European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group

Bernard Rands's Vincent and Gregory Spears's Fellow Travelers at OPERA America's New Works Forum

Jan. 06, 2015

Bernard Rands's <em>Vincent</em> and Gregory Spears's <em>Fellow Travelers</em> at OPERA America's New Works Forum

As part of its New Works Forum, taking place January 11-14, OPERA America features showcase performances of excerpts from Bernard Rands’s Vincent as well as Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers. The annual Forum and its featured showcases, taking place at the National Opera Center in New York, are an opportunity to share strategies for the successful creation and production of new operatic works.

Rands’s Vincent is a two-act opera based on the life and work of Vincent van Gogh with a libretto by celebrated American poet J.D. McClatchy. The work, which received its premiere production by the Indiana University Opera Theatre in 2011, realizes Rands’s long-held wish to compose an opera on Van Gogh’s life. Rands elaborates:

[The] opera is a succession of ’tableaux’ each placing Vincent in contexts which were his real experiences thus revealing his complex character – that of genius artist, religious fanatic, alcoholic, epileptic, and unstable of temperament resulting in behavior ranging unpredictably between affability and violent aggression. The scenes suggest a more-or-less chronological outline of his late years; a transition from the ’dark’ environment of his early years, full of positive enthusiasms amid the dark surroundings, to the darkening of his inner light amid the brightness of the South. This narrative suggests a process of alienation and the degradation and diminishing of the human spirit culminating in madness and suicide.

New Works Forum 2015 includes a reading of J.D. McClatchy's complete libretto for Vincent by actors alongside performances of Scenes 1 and 2 from Act I and all of Act II from the opera, in both piano/vocal and orchestral settings.

The New Works Forum also features a showcase of excerpts from Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers, a new stage work in development with a libretto by Greg Pierce. Based on the best-selling novel by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers is a journey through the world of the 1950’s American witchhunts, revealing an intimate, personal story set against the public, political backdrop of the “Lavender Scare.”

For more information on Bernard Rands and Gregory Spears, visit schott-music.com. 

Details on the OPERA America New Works Forum can be found at operaamerica.org. 

Bernard Rands
Vincent (2011)
libretto (Eng) by J.D. McClatchy
for 2 sopranos, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, tenor, 2 baritones, 2 basses, light baritone/low tenor, SATB chorus, ballet/dance troupe
3(3.pic&afl).2.3(3.bcl).2-4.3.2.btbn.1-timp.2perc-hp.cel.acc.pno-str
110’

Gregory Spears
Fellow Travelers
libretto (Eng) by Greg Pierce
based on the novel Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon
for 2 sopranos, mezzo-soprano, tenor, 5 baritones and ensemble
fl.2ob-2tbn-perc-kybd-str
100’

News