Hints and tips:
...The trend for operas that deal with contemporary historical settings really began with John Adams’s 1987 Nixon in China. Why the sudden change?...
...The most hard-hitting of the six is Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Black Milk (2019), a setting of Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) about the Holocaust....
...Despite Osborne’s criticisms, it is probably not a coincidence that all three are American: Philip Glass, John Adams and — dare we include him? — Stephen Sondheim....
...In Turnage’s uproarious, hard-edged score, Berkoff’s caustic social satire finds its ideal musical counterpart....
...In sum, Håkan is Turnage at his most characteristic — sharp, strong ideas, never time to get bored. At short notice John Wilson found himself conducting this concert in place of Daniel Harding....
...many opera houses are running into financial difficulties, a group of philanthropists is backing a charity that, with no offices and a tiny staff, staged its first opera — a new production of Mark-Anthony Turnage...
...It is, says the programme, “inspired by the book by Deborah Davis” and claims to deal with John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Mme Pierre Gautreau, which caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1884....
...It preceded Mark-Anthony Turnage’s much-hyped 2011 docu-opera Anna Nicole by more than 30 years....
...Mark-Anthony Turnage’s much-hyped Anna Nicole (about the ill-fated Texan model who married an oil tycoon 63 years her senior) sold out when it opened at London’s Royal Opera House in 2011....
...permeated Turnage’s musical thinking....
...John Cheek, Met veteran, grumbled knowingly in several bass roles....
...John Paul Jones was known as “the quiet one” in Led Zeppelin....
...A newly-commissioned fanfare by Mark-Anthony Turnage, called Canon Fever, set brass rhythms ricocheting across the Royal Albert Hall for three noisy minutes....
...Audiences have already seen John Macfarlane’s comically dowdy sets for Gianni Schicchi but those by Ultz for Il tabarro and by Miriam Buether for Suor Angelica will be new....
...The trailblazing docu-opera was John Adams’ Nixon in China , a three-act version of US president Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972, when he met chairman Mao....
...- hero-turned-war-victim Harry Heegan in The Silver Tassie) and John Adams (pioneering nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic)....
...John Adams’ Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer (about the Middle East conflict) take their cue from recent events....
...They range from roles Finley has created – Oppenheimer in John Adams’ Doctor Atomic and Harry in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie – to Wolfram’s Act 3 aria from Tannhäuser and the Toreador’s Song...
...And, most important, there is a new role to be learnt for a major new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage at the Royal Opera House....
...Next February it will show the premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera, Anna Nicole, about the life of model/actress Anna Nicole Smith....
...I work with John Scofield because he inspires me. The result may be a hybrid but there has always been an influence of popular music in classical.”...
...In his choice of commissions, he rarely went for the sort of big piece the Royal Albert Hall demands – a full-evening Mark-Anthony Turnage oratorio or a heavily scored Jonathan Lloyd symphony....
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