Guthrie Director Dowling will be on NPR this Friday

Guthrie director Joe Dowling will be featured on National Public Radio's "Performance Today" on Friday, May 23, airing in Minnesota on KSJN classical 99.5 at noon (for other NPR stations or to listen online, check the website http://performancetoday.publicradio.org). Dowling joins host Fred Childs as part of the show's week-long series on music and literature, discussing Shakespeare's influence on music and discussing how he uses music in his current hit production of A Midsummer Night's Dream now playing at the Guthrie through June 22.

A glorious celebration of young love and the power of imagination, A Midsummer Night's Dream has been hailed as "massively entertaining" by critics, who say "Midsummer has it all!" Information, photos and video of the production can be found at www.mymidsummer.com.

The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is an American center for theater performance, production, education and professional training. The Guthrie is dedicated to producing the great works of dramatic literature, developing the work of contemporary playwrights and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. Led by Director Joe Dowling since 1995, the Guthrie opened their new three-theater home on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in June 2006.

The Guthrie is located at 818 South 2nd Street (at Chicago Avenue), in downtown Minneapolis. To purchase tickets or season subscriptions call the Guthrie Box Office between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. daily at 612.377.2224 or toll-free 877.44.STAGE. For more information, or to purchase tickets online, visit www.guthrietheater.org.

"Performance Today" is one of America's most popular classical music radio programs, with more than 1.2 million weekly listeners on 237 stations around the country.

"Performance Today" features live concerts by famous artists in concert halls around the globe and from the American Public Media studios as well as interviews, news and features. Listeners to Performance Today, on any given day, may hear from performances in the great concert halls of New York, Prague, London, Berlin and Paris.

The list of concert performers and studio guests on Performance Today is a Who's Who of the classical music world: the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Yo Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Midori, Maxim Vengerov, Itzhak Perlman, Andrew Manze, Pierre Boulez, John Adams, John Tavener, Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming, Cecelia Bartoli, the Emerson Quartet, the Eroica Trio, Sir Simon Rattle, Lorin Maazel, Daniel Barenboim, Michael Tilson Thomas, Ravi Shankar, Mikhail Pletnev, Emanuel Ax, and Alfred Brendel, to name just a few. Several times each year, "Performance Today" also features young American soloists with the potential for great careers, as "Young Artists in Residence."

Through their masterworks, great writers and great composers have inspired and enriched each other for centuries, as they do today. This week, "Performance Today" explores this perennial love affair with recent performances from around the country and the world. You'll hear the insights of composers, performers, and writers who find language-music connections especially compelling: composers who set vocal music to poetry and other written forms, acclaimed performers who also write, and writers whose work incorporates vivid slices of musical experience. Great music drawn from this rich tradition—from early times to the present—illuminates each facet of the week's offerings.

Need more Classical Music Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...