KURT WEILL AND STREET SCENE

– MORE THAN THREE PENNIES WORTH!

 When Weill’s THREEPENNY OPERA premiered in Berlin in 1928, he was already one of the most successful, popular and admired composers in Germany. Though he has been associated with Brecht and a theatre of social criticism, his wife Lotte Lenya stated that it had never been his intention to set the Communist Manifesto to music. He was above all a man of his time and believed that a composer’s job was to write for the audience in front of him!

 His music defies categorization and his compositions reflect the influence of Busoni, Stravinsky, Humperdinck, American Jazz, cabaret and the folk idioms of his native Germany and the USA.

Langston Hughes,

lyricist

Original Broadway

production of

STREET SCENE,

1949

©Culver Pictures Inc.

Elmer Rice’s Play STREET SCENE

won a Pulitzer Prize.

Kurt Weill’s STREET SCENE won

a Tony Award for Best Original Score.

Weill calls STREET SCENE an American Opera. Collaborating with Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes, his down-at-the-heels street is claustrophobic and teems with tenement life both hopeful and desperate. The original production was cast with card carrying opera stars from the Met and City Opera, who agreed to the grueling schedule. The show ran on Broadway for 148 performances, about two dozen more than PORGY AND BESS, Gershwin’s earlier attempt at American opera.

Musical director Maurice Abravanel, composer Kurt

Weill, and tenor Brian Sullivan ©Sony Entertainment

Weill, Rice,

and Hughes

JENNIFER TAVERNER …   From Bach to Tiefenbach

Time was, everybody wanted to be a specialist. In music this meant you only sang Italian verismo opera or German Lieder or Bach cantatas. But no more ... just ask Jennifer Taverner, who sings Rose in STREET SCENE.

 

“You must be a well-rounded artist these days”, she commented recently. And wellrounded she is, singing works of Kurtag at Tanglewood, in MESSIAH with Lydia Adams and the Amadeus Choir and ... wait for it! ... in Peter Tiefenbach’s SONGS FROM MY CUPBOARD, singing and managing the technical demands of Powerpoint, much to the amusement of her audience.

See it on YouTube: tavernersoprano

Jennifer Taverner    photo: Katie Cross

COLIN AINSWORTH –  An ‘A’ List Tenor

Colin Ainsworth is one in a long line of gifted Canadian singers who were featured early in their careers by OIC. He debuted with VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert as Pollux in Rameau’s CASTOR ET POLLUX (recorded by Naxos) and he has also been heard in our production of Donizetti’s ROBERTO DEVEREUX.

 

Well-established now as an A-list tenor, he appears regularly with the opera companies of Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto while international appearances in Greece, Edinburgh, Montpelier, Festival de Beaune, Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Glimmerglass Opera figure prominently in his schedule.

Colin Ainsworth as Fenton in FALSTAFF 2007

photo: Ed Ellis

SPEAK YOUR LINES CLEARLY!!

This was a famous exhortation from Noel Coward to actors and more recently from Monica Whicher to singers in her capacity as Lecturer at the Faculty of Music in English Song and Diction. Famed for leading roles on the opera stage, she is also renowned as a recital artist dedicated to communicating the text.

Monica Whicher will do so on stage with VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert as the adulterous Anna Maurrant, an unhappy tenement wife with an abusive husband. Text was as important to Kurt Weill as Hugo Wolf and Monica’s genius for dramatic truth through words set to music will bring the audience to the edge of their seats.

Monica Whicher

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ROBERT COOPER C.M. conducts STREET SCENE

Robert Cooper was the founder of our choral ensemble and has been its only conductor since that auspicious day in 1978 when they first took the stage for LA CLEMENZA DI TITO. Recently appointed as a member of the Order of Canada, Robert has conducted a number of our productions with orchestra over the years. He is conductor and artistic director of the Orpheus Choir, which continues to flourish under his guidance and Chorus Niagara, based in St. Catharines, has reached new heights. Weill’s STREET SCENE is a special treat for our VOICEBOX chorus as many of our emerging artists are members of the ensemble and will be featured in the larger roster of characters called for by the score.

VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert

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