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James Conlon Brings US Premiere of Franz Schreker's The Stigmatized to Los Angeles Opera

Apr. 06, 2010

Los Angeles Opera presents the US premiere of Franz Schreker's The Stigmatized on April 10. Part of the Recovered Voices project spearheaded by James Conlon, the production also marks the first staging of a Schreker opera in the western hemisphere. A late-Romantic composer whose works were considered to be a continuation of the great Austro-German tradition of Wagner and Strauss during the 1910s and 1920s, Schreker's music fell under the unfortunate label of 'degenerate music' and was swiftly banned by the Nazi's. James Conlon comments on the music:

As in Wagner and Strauss, the orchestra is the protagonist. Schreker's massive forces and rich harmonic language are manipulated to create new sonorities as they tailor themselves to their dramatic situation.... Schreker constructs scenes that are pre-cinematic in their ability to "cut" from one subject to another without warning or interruption; his orchestra transforms itself on command from conversation to rhetoric, beauty to ugliness, love to violence, and lucidity to insanity.

The LA Opera production, directed by Ian Judge and sung in German, continues through April 24. The operatic tragedy features tenor Robert Brubaker in his LA Opera debut as the beleaguered artist Alviano, whose island paradise Elysium becomes the breeding ground for illicit human desires. Soprano Anja Kampe plays Alviano's love interest Carlotta.

Visit www.losangelesopera.com for more information on LA Opera's production of The Stigmatized.

Learn more about the works of Franz Schreker at www.universaledition.com.

Franz Schreker
The Stigmatized* (1911/1913-15)
opera in 3 acts
libretto (Ger) by Franz Schreker
*LA Opera will be performing the reduced instrumentation by Juilliard conductor George Stelluto: 3.3.3.2-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc-hp.cel.pno-str
150’

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