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Premiere of Morton Subotnick's Jacob's Room: Monodrama at Juilliard

Oct. 02, 2013

Premiere of Morton Subotnick's <em>Jacob's Room: Monodrama</em> at Juilliard

On October 11, Jeffrey Milarsky leads Juilliard's AXIOM Ensemble in the world premiere of the revised version of Morton Subotnick’s Jacob’s Room: Monodrama. The performance, which takes place at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Lincoln Center, features Joan La Barbara as vocal soloist and is one of many events celebrating the 80th birthday year of the groundbreaking American composer.

Jacob’s Room: Monodrama, based on scenes from Subotnick’s chamber opera, Jacob’s Room, was originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and premiered on the symphony’s American Mavericks series in 2012 with La Barbara as soloist and Milarsky conducting. The 2013 revised version features additional movements as well as a new orchestration for voice, keyboard, string orchestra and electronics.

Jacob's Room is inspired by a variety of texts, including Plato’s Phaedrus, Eleni by Nicholas Gage, and the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. On the chamber opera, Subotnick states:

The opera that is Jacob’s Room takes place in Jacob’s mind as he struggles to accept the loss of his family in multiple devastating world conflicts. He tries to forget by turning inward, losing track of everything and everyone around him. Jacob longs for order and justice and beauty. He reads, studies and tries to absorb Platonic thought. A woman (the conscience of humanity) appears and forces him to accept, finally, what he has denied…not only the horror and the pain of his loss, but his sense of utter aloneness and his feelings of guilt for having survived.

Check out a recent profile on Morton Subotnick at www.newmusicbox.org.

For more information on Morton Subotnick, please visit www.schott-music.com.

Details on AXIOM Ensemble’s performance can be found at www.juilliard.edu

Morton Subotnick
Jacob’s Room: Monodrama (2012, rev. 2013)
for voice, keyboard, string orchestra and electronics
30’

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