Previous Operas: Push! (critics’ choice in The Telegraph and Classical Music Magazine) Show more
Recent Commissions:
Song cycle for Dawn Upshaw, commissioned for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala Gumboots, clarinet quintet commissioned by Carnegie Hall (2008) Caja de Musica, commissioned by Concert Artists Guild (2009)
Awards:
Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award (2008) Show less
Birthplace: Richmond, Yorkshire, England Show more
Other operas: The World Was All Before Them Lessons from Harmony On London Fields (Royal Philharmonic Award, 2005) The Feathered Friend The Hackney Chronicles Red Riding Hood On Spital Fields (Royal Philharmonic Award, 2006) The Enchanted Pig The Adventures of Pinocchio (Opera North, Minnesota Opera)
Plays: Einmal (The Stoked Festival, 2007) Show less
American opera is no different from opera in any other country, or indeed any other art form. Art’s role, in any form or country, surely is to offer spiritual nourishment and transcendence to its audience. Art must be the place in which a society is allowed to step out of its everyday mindset and contemplate the wider picture, the big questions. In America this role is perhaps even more important than it is in many other countries, as the popular-culture, mass-media image of the world we are offered every day is so pervasive that it can often be difficult to imagine that there is an alternative reality, an alternative sense of meaning in the world. But art must prove, by its passion and determination, by its mad commitment in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that there is an alternative.
*Indicates excerpt performed in VOX 2009
After the opening chorus, we meet the nightingale. Ivan is fascinated and wonders what her song means. His father, a wealthy merchant, scolds him, saying, “It doesn’t mean anything”. Later Ivan goes for a walk and happens upon some abandoned baby birds. He saves them from a storm with his coat. When the storm abates, a golden bird appears and thanks Ivan for saving her children. In return she will grant him any wish. Ivan wishes to understand the language of the birds. Show more
When Ivan returns home he is distraught to hear the nightingale sing that one day his father will come to him as a pauper and beg for money. Ivan tells his father this, and his suspicious father cruelly rejects his son, drugging him and pushing him out to sea on a boat. Ivan wakes to find himself surrounded by sailors who have rescued him.
On the sailors’ boat Ivan hears cranes flying above, warning of a storm. The captain doesn’t believe him, but after the storm does indeed come, the captain listens more carefully to him next time, when a flock of swans warns of pirates coming. The captain docks in a harbor and the crew is saved. Now Ivan finds himself in the harbor of this distant land.*
Soon he learns that the King is having trouble with noisy ravens. The King offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can make them go away. Ivan listens to what the ravens are saying and soon resolves their squabble. The ravens fly off and Ivan marries the Princess.
Meanwhile the merchant, Ivan’s father, has lost all his money, and his wife has died. He has become a pauper and sets off, homeless, to beg for food.*
Eventually the father arrives at Ivan’s palace, and, not recognizing his son, begs him for some small space in which to curl up and die. The nightingale flies in through the window and reveals father and son to one another, saying her prediction had come true. Ivan opens his arms to his father, and both weep for joy. In the closing chorus we learn that the most important lesson the nightingale has to teach us can be spoken in a single word: “Listen”.* Show less
