Moab fest features pianist-composer
"Tanglewood celebrated my birthday," Bolcom said in a phone interview, "and there have been a lot of other things going on. I've been on the road a lot this year."
When the Deseret News spoke with him, Bolcom was at the Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, Calif., where his 2004 opera, "A Wedding," was performed in a newly commissioned version for small orchestra. "The students here are fabulous," Bolcom said. "It was a great production."
Bolcom's cross-country travels this year will also bring him to Utah, where he will be the composer-in-residence at the Moab Music Festival, which begins Thursday. At the festival, Bolcom will play some of his own works as well as those of other composers.
Among his own compositions are the Violin Sonata No. 2 ("In Memoriam Joe Venuti") and a movement from the Clarinet Concerto. But the spotlight will definitely be on his one-act comic opera "Lucrezia."
"Lucrezia" is based on Machiavelli's story "La Mandragola" ("The Mandrake Root") that Mark Campbell transformed into a libretto for a comic opera. The work was premiered in March at Michael Barrett's Festival of Song in New York City, along with John Musto's one-act comedy, "Bastianello," also with a libretto by Campbell. Both will receive their western United States premieres in Moab on Sept. 5.
In an interview with the New York Times before the opera's premiere last spring, Bolcom described "Lucrezia" as a zarzuela imagined by the Marx Brothers. "I've always loved zarzuelas and I wanted to do one," he said, referring to the popular Spanish stage entertainment that's a cross between operetta and opera. "That gave me the chance to write tangos, jotas, habaneras and other Latin dances."
The work is in English and written for five singers and two pianists (the same scoring as "Bastianello"). Most of the ensemble that premiered the two works in New York will be on hand in Moab: singers Lisa Vroman, Becca Jo Loeb, Paul Appleby, Patrick Mason and Matt Boehler; and pianists Michael Barrett and David Shimoni.
A prolific composer, Bolcom considers himself a "theater man." Among his early works are three operas for actors that he wrote between 1963 and 1970. "I specifically wanted actors and not singers because back then it was hard to understand singers in English. And even today, few have the diction that my wife (mezzo-soprano Joan Morris) has, but it's better now, because these kids are taught better diction. But back in the '60s it was bad. (Composer Luciano Berio) called it British-Italian."
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