John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.
"The Snow Queen" is an original fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. It was first published 21 December 1844 in New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection. The story centers on the struggle between good and evil as experienced by Gerda and her friend, Kai.
Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He has been described as a key figure of theatre and opera from the last 50 years.
Doctor Atomic is an opera by the contemporary American composer John Adams, with libretto by Peter Sellars. It premiered at the San Francisco Opera on October 1, 2005. The work focuses on how leading figures at Los Alamos dealt with the great stress and anxiety of preparing for the test of the first atomic bomb.
Hart's Hope (1983) is a fantasy novel by American writer Orson Scott Card, written in second person.
La guirlande is an opera by the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau with a libretto by Jean-François Marmontel. It takes the form of an acte de ballet. It debuted on 21 September 1751 at the Paris Opéra.
Le papillon is a 'fantastic ballet' in two acts of 1860, with choreography by Marie Taglioni and music by Jacques Offenbach to a libretto by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges.
Zoroastre (Zoroaster) is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, first performed on 5 December 1749 by the Opéra in the first Salle du Palais-Royal in Paris. The libretto is by Louis de Cahusac. Zoroastre was the fourth of Rameau's tragédies en musique to be staged and the last to appear during the composer's own lifetime. Audiences gave the original version a lukewarm reception, so Rameau and his librettist thoroughly reworked the opera for a revival which took place at the Opéra on 19 January 1756. This time the work was a great success and this is the version generally heard today.
Maria Guinand is an internationally renowned choral conductor.
Eric Owens is an American operatic bass-baritone. He has performed both in new works and reinterpreted classic repertoire. In 1996 he won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions.
Jessica Rivera is an American soprano of Peruvian-American ancestry.
Schola Cantorum de Venezuela is one of the most important choral societies belonging to the growing choral movement in Venezuela. SCV was founded in 1967 by Alberto Grau, a Venezuelan composer and conductor born in 1937 in Barcelona, Spain. Currently, the choir is conducted by María Guinand and Ana María Raga, with the assistance of young conductors Pablo Morales Daal and Victor Leonardo Gonzalez. Schola Cantorum de Venezuela works under the sponsorship of the Fundación Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, a Non-Profit Organization that oversees several other choirs such as: Cantoría Alberto Grau, Pequeños Cantores de la Schola and Schola Juvenil. Together they provide a complete system to promote and develop choral music in Venezuela.
Ana María Raga is a Venezuelan musician, choir and orchestra director, pianist, arranger, composer and teacher. She has won national and international prizes in the field of choral singing. She is the founder and president of the Aequalis Foundation.
Le dernier sorcier is a chamber opera in two acts with music composed by Pauline Viardot to a French libretto by Ivan Turgenev. It was first performed privately on 20 September 1867 at the Villa Turgenev in Baden-Baden and received its first public performance at the Court Theatre in Weimar on 8 April 1869. The story revolves around Krakamiche, an old and once-powerful sorcerer whose presence in the woods has upset the elves living there, and a romance between the sorcerer's daughter Stella and Prince Lelio, whose marriage comes about through the intervention of a Queen of the Elves.
"A Flowering Tree" is a short story written by A. K. Ramanujan in his 1997 book A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India. In actuality, it is a Kannada folklore told by women which is translated by A. K. Ramanujan to English. The story was collected in several versions in the Karnataka region over the span of twenty years by Ramanujan and his fellow folklorists. It is a woman-centered tale and attempts to establish a sisterhood between women and nature. This has been regularly done by many feminist writers.
Hallelujah Junction is a two-CD retrospective album of works by John Adams on the Nonesuch label, published as a companion to his memoir Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. It is also available in mp3 format.
The Magic Mirror is a ballet-féerie in four acts and seven scenes, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa with music by Arseny Koreshchenko. The libretto is based on the 1812 fairy tale Snow White by the Brothers Grimm and the 1833 poem The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights by Alexander Pushkin. The ballet was premièred on the 22 February [O.S. 9 February] 1903 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Martine Bailly is a French classical cellist who held the position of supersoloist, principal first cello of the Orchestre de l'Opéra national de Paris for 26 years.
The Boy with a Moon on his Forehead is a Bengali folktale collected by Maive Stokes and Lal Behari Day.
The Turtle Prince or The Tortoise Prince refers to a group of South Indian and Sri Lankan folktales wherein a prince in turtle form marries a human princess.
