ACC Music Presents
Whalesong
by Dana Kaufman
&
The Telephone
by Gian Carlo Menotti
Directed by Dr. Blythe Cates
Dr. Shane Anderson & Dr. Valeria Diaz, accompanists
Friday, April 25th
Saturday, April 26th
7:00 pm
Highland Recital Hall
Building 2000
Embedded Files
Casts
Whalesong:
Alex: David Dech* and Jalen Easley+
Aristotle: Mason Carter+ and Daniel Garcia*
Cachlot: Jaquilla Bowers* and Ansleigh Yates+
Essex: Marcel Bobe* and Daniel Garcia+
Pophyrios: Benjamin Cox+*
The Telephone:
Lucy: Kayleigh Hungerford+ and Bianca Youngblood*
Ben: Brian Rouston* and Angel Gomez+
* denotes a Friday night performance
+ denotes a Saturday night performance
Whalesong Program Notes
The impetus for this story was a news story librettists, Sarah LaBrie read about scientists using artificial intelligence to decode whale language. The scientists all seemed really smart and well-intentioned, and the technological aspect of it was innovative and cool, but something about it irked Sarah. Whales aren't talking to us. What is they don't want to be understood by us? What if they hate us? Shouldn't they? After everything we've done to their homes? Or what if they're indifferent? They're bigger, older and smarter than we are, and they will probably be here after we're gone. It never fails to amaze how humans tend to center ourselves in every story, so Sarah wrote this out of a desire to see what happens when other species articulate how silly that is. The whales are named after 1) a 19th century whaling ship that was destroyed by a sperm whale (the Essex), 2) an old word for sperm whale that means "big teeth" (Cachelot), and 3) a sixth century Byzantine whale (Porphyrios) who wrought so much havoc on whaling ships that h's mentioned, worriedly, in ancient texts by Greek historians of the time.
About: Dana Kaufmann
About: Dana Kaufmann
The work of Los Angeles-based composer-librettist Dana Kaufman centers disruptive opera and vocal music, accessible and inclusive stages, and the intersection of pop culture and classical music. Hailed as “whirlwind” (Gramophone), “ingeniously derived” (Sequenza21), and “dramatic…and powerfully funny” (Observer), Kaufman’s music has been heard in North America, Europe, and Asia. Her works have been featured at venues and festivals such as Carnegie Hall, New York Opera Fest, Contemporary Music Center of Milan, the National Gugak Center (South Korea), Seattle Opera’s Tagney Jones Hall, The Tank, Jordan Hall, Boston New Music Festival, National Opera Week, Hartford Opera Theater, Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall (Croatia), Ravinia Festival, Lowbrow Opera Collective, and Opera on Tap Chicago; they have been commissioned by GRAMMY-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko, the Louisville Ballet, Carlow Arts Festival (Ireland), Synchromy, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, Paradox Opera, and many others.
A Fulbright Research Fellow in Estonia, National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, winner of an OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Women Composers: Discovery Grant (supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation), and four-time American Prize honoree, Kaufman has given lectures at the LA Opera, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Leuphana Universität Lüneberg, Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and the Music by Women Festival as a frequent speaker on gender diversity in composition and composing for trans voice. Kaufman received her Bachelor of Arts in Music and Russian (magna cum laude) from Amherst College and her Master of Music in Composition from New England Conservatory. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition from University of Miami Frost School of Music, where she was the first Frost student to be a Dean’s Fellow and of which she is now a Centennial Medalist. She is Associate Professor in Music Composition at University of California, Riverside.
The Telephone Program Notes
Indispensable 21st-century communication device, or bane of real-world relationships? With video chat, texting, social media and more, mobile phones connect us as never before. But they demand so much of our attention that we may end up disregarding those dearest to us…
Lucy and Ben are two young lovers squeezing in time for a swift drink before Ben must dash for his train. He’s about to pop the most important question in his life – but can he compete with the relentless demands of Lucy’s mobile phone?
Gian Carlo Menotti’s exquisite 1947 opera is a romantic comedy in one act, written for just two singers and a chamber ensemble of instrumentalists. It's colorful, witty score brings together piquant humor with sly nods to the classics of grand opera.
The Telephone reminds us that forgotten joys lie in the real world around us – not on the screens of our mobile phones.
