(Credit: Opéra de Montréal official website / American Lyric Theater official website) The New York City Opera has announced a spring 2021 season featuring works by the two prominent American composers. The NYCO will first stage the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which is a co-production with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Famed {…}
Anthony Davis is one of the most important opera composers working today. Often called the “Dean of African-American opera composers,” he has created a number of major operas, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. So for this week’s edition of the opera quiz, we take a look at the composer’s legendary career, with a special emphasis on his operatic output. As {…}
Anthony Davis’ “Amistad” didn’t have the greatest of premieres. The opera, which first appeared at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997, received middling reviews. The opera, which featured a libretto by Thulani Davis, then underwent a major revision and was then presented at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2008. Of this newer version, Opera Today noted that the work {…}
Thulani Davis is best known as the librettist for two of the most acclaimed operas of the late-twentieth century—“X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” and “Amistad.” Both projects were in collaboration with her composer, the composer Anthony Davis. Davis was born July 19, 1949 to parents from Virginia, but moved to New York City to attend Barnard College, {…}