Washington National Opera Announces Full Schedule for American Opera Initiative
WASHINGTON)—Washington National Opera (WNO) today announced details for the fourth season of the American Opera Initiative, its comprehensive commissioning program that brings contemporary American stories to the stage while fostering the talents of rising American composers and librettists. Three pairings of new opera composers and librettists—Christopher Weiss and John de los Santos, David Clay Mettens and Joshua McGuire, and Sarah Hutchings and Mark Sonnenblick—will premiere new one-act operas, each based on a contemporary American story, in a semi-staged concert performance on December 2, 2015 in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Composer Luna Pearl Woolf and librettist Caitlin Vincent, an alumnus of the program's second season, will present their new hour-long work Better Gods—based on the life of Queen Lili'uokalani, the last monarch of Hawaii—on January 8 and 9, 2016 in the Terrace Theater.
Karyn Levitt to Perform ERIC BENTLEY'S BRECHT-EISLER SONG BOOK, 2/3
Singer Karyn Levitt, with pianist Eric Ostling, will perform Eric Bentley's Brecht-Eisler Song Book, a unique evening that features the songs of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), set to poetry by Bertolt Brecht and other noted writers, in English versions by Eric Bentley, Monday February 3 at 7:30 PM at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia/Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway (entrance on 95th Street). Eric Bentley, now 97 years old, is the first translator into English of Brecht's plays and poems, introducing Brecht's work to American stages in the 1940's and 50's. Bentley has now unlocked Hanns Eisler's starkly beautiful songs, many set to poems by Brecht, to be performed by soprano Karyn Levitt, with whom he has worked closely since 2011.
