by Nicholas Stevens
This month, a cast of students gave a genre-bending, violent new opera its Northeast Ohio premiere run at a coffee shop — and all five performances sold out in advance. The scenario may sound unlikely, but Angel’s Bone, a chamber work with music by Du Yun and a libretto by Royce Vavrek, has exceeded expectations since its 2016 premiere. On January 31, the Oberlin Opera Theatre debuted its production of Angel’s Bone, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music Composition, in the Cat in the Cream Coffeehouse. [Read more…]
While Sergei Prokofiev’s third piano concerto receives more than its fair share of visits to the concert stage, and even his first concerto makes appearances from time to time, what about the composer’s second concerto — why does it languish in obscurity?
In an age when the word “opera,” to most, means the historical canon — that body of works that recirculate through the world’s houses each year — it bears repeating as often as possible that new efforts in the genre have flourished of late. Thanks to the combined efforts of the Cleveland Opera Theater, the Maltz Performing Arts Center at the Temple-Tifereth Israel, the Cleveland Composers’ Guild, and the Baldwin Wallace and Oberlin Conservatories of Music, Northeast Ohio audiences recently had a chance to hear scenes from three new works-in-progress by area composers and librettists.
