Thursday, June 4, 2009

Thats what summer is for...

Here I am back in Bloomington. I finally arrived this past Tuesday, but this is the first chance I've had to write. My last days in Canada were great. I had a wonderful time getting to see my friend Timothy Vernon who is the conductor and artistic director of Pacific Opera Victoria, which now also performs as Opera London. I saw their Magic Flute with some fantastically talented young singers and Timothy and I got a lot of time to chat. Now I'm here at IU for a series of meetings about AOT's collaboration on Appartition/Visitation (staged songcycles by George Crumb and Francois Couperin) that we will do here in October. There is also exciting talk about future collaborations (perhaps even John Adam's El Nino) that have me busy here.

In the free time I am working on putting together a version of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" for performance in Amsterdam next Winter. Peter Brook did a version for two pianos (which is actually just a splitting of Debussy's original one piano reduction) that lasts about 90 minutes. After spending some time with the score, however, I'm not altogether happy with the changes he made. A lot of beautiful, and important, material was cut, including the sung lines of Yinold which are a fantastic addition. So it looks like I will do my own version. Also I'm orchestrating the songs for our Kurt Weill program with Sylvia McNair (who is here in Bloomington and I am happy to get to spend some time with again). And somehow I'm managing to help the Summer Opera Workshop with some acting classes for their students. Oh...and learn Dutch.

Happy Summer!