9/9/2023 0 Comments Music songs of remembrance![]() ![]() In Out of Darkness, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer accomplish something remarkable. In addition to Out of Darkness, this disc includes a bonus video that explores how this brilliant opera was conceived and brought to life. Heggie has described what moves him to create these profound tributes to the Holocaust's legacy: "I'm particularly inspired by stories of social justice and the inequities of life, and how we are all connected as human beings despite those inequities.” Out of Darkness marks the fourth commission in Heggie and Scheer’s decade-long collaboration with MOR, and draws on their earlier works For a Look or a Touch (2007), Another Sunrise (2012), and Farewell, Auschwitz (2013). ![]() Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer tell these stories with uncompromising emotional honesty, and with deep compassion that never descends to pathos or sentimentality. The first act, "Krystyna," reveals the true story of Krystyna Zywulska, whose daring poems became anthems of defiance among her fellow prisoners in Auschwitz.Īct Two, "Gad," explores the fate of homosexuals during the Holocaust through the experience of Gad Beck and Manfred Lewin, two idealistic young loves in 1930s Berlin whose lives and love were torn apart during Nazi rule. Out of Darkness is a powerful portrait of survival that conveys the Holocaust's vast scope through emotionally rich depictions of those caught in its grasp. ![]() "Cipullo cycles nimbly through the full spectrum of emotions Stein and Picasso provoke in each other, unfailingly setting Mason’s illuminating and provocative libretto so it can be declaimed with great clarity." Performances and recording are of the highest standard. Both exude a sense of questioning what was and what might have been. "Cipullo's musical language is perfect for this, cogent harmonically and melodically." "The two pieces are excellently matched. "Cipullo weaves David Mason's ingenious, rhapsodic libretto into an absorbing, often lively, occasionally desultory narrative told in words and music that is translucently scored and makes full use of the five-member ensemble's colours, astonishingly vocal at times in their effect." Lori Laitman's song cycle In Sleep The World Is Yours sets three beautiful poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who was to perish in a Nazi labor camp in Ukraine at the age of 18. David Mason's libretto imagines an encounter between the ghosts of Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein, who reveal both their brilliance and their human flaws. Tom Cipullo's contemporary opera After Life explores the role of art in a troubled world and poses weighty questions about the artist's duty in confronting inhumanity. Their tragic understanding that both love and art derive their meaning from human mortality climaxes in some of the most moving music contemporary opera has to offer. Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti and his beautiful wife Fanni come intensely alive in a dance with death, facing their mortality in time of war. The consciousness of death-universal and inevitable-gives the deepest meaning to both love and art. But his choice must also be made in the face of certain death. What does it mean to be an artist in a time of global catastrophe? Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti in Tom Cipullo's powerful new opera, must choose between ordinary love and the vocation of his art. Tom Cipullo's extraordinary new opera sets these terrifying works against Radnóti’s desire to live and love. Out of a mass grave came some of the most haunting poems of the Holocaust, written by Hungary's Miklós Radnóti in the weeks before his execution. CD - THE PARTING Catherine Cook, mezzo-soprano Michael Mayes, baritone Laura Strickling, soprano Alastair Willis, conductor ![]()
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