Huang Ruo News

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of composer/librettist Huang Ruo (music influenced by Chinese folk melody, Western avant-garde and other styles, but unlike anything else you’ve heard) and director/designer puppeteer Basil Twist (a MacArthur “genius grant” winner in 2015). The four tales included in the piece, which Huang describes as “abstract and eternal,” kept the audience in its thrall for 80 minutes.

The Washington National Opera has gathered a company of first rate singers for a portmanteau of four, one-act operas called Written in Stone. Unfortunately, their fine skills and exceptional voices cannot make silk purses out of scores, libretti, and orchestrations that evade aesthetics, emphasize negatives, and ignore the connection implicit in musical theatre between the notes and the text. This world première requires an orchestra to seem to be playing a piece of music that is not the same piece of music as the singers are singing. The last time this many groups of unfriendly instruments had a gig in a first run house was probably PDQ Bach's last show in Carnegie Hall. Gesamtkunstwerk this isn't, and it lasts for two and a half hours.

Gounod's masterpiece of grand French opera, Roméo et Juliette, continues San Diego Opera's 2021-2022 season when it opens on Saturday, March, 26, 2022 for four performances at the San Diego Civic Theatre. Additional performances are March 29, April 1, and 3 (matinee), 2022.

Inspired by iconic monuments in Washington, D.C., and the ideals embodied by President Kennedy, 'Written in Stone' is a series of intimate short works interwoven into a single evening celebrating the Kennedy Center’s fiftieth anniversary.

Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) - Baltimore's premier presenter of chamber music ensembles and solo recitalists - presents the East Coast premiere of Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke's new, recital-length project how do i find you with pianist Kirill Kuzmin on Sunday, March 6, 2022 at 5:30pm.

St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, in association with PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now and Trinity Church Wall Street, today announced that the sonically rich and visually arresting Book of Mountains & Seas will make its U.S. premiere this March 15-20.

Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, will present Washington National Opera: Written in Stone on February 6, 2022 at 7:30 pm.

Celebrate Lunar New Year: Year of the Tiger with the San Francisco Symphony at this vibrant event that draws upon Asian traditions, past and present. Conductor Yue Bao makes her debut leading the Orchestra in The Butterfly Lovers Concerto and works by Huan-zhi Li, Tan Dun, Texu Kim, Tzyen Hsiao, and Liu Yuan, as well as traditional folk music.

Can we talk—about live opera in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast in the coming months?

A surveyor ponders the meaning of memory and monuments. A young girl scout seeks a place for herself in history. A Black father and son find themselves on opposite sides of a same-sex marriage rally. And the vision of 22-year-old Asian American undergraduate Maya Lin is the catalyst for a reappraisal of the Vietnam War.

Today, the directors of the PROTOTYPE Festival, alongside partners St. Ann's Warehouse, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Abrons Arts Center, announced the difficult decision to postpone this year's tenth anniversary festival to January of 2023, due to the current surge in COVID cases and the resulting safety risks, as well as logistical challenges including artist and staff illnesses, travel complications, and more. The Festival was scheduled to run January 7-16, 2022.

Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, has announced its spring 2022 season Featuring Commissions Celebrating New York's Modern, Street, and Vernacular Dance and Beatbox artists, and World Premiere of Third Bird by Isaac Mizrahi, Nico Muhly, and John Heginbotham.

OPERA America has announced the recipients of the 2022 IDEA Opera Residencies (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access) program, an initiative that provides New York City-based composers and librettists of color an opportunity to explore opera as an expressive medium. The program is supported by the Katherine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund of The Scherman Foundation.

St. Ann’s Warehouse will again join forces with PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now to present the U.S. premiere of the sonically rich and visually arresting Book of Mountains & Seas, January 11-15, as part of the tenth anniversary PROTOTYPE Festival.

Oh, sure, give us Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Laura Kaminsky, Kevin Puts, Terence Blanchard, Paul Moravec, Huang Ruo and all the other fabulous composers at work today. But let’s talk about Rossini--and it’s hard for anyone who attended the concert the other night at New York’s 92nd Street Y not to. With tenor Lawrence Brownlee, (bari)tenor Michael Spyres and pianist Myra Huang presenting us with a dizzying array of what Brownlee called “barnburner pieces, back to back,” there was not much more to do than stand up and scream for more.

In a new panel hosted by Works and Process at the Guggenheim, composer Huang Ruo and writer David Henry Hwang discussed their newest collaboration, 'M. Butterfly蝴蝶君,' with moderation by Jim Robinson.

Del Sol Quartet and the vocal ensemble Volti will give the world premiere performance of internationally acclaimed composer Huang Ruo's “Angel Island - Oratorio for Voices and String Quartet” at the newly renovated Presidio Theatre.

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music announces the fourth season of the China Now Music Festival, from October 12 to 17. The festival's concerts will take place at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

Works & Process, the performing arts series at the Guggenheim, begins its fall 2021 Season with a return to evening performances in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Peter B. Lewis Theater this September and October at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128.

This year, 6 composers and 3 librettists have been selected to receive fellowships, including composers Gabrielle Herbst, J.E. Hernández, Raquel Acevedo Klein, Paul Pinto, Tidtaya Sinutoke and Ania Vu, and librettists Jeesun Choi, Isabella Dawis, and Troy Defour.