A música operática de Adams e Glass têm-me acompanhado ultimamente. Aqui ficam uns textos/colagens sobre os dois compositores e uma selecção de quatro óperas imperdíveis.
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986), On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003), and Shaker Loops (1978), a minimalist four-movement work for strings. His well-known operas include Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb.
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. One of the highest profile composers writing "classical" music today, he is often said to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. His music is also often (controversially) described as minimalist.
He has lately distanced himself from the "minimalist" label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures."[5] Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called "minimalist", he has since evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist”.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written works for the musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble, as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas, and film scores. Glass counts many artists among his friends and collaborators, including visual artists, writers, film and theatre directors, and choreographers. Among recent collaborators are Glass's fellow New Yorker Woody Allen, Stephen T. Colbert, and poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.
Operas from Glass
Akhnaten | Appomattox | The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down | Einstein on the Beach | Galileo Galilei | Hydrogen Jukebox | The Juniper Tree | Kepler |The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 | Monsters of Grace| The Photographer | Satyagraha | The Sound of a Voice | The Voyage | Waiting for the Barbarians.
SYNOPSIS
Doctor Atomic is an opera by the contemporary American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera on 1 October 2005. The work focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb (the "Trinity" test) was being prepared. In 2007, a documentary was made about the creation of the opera, titled Wonders Are Many.
Nixon in China is an opera in three acts by John Adams, with a libretto by Alice Goodman. Adams' first opera, it was inspired by the 1972 visit to China by US President Richard Nixon. The work premiered at the Houston Grand Opera on October 22, 1987, in a production by Peter Sellars with choreography by Mark Morris. When Sellars approached Adams with the idea for the opera in 1985, Adams was initially reluctant, but eventually decided that the work could be a study in how myths come to be, and accepted the project. Goodman's libretto was the result of considerable research into Nixon's visit, though she disregarded most sources published after 1972.
Satyagraha (English pronunciation: /sʌtˈjɑːɡrəhə/, Sanskrit सत्याग्रह, satyāgraha "insistence on truth") is a 1979 opera in three acts for orchestra, chorus and soloists, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong.
Loosely based on the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, it forms the second part of Glass's "Portrait Trilogy" of operas about men who changed the world, which also includes Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten.
The title refers to Gandhi's concept of non-violent resistance to injustice, Satyagraha, and the text, from the Bhagavad Gita, is sung in the original Sanskrit. In performance, translation is usually provided in supertitles.
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five "knee plays" or intermezzos), scored and written by Philip Glass and designed and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. The music was written "in the spring, summer and fall of 1975." The premiere took place on July 25, 1976, at the Avignon Festival in France. The opera contains writings by Christopher Knowles, Samuel M. Johnson and Lucinda Childs. It is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired.
The work became the first in Glass' thematically-related Portrait Trilogy, along with Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). These three operas were described by Glass as portraits of men whose personal vision transformed the thinking of their times through the power of ideas rather than by military force.
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