Charlottesville Opera To Present Librettist Claudia Stevens For Lecture, 3/23

Librettist Claudia Stevens will give a free lecture for ticket holders and Virginia Festival of the Book participants before Charlottesville Opera's March 23performance of Middlemarch in Spring. She will describe her process of adapting George Eliot's masterpiece Middlemarch into the six-scene chamber work, Charlottesville Opera's first premiere in over 35 years.

Middlemarch in Spring, which had its world premiere in San Francisco in 2015, received rave reviews from the Encyclopedia Britannica and San Francisco Chronicle, both of which recognized it as a noteworthy new work. Charlottesville Opera will bring this new work to the East Coast for the first time on March 23 and 24 at The Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville, featuring a number of artists from the original cast, including renowned bass-baritone Philip Skinner.

Initially a composers' pianist and musical scholar, librettist Claudia Stevens' twenty-five-year crossover career as a performance artist and engagements throughout the United States, in Europe and Asia brought her to national attention. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts ("New Forms"), International Theater Institute and Virginia Commission for the Arts and artist residencies including the MacDowell Colony, RS9 Szinhaz in Budapest, Baltimore Theater Project and Gitameit Art Center in Burma. In 2007 she began her collaboration with composer Allen Shearer as the librettist of seven operas, all produced and for several of which she also was stage director. Their chamber opera Middlemarch in Spring, for which she shared a New Music USA grant with Shearer, premiered at San Francisco's Z Space in 2015. Stevens holds degrees in music from Vassar (summa cum laude), University of California at Berkeley and the DMA from Boston University. An Adjunct Associate Professor of Music at the College of William and Mary until 2005, she is currently on the faculty there as a Visiting Scholar.

Middlemarch in Spring marks Charlottesville Opera's first-ever collaboration with the Virginia Festival of the Book, which will be held from March 22-26, 2017. The festival is an annual celebration of books, reading, literacy, and literary culture that attracts more than 20,000 participants each year. Jane Kulow, Director of the Festival of the Book, echoes the company's enthusiasm for this piece: "We love seeing books brought to life in new ways, and we're delighted to collaborate with Charlottesville Opera to present Middlemarch in Spring during the 2017 Virginia Festival of the Book!"

For 40 years, Charlottesville Opera, the recently renamed Ash Lawn Opera, has produced high-quality opera and musical theater at affordable prices in Central Virginia. Their fortieth anniversary season marks its most ambitious yet, with performances of Middlemarch in Spring in March followed by Verdi's Rigoletto in July and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! in July and August. Charlottesville Opera also continues its longtime commitment to providing free educational programs to community members of all ages, including its upcoming Artist-in-Residence series, held in April. These programs reach over 1,500 participants annually.

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