Photographs throughout the post show the puppets used in Don’t Blame Anyone. By Dan Gross Don’t Blame Anyone is the first opera by Eastman faculty members to premiere at Kodak Hall in 60 years. This piece combines music, puppetry, dance, and theatre into a two-act opera, and is a collaboration of performers from the United…
By Erik Elmgren This week, the Eastman Opera Theatre will present Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (performance dates and times are listed at the end of this post). The performances will feature two rotating casts of Eastman School of Music undergraduate and graduate students. Benton Hess, Distinguished Professor of Voice, serves as music…
On Saturday, November 12, in Rochester, NY, and Monday, November 14, at Lincoln Center, the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music Philharmonia Orchestra will present the world premiere performances of Letters from Georgia – a new song cycle by Kevin Puts. Puts, a Pulitzer Prize- winning alumnus of Eastman (BM ’94, DMA ’99), wrote…
The Eastman School of Music announced the Eastman Philharmonia, conducted by Neil Varon, will take the stage with Renée Fleming at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall on November 14, 2016. The performance will include a new composition by Eastman alumnus and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Kevin Puts, written specifically for Ms. Fleming and the Eastman Philharmonia.…
ROCHESTER, N.Y.—Renée Fleming, the world’s most sought-after and beloved soprano, has been appointed Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. “I am thrilled that Renée Fleming will be joining the University of Rochester’s fabulous Eastman School of Music as a Distinguished Visiting Artist,” said Joel Seligman, President and CEO of…
Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount is a challenging opera to bring off, but the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra did just that last week (April 10 and 12) in its concert version, with help from Eastman forces including the Eastman Rochester Chorus, Eastman Chorale, and several soloists chosen from recent graduates and current students. Conductor Michael Christie of…
…for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s presentation this week of Howard Hanson’s rarely performed opera (in fact, his only opera), Merry Mount. This three-act piece was written when Hanson was director of the Eastman School of Music, and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1934. The Rochester Philharmonic’s concert performance, conducted by Michael Christie, previews a…
Is it possible that we die “not for ourselves alone, but for each other”? This is one of the questions at the heart of Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, this French composer’s most ambitious work and one of the great 20th-century operas. Set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the opera tells the true…
These 19th century phonographs in the Collection Charles Cros, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, were photographed by Sarah Fuchs Sampson, a PhD student in musicology. Beginning in 1891, anyone with a private telephone line in France could subscribe to the Théâtrophone — and listen to live performances of opera in the comfort…