of Glass’s so-called ‘pocket’ operas, In the Penal Colony, now coming to the end of a near sell-out twelve date UK tour. Michael McCarthy’s “taut, angry production” (Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday) has been widely praised, as has the brilliant playing of the string quintet drawn from the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble under Music Director Michael Rafferty. Philip Glass found the experience of working with Music Theatre Wales so obviously rewarding that he has offered to write another ‘Kafka’ opera for the company for 2013 – this time based on The Trial. As in In the Penal Colony, it will be intimate in scale and dark and claustrophobic in atmosphere. “I’ve enjoyed working with Music Theatre Wales. They are wonderful to work with and they seem to like these ‘odd’ pieces of mine, and they do them very well,” said Philip Glass in a recent BBC Radio 3 interview, adding: “I think of my pocket operas as neutron bombs – small, but packing a terrific punch”. Philip Glass remains one of the most popular and distinctive of all living composers. Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations, he has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times - indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music simultaneously. MTW records In the Penal Colony for OMM Music Theatre Wales will record In the Penal Colony for Orange Mountain Music, Philip Glass’s own music label. A quintet drawn from the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble - Miranda Fulleylove, Philippa Mo (violins), Gustav Clarkson (viola), Chris Allan (cello) and Kenneth Knussen (double bass) - will be conducted by Michael Rafferty, with the original singing cast of Music Theatre Wales’s recent production – baritone Omar Ebrahim as The Officer and tenor Michael Bennett as The Visitor. Philip Glass’s long-standing record Producer, Michael Riesman will supervise the recording, which will take place on November 27/28 at Angel Recording Studios in North London. |
| web site: www.musictheatrewales.org.uk |
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Tuesday, November 16, 2010 |
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