Well, COAA (that is the Canadian Operatic Arts Academy for those of you that missed my last blog) is finished. It has been an intense three weeks that culminated this past Saturday and Sunday with a performance of 15 scenes (a marathon performance of large scenes from everything from La Calisto, to Jephtha, to Rusalka, to Rigoletto, to Albert Herring, to Pelleas et Melisande, to everything inbetween). The performance was completed full, had to keep adding seats, and the audience was blown away. Then on Sunday, a repeat of many of the scenes with Orchestra London. Today was a postmortem and the program seems to have been a huge success. There are exciting things in the works for it next year, even bigger and more extensive, but I can reveal those just yet.
And now about those men in my life. They are John Dowland, George Crumb, Francois Couperin, Olivier Messiaen, and last, but not least, Kurt Weill. I'm hard at working with the dramaturgy and staging of the John Dowland cycle AOT will present as part of Baltimore Artscape with Monica Reinagel. The Crumb/Couperin are part of a large and well funded production of several pieces that has lots of video and multimedia, with two of AOT's sopranos, Emily Noel and Rebecca Duren. The production isn't until October, but I need to map out all the elements now so that the video design lab can start creating the technology to make it come to life. The Messiaen is for a staging of his songcycle Harawi that I'm doing in London in September, and of course the Weill is for Songspiel with Sylvia McNair. It is all the way in November, but I have to select the songs, the order, do translations of those not in existence yet, and orchestrate them all for our band.
One the other hand, I can't think of five men I would rather spend this last days in Canada with....
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