Steven Stucky's THE CLASSICAL STYLE to Make New York Premiere at Carnegie Hall, 12/4

When Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Steven Stucky's first opera - The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) - premiered at the 2014 Ojai Music Festival, it was hailed as "a dazzling display of inventiveness and broad comical delight" (San Francisco Chronicle) that, thanks to "the bliss and beauty of the music" (San Jose Mercury News), "proved unexpectedly moving" (Santa Barbara Independent). Composed to a libretto by MacArthur Fellow Jeremy Denk, Stucky's comic opera - a co-commission of Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Ojai and Aspen Music Festivals - is now set to receive its East Coast premiere. On December 4, The Classical Style comes to Carnegie's Zankel Hall, where Grammy Award-winning conductor Robert Spano leads a stellar octet of vocal soloists, five of whom have been nominated for the inaugural Warner Music Prize, and New York-based orchestral collective The Knights -dubbed "the next generation of classical music" (Performance Today host Fred Child) - in a semi-staged production by Mary Birnbaum.

One of America's most frequently performed living composers, Steven Stucky was recognized with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his Second Concerto for Orchestra. The compositions in his extensive catalogue range from large-scale orchestral works to a cappella miniatures for chorus, yet although he has written oratorios - including August 4, 1964, a 2013 Grammy nominee for "Best Contemporary Classical Composition" - The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) represents his first contribution to the operatic genre. As Stucky told Opera News:

"I had been wanting to try opera, but I had to be persuaded that I had the chops for it, because it's a pretty tough assignment! But as I began to read drafts of the libretto, and I began to laugh out loud, pretty soon it was irresistible."

The libretto in question is by Avery Fisher Prize-winning pianist Jeremy Denk, also an accomplished writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and New York Times Review of Books. However improbably, Denk's inspiration was The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, the late Charles Rosen's National Book Award-winning masterpiece of musical scholarship. Opera News explains:

"Characters in the opera include not just Charles Rosen and the three title characters from his book but Tonic (a bass-baritone), Dominant (soprano) and Sub-Dominant (mezzo), who are involved in a love triangle. Also present are a disheveled character who turns out to be the Tristan Chord, Robert Schumann (a mezzo), and Donna Anna and the title character from Don Giovanni. But, explains Denk, 'The real protagonist is music itself, and what it does.'"

As a result, Stucky's writing draws both on his own post-tonal compositional voice, and on a scholarly yet playful appropriation of Classical stylistic tropes. At the opera's premiere, Classical Voice North America characterized his music as "spraying mischievous quotes and parodies at us in a torrent of bemused erudition," and pronounced the results "a hit with Ojai's doting audience and with at least one music critic who laughed his head off at many of the musical in-jokes." All told, as the Boston Globe concluded, The Classical Style "works improbably well, thanks to the intertwining of Denk's witty libretto and Steven Stucky's clever pastiche of Classical-era music."

At the upcoming East Coast premiere, all The Classical Style's characters will be shared between the eight vocal soloists: soprano Jennifer Zetlan, mezzo-sopranos Rachel Calloway and Peabody Southwell, tenors Dominic Armstrong and Keith Jameson, baritone Kim Josephson, and bass-baritones Aubrey Allicock and Ashraf Sewailam. Zetlan, Calloway, Southwell, Armstrong, and Allicock are all nominees for the first Warner Music Prize, which will be awarded next year in association with Carnegie Hall.

As at Ojai, the singers will be accompanied by innovative young chamber orchestra The Knights, now making its Carnegie Hall debut under the leadership of the Atlanta Symphony's Robert Spano. The Knights recently launched a three-year residency funded by the Mellon Foundation at Brooklyn's Roulette, where their performance featured special guest Gil Shaham and impressed the New York Times as "polished and jubilant." Further information about The Knights is available at www.theknightsnyc.com.

Archived footage of the opera's live-streamed world premiere performance at last summer's Ojai Music Festival is available here. Further acclaim for The Classical Style: An Opera (Of Sorts), and details of the upcoming New York performance, are provided below.

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