About: Gian Carlo Menotti
About: Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti, composer (b. July 7, 1911--d. February 1, 2007)
Gian Carlo Menotti became the most-performed contemporary opera composer of his era. He stood alone on the American scene as the first to create American opera with so much appeal to audiences that it became established in permanent repertory. He adapted his natural Italian gift for operatic drama and performance to the requirements of the American stage and changing times. According to fellow composer Ned Rorem: "It is not opinion but fact that Menotti singlehandedly revitalized the concept of living opera for Americans...and violently altered the nature of lyric theater here and, by extension, throughout the world."
Menotti was born in the country town of Cadegliano on Lake Lugano in Italy. His father was a prosperous businessman and his mother, although she had nine other children, was a talented musician, and taught her young son the rudiments of music. At age 10, Menotti wrote his first opera titled The Death of Pierrot, though it was never performed professionally. At age 13, when Menotti entered the Milan Conservatory, he had already written a second opera. In 1927, he came to the United States and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Rosario Scalero. Having received his diploma with honors from the Institute in 1933, Menotti began the libretto for his opera Amelia Goes to the Ball, an ebullient opera buffa, first staged in 1937 at Philadelphia's Academy of music by students of the Curtis Institute and then in New York with such success that the Metropolitan Opera accepted it for the following season. Amelia was responsible for Menotti's receiving a commission from NBC for a radio opera. The comic opera, first broadcast in 1939, was The Old Man and the Thief, which was later performed on stage by the Philadelphia Opera Company.
It was, however, with The Medium that Menotti was established as one of the foremost composer-librettist of modern opera. The tragedy, about a fraudulent spiritualist caught between the worlds of reality, which she cannot understand, and of the supernatural, in which she doesn't believe, had a run of 211 performances at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway (1947-48) and was accompanied by a "curtain-raiser," a totally different one-act comedy The Telephone.
Menotti's first full length opera, The Consul, considered by many to be his greatest work, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater March 15, 1950. This searing contemporary work describing the plight of political fugitives vainly trying to escape an unnamed police state but failing to obtain the necessary visa had an eight month run and received the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Award. It has since been translated into 12 languages and performed in more than 20 countries.
On Christmas Eve, 1951, the first opera written expressly for television, Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors was broadcast on NBC. The opera, influenced by Bosch's Adoration of the Magi, has become one of the most frequently performed of the 20th century. The composer's next effort, The Saint of Bleecker Street, a serious drama set in contemporary New York, which opened in New York December 27, 1954, won the Drama Critics Circle Award for the best musical play of 1954 and the Pulitzer Prize for 1955. It also received a Music Critics Circle Award for the best opera. Three years later, Menotti organized the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, staging old and new musical works.
In 1977, he inaugurated the American counterpart of the festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Menotti was later replaced as director of the Spoletto Festival, due to differences in his approach to music. Additional works evolved including The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, a cantata about the Children's Crusade of 1212, commissioned by the Cincinnati Music Festival Association, and Le dernier sauvage, an opera which premiered in France and was later given a lavish production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Operas for children are also included among his works. A Bride from Pluto, a humorous space opera was commissioned by the Kennedy Center. His Help, Help, the Globolinks!, which he considers "an opera in one act for children and those who like children," was commissioned in Hamburg.
In addition to his numerous operatic works, Menotti has enriched the artistic world with his ballets, including Sebastian ; Errand into the Maze; and The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore orchestral works (Apocalypse), and Landscapes and Remembrances, a cantata to his own autobiographical words. Menotti continued to compose--his most recent operas include Goya (1986) and The Singing Child (1993). In addition to being awarded the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts, Menotti was also chosen as the 1991 "Musician of the Year" by Musical America. According to critical appraisal by H. Wiley Hitchcock, "Menotti combined the theatrical sense of a poplar playwright and a Pucciniesque musical vocabulary with an Italian love of liquid language and a humane interest in characters as real human beings. The result is opera more accessible than anyone else's at the time.
Past Opera Workshop Performances
Hand of Bridge, Barber
2024
Little Red's Unusual Day, Davies
2022
Old Maid & The Thief, Menotti
2023
The Scarf, Hoiby
2024
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