ALERT: This afternoon at 2:30 p.m. in Overture Hall is your last chance to hear the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in “Carmina Burana” in the MSO’s spectacular season-closing program. Read three rave reviews by local critics:
But not all of the news has to do with politics, suicide bombings, increased troop commitments and fierce fighting in a civil war.
It also has to do with art.
Specifically, opera — that potent combination of theater and music.
The Long Beach Opera commissioned and recently premiered a new chamber opera based on the Iraq War and PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder), and us based on the life and work of U.S. Marine Christian Ellis . It is called “Fallujah” and it is the first such opera to be written. (A photo below is by Keith Ian Polakoff for the Long Beach Opera.)
You can hear librettist Heather Raffo and composer Tobin Stokes discuss the opera in the YouTube video at the bottom.
It makes The Ear wonder if it might find its way into an upcoming season of the Madison Opera, which tends to use its smaller winter productions to stage works that are newer, smaller, more adventurous and more exploratory.
Or maybe the University Opera at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music might find it a good choice for a student production?
Iraq war veteran and writer Brian Castner (below) will soon see his memoir “The Long Walk,” about his experience in dealing with war and PTSD, turned into an opera that is scheduled to receive its world premiere in 2014 at the American Lyric Theater in New York City which has commissioned the work.
The composer is Jeremy Howard Beck and the librettist is Stephanie Fleischmann. They are pictured in the photo below with Brian Castner in the center.
Recently NPR’s terrific classical music blog “Deceptive Cadence” featured a piece on the collaboration and subject matter. It included an overview with interviews and background plus an audio snippet that is also worth listening to
The Ear likes the idea. It is certainly is a different and more contemporary take on war and armed conflict than the romanticized and melodramatic versions one often finds in grand opera or even a lot of classic literature.
It seems more realistic and more in keeping with the current way that veterans wage armed conflict and then return home to a different, more personal and more difficult war.
We’ll have to see how good it is. (See the YouTube video at the bottom for the creators discussing the new opera.)
But if it holds up as a work of musical and theatrical art, it sure would seem a natural choice for Madison – perhaps the Madison Opera, which next season will stage Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” or at least the University Opera at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which can afford to be more experimental and controversial.