Death Of Klinghoffer Research Articles

A Conversation with James Maddalena, Part 1

James Maddalena (born 1954) is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston, directed by Peter Sellars. He has since reprised it over a hundred times. It was recorded for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddalena’s role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic.[3] He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers. In addition to American opera, Maddalena has sung a broad operatic repertoire which ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and Verdi to modern composers like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. He is also a concert artist whose regular performances include works by Bach, Handel and Schubert, as well as those by modern composers.

A Conversation with James Maddalena, Part 2

James Maddalena (born 1954) is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston, directed by Peter Sellars. He has since reprised it over a hundred times. It was recorded for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddalena’s role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic.[3] He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers. In addition to American opera, Maddalena has sung a broad operatic repertoire which ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, and Verdi to modern composers like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. He is also a concert artist whose regular performances include works by Bach, Handel and Schubert, as well as those by modern composers. (Part 2 of a 2-part series.)

Tansy Davies Between Worlds, Barbican Theatre, London

As suggested by its title, Tansy Davies's new opera Between Worlds is more fantasy than a representational depiction of historic events. Co-commissioned by ENO and the Barbican, where it was premiered on 11 April 2015 with a superb cast conducted by Gerry Cornelius (I attended on 21 April), it raises a central aesthetic and political question about the extent to which public figures of our time can be drawn and re-drawn in art. Recent docu-operas, such as Nixon in China, the more recent Anna Nicole and, of course, the highly controversial The Death of Klinghoffer suggest the issue is a live one.

Proms 2004: Adams, Corigliano, Saariaho

Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the third opera in John Adams's trilogy, Doctor Atomic, seems set fair to juxtapose modern political forces, personalities and moral debate. Here admiration for Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow geniuses who created the atomic bomb is contrasted with the enormity of destruction wreaked on Hiroshima. With over a year to go to the opera's world première by San Francisco Opera, the composer himself conducted Easter Eve 1945, the opening of Act 2, at the Albert Hall on 22 August with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Audra McDonald as soloist.

Performance and Ethics: Questions for the 21st Century

One of the most prolific and multifaceted contemporary artists, Peter Sellars in recent years has directed a wide range of works in theatre, opera, television, film, and video, in Europe and the U.S. He is well-known for his highly original earlier stagings of Mozart’s operas Cosi Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, as well as premieres of John Adams’s Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and El Nino. He has been Director of the American National Theatre in Washington, Artistic Director of the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals, and is currently a Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Sellars has collaborated with The Wooster Group, created radio episodes for The Museum of Contemporary Art’s “The Territory of Art” series, and directed the feature film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. His productions have been commissioned by the major opera houses and theatres in Europe, appearing also in many festivals abroad. Among the recent works he has staged are Olivier Messaien’s St. Francoise d’Assise, Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier, Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Tan Dun’s Peony Pavilion. He also worked with Bill Viola on the 25th year survey of the video artist’s work. Sellars’s latest theatre piece, Children of Herakles, is one of the many classics he has staged throughout his career, a project created with the participation of refugees, government officials, writers, and immigrants in several European cities and in the U.S., in Boston. Sellars is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contributions to European culture. This interview was taped during the run of Children of Herakles at Teatre Lliure as part of Forum Barcelona 2004, on June 16, 2004.

Opera as ‘Information’: The Dramaturgy of The Death of Klinghoffer

Opera as ‘Information’: The Dramaturgy of The Death of Klinghoffer

The Performance of Pastoral Politics: Britten's Albert Herring

British historians and cultural commentators have tended to fight shy of opera as a site of critical and political engagement. Dismissed as a rich person's entertainment, its radical possibilities are ignored by all but a specialist few. Opera has, however, always been a critically political force, from Claudio Monteverdi's uncompromisingly humanist critique of sensual and political corruption in L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642-3), to John Adams's controversial exposition of the terrible symmetry of Israeli and Palestinian enmity in The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), an opera which was jointly commissioned by Glyndebourne but has yet to be performed there. Opera has a long and honourable tradition of championing in song the otherwise voiceless. In the season of 2002, for instance, Covent Garden staged an opera concerming the tragic collapse of a destitute soldier, victimized into insanity and provoked into the murder of his common-law wife by the selfishly deluded experiments of an exploitative doctor, and the selfrighteously patronizing injunctions of an army captain. Alban Berg's Wozzeck is an uncompromising score, inspired in part by its composer's experience of dehumanization as a member of the Austrian army in the First World War; like so many Viennese of the generation that came of age around 1900, Berg was fascinated by the misfortunes of the socially marginalizedI Earlier in 2002, English National Opera had memorably staged Berg's Lulu, the drama of a street-girl who both exploits and is exploited by the fatal

From Liszt to Adams (II): ‘The Black Gondola’

The Black Gondola, John Adams's transcription for chamber orchestra of Liszt's La Lugubre Gondola II, composed in 1989 for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota, shows how – as in the case of Wiegenlied (discussed in an earlier article, Tempo 175) – the composer has been attracted to those aspects of Liszt's late style which inter–connect with minimalism: regular, and fluid, rhythmic textures; economy of thematic material which undergoes ‘minimal’ transformation; extensive phrase repetition in a ‘sequencing’ structure; harmonic ambiguity and elusiveness. In addition, in this case, a strong programmatic element is evident in the symbolism of the original piece which is heightened considerably within Adams's transcription: an expression of the dramatic style which has influenced his recent stage works, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer.