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Peter Eötvös' Angels in America in US Premiere at Opera Unlimited in Boston

Jun. 01, 2006

Beat FurrerPeter Eötvös’ Angels in America, with a libretto by Mari Mezei, based on the play by Tony Kushner receives it North American premiere at Opera Unlimited in Boston this month, a collaboration between Opera Boston and Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Performances take place on June 16, 17, and 20 at 8:00 p.m. and June 24 at 3:00 p.m. in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts. The Opera Unlimited premiere will be directed by Steven Maler, Artistic Director of Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and conducted by Gil Rose.

Set in New York City in the mid1980s, Angels in America is based on the Pulitzer-prize winning two-part stage play ("Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika") by Tony Kushner which remains one of the most important and most performed dramatic works of 20th-century American literature. The Transylvanian-born composer and conductor Peter Eötvös has reimagined Kushner's apocolyptic saga of people struggling with AIDS and produced a new music-theater work that focuses squarely on the passionate relationships that develop among the vivid characters, some real and some imagined. Eötvös' work amplifies the permanently uncertain state of our visions and transcendent states, creating a thrilling merging of hallucination and reality. The original seven-hour epic is now a two-act chamber opera, sung in English and lasting approximately two and a half hours.

Transylvanian-born Eötvös is internationally known for his composing and conducting. Angels in America was commissioned by Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and premiered there in November 2004. The Paris production was filmed for PBS’ Great Performances and will air later this year. Summer 2005 saw its German premiere in Hamburg.

Gil Rose, music director of Opera Unlimited remarks, “Angels in America, though clearly of its time, has surprising currency. Its messages of faith, despair and redemption reveal emotional subcurrents of a timeless nature. It’s exactly the kind of groundbreaking work that Opera Unlimited is proud to stage in Boston.”

To learn more about the life and music of Peter Eötvös, please visit www.schott-music.com. For more about Opera Unlimited's production of Angels in America, please visit www.operaboston.org.

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