DARKLING
Text: Darkling: A Poem by Anna Rabinowitz
Music by Stefan Weisman
“The Darkling Thrush” song by Lee Hoiby
About Darkling
Commissioned by American Opera Projects (AOP) DARKLING explores the outer edges of the operatic form with an experimental opera-theatre work conceived by Michael Comlish, with original music composed by Stefan Weisman and Lee Hoiby. Darkling was created for four singers (soprano / mezzo / tenor / baritone), seven actors, and string quartet with optional piano. This touring version of Darkling reduces the number of actors to one and is adaptable to multiple venues.
Spanning the decades from the 1930’s to the post-World War period, DARKLING is a remarkable story – both poignant and humorous – of love, loss, calamity and hope. Past and present blur, characters are swept along by the great forces of history and lives are bowed and buffeted in this uniquely moving and captivating work. “Brave and sensitive” (The New York Times), DARKLING uses opera, avant-garde theatre, vaudeville and cutting edge technology to create “an unlikely collaboration of Wagner, Sally Bowles and Steven Spielberg” (Time Out/New York). Performed in English, American Opera Projects’ dramatic tour-de-force views history not from a grand geo-political perspective but from the insightful, intimate outlook of a poet whose ordinary Polish-Jewish family is unexpectedly affected by extraordinary events of the Holocaust.
About the Creators
ANNA RABINOWITZ (text: Darkling: A Poem )
Anna Rabinowitz was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for 2001. She won the Juniper Prize for her first volume of poetry, At the Site of Inside Out, which was published by the University of Massachusetts in 1997. Her work has appeared widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, and Doubletake. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, and in The KGB Bar Reader. She edits and publishes the nationally distributed literary journal, American Letters & Commentary, and is a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America. Her most recent book, The Wanton Sublime, appeared in March 2006. For more information, visit www.annarabinowitz.com.
STEFAN WEISMAN (composer for Darkling)
Stefan Weisman opera FADE was premiered during Center City Opera Theater’s 2008 ConNEXTions presentations. Mr. Weisman first worked with American Opera Projects as a member of its annual Composers & the Voice program. His music has been heard at places such as Symphony Space, the June in Buffalo festival, the Flea Theater, and Guggenheim Museum’s “Works & Process” series. His compositions include chamber, orchestral and choral pieces, as well as music for theater, video and dance. Among his commissions are works for Sequitur, the Minimum Security Composers Collective, the Gay Gotham Choir, and the Oregon Bach Festival, which commissioned a piece in honor of George Crumb on the occasion of his 75th birthday. His orchestral work “The Bird Happens” was selected to be included in the American Composers Orchestra’s 2005 Underwood New Music Readings, and was conducted by Steven Sloane. His piece “From Frankenstein” won the Chicago Ensemble’s 2005 Discover America Competition and was presented by male-soprano Anthony Costanzo with the ensemble Newspeak, conducted by James Lowe in Merkin Hall’s “Ear Department: Emerging Composers” concert series, moderated by composer Michael Gordon. His piece “Skin Nails Hair” was performed in New York City by the Lost Dog New Musik Ensemble. Stefan participated in AOP’s Composers & the Voice during the 2003-04 season. For more information, visit his website.
LEE HOIBY (song composer – “The Darkling Thrush”)
Lee Hoiby is beloved by performers as diverse as Leontyne Price and Jean Stapleton, for his numerous settings of texts from Emily Dickinson to Julia Child. Mr. Hoiby was introduced to opera by his teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music, Gian Carlo Menotti, who involved him closely in the famed Broadway productions of The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street in the early 1950s. His works have been recognized by awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989 his work was the subject of a retrospective concert at the Kennedy Center on the American Composer Series, and a two-week festival of his work was presented by the music department of the University of California at Long Beach. His principal works include the operas The Scarf (1958 ), A Month in the Country (1964), Summer and Smoke (1971) and The Tempest (1986). He is also the composer of nearly 100 songs, as well as music for orchestra, solo instruments, chorus and the theater. He lives in upstate New York. For more information, visit www.leehoiby.com
Presented by CCOT September 8-12, 2009 as part of the Philadelphia Live Arts & Fringe Festival
Matt Gray, Stage Director
Maeve Hoglund, soprano
Hai-Ting Chinn, mezzo-soprano
Jon Garrison, tenor
Martin Hargrove, bass-baritone
Jason Switzer, baritone
Sharon Sigal, speaker
All performances at The Lantern Theater are double billed with The Always Present Present.