Stefan Weisman is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He composes opera, chamber music, orchestral music, as well as music for the theater, video and dance.
Raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, Weisman credits his passion for music starting with his participation in the orchestra at East Brunswick High School. [1]
His opera Darkling, with a libretto by Anna Rabinowitz was commissioned, developed and produced in 2006 by American Opera Projects. Elements of composer Lee Hoiby’s song “The Darkling Thrush” were used as source material for the opera's music. Darkling was included in the Guggenheim Museum's "Works & Process" series, and premiered at the East 13th Street Theater. In a New York Times review, Anthony Tommasini described Weisman's music as "personal, moody and skillfully wrought." [2] Darkling was released internationally by Albany Records in 2011. Of the CD, Gramophone Magazine wrote: “Weisman unfolds his emotional tapestry with confident strokes…resulting in something resembling a high-art radio drama.” [3]
Weisman's opera Fade, with a libretto by David Cote, was commissioned and produced in 2008 by Second Movement Opera.
Weisman was a resident artist at the HERE Arts Center, where he developed an opera with Cote, based on the short story "The Scarlet Ibis" by author James Hurst. With Cote, he is creating an opera, American Atheist, about the life and violent death of Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
He was a recipient of a 2007 commission from Bang on a Can, and his music has also been performed by the Miró Quartet, Lisa Moore, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and Newspeak. He wrote the music for the play Calabi-Yau. In 2012, when his song "Twinkie" was featured on the nationally syndicated program The Wendy Williams Show, the host said, "Very unique...You're not going to hear opera like this anywhere else...Fabulous!" [4]
He studied composition at Bard College with Joan Tower and Daron Hagen, and at Yale University with David Lang, Jacob Druckman, Ezra Laderman and Martin Bresnick. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011, where he studied composition with Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey and Barbara White.
Presently, he is a music instructor at Bard High School Early College in Queens, NY. He has also taught at the Princeton University Department of Music, and Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, [5] and the City College of New York.
2012: "Stefan Weisman: Darkling" Albany Records
2012: "Newspeak: Sweet Light Crude" New Amsterdam Records
2011: "Jody Redhage: of minutiae & memory" New Amsterdam Records
Charles Peter Wuorinen was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He also performed as a pianist and conductor. Wuorinen composed more than 270 works: orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas, such as Brokeback Mountain. His work was termed serialist but he came to disparage that idea as meaningless. Time's Encomium, his only purely electronic piece, received the Pulitzer Prize. Wuorinen taught at several institutions, including Columbia University, Rutgers University and the Manhattan School of Music.
Dialogues des Carmélites, FP 159, is an opera in three acts, divided into twelve scenes with linking orchestral interludes, with music and libretto by Francis Poulenc, completed in 1956. Poulenc wrote the libretto for his second opera after the work of the same name by Georges Bernanos, itself based on The Song at the Scaffold by Gertrud von Le Fort. This is a fictionalized version of the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, Carmelite nuns who, in 1794 during the closing days of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, were guillotined in Paris for refusing to renounce their vocation.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
"The Scarlet Ibis" is a short story written by James Hurst. It was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1960 and won the "Atlantic First" award. The story has become a classic of American literature, and has been frequently republished in high school anthologies and other collections.
The Mother of Us All is a two-act opera composed by Virgil Thomson to a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Thomson and Stein met in 1945 to begin the writing process, almost twenty years after their first collaborative project, the opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Stein wrote the libretto in the winter of 1945–46 before sending it to Thomson in March. After Stein's death in July, Thomson began working on the score, which he finished within just a few months. The opera centers around Susan B. Anthony, one of the major figures in the fight for women's suffrage in the United States, with a supporting cast of characters both fictional and based on other historical figures. Thomson famously described the work as a "pageant".
Lee Henry Hoiby was an American composer and classical pianist. Best known as a composer of operas and songs, he was a disciple of composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Like Menotti, his works championed lyricism at a time when such compositions were deemed old fashioned. His most well known work is his setting of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke, which premiered at the St Paul Opera in 1971.
Otto mesi in due ore ossia Gli esiliati in Siberia is an opera in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti to a libretto by Domenico Gilardoni.
David Cote is an American writer.
L'equivoco stravagante is an operatic dramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini to an Italian libretto by Gaetano Gasbarri. It was Rossini's first attempt at writing a full two-act opera.
The American Opera Project (AOP) is a professional opera company based in Brooklyn, New York City, and is a member of Opera America, the Fort Greene Association, the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./NY). The company's primary mission is to develop and present new operatic and music theatre works and has gained a reputation for the "rarefied range" of the projects it fosters. AOP was founded in 1988 by Grethe Barrett Holby who served as Artistic Director of AOP from 1988 until 2001, at which point Charles Jarden became the company's Executive Director and Steven Osgood the company's Artistic Director. Steven Osgood left the post of Artistic Director in 2008 to pursue conducting full-time but remains the Artistic Director for AOP's "Composers & the Voice" program.
The Center for Contemporary Opera (CCO) is a professional opera company based in New York City, and a member of OPERA America. The company focuses on producing and developing new opera and music theater works and reviving rarely seen American operas written after the second World War. The Center for Contemporary Opera has staged the premieres of many works written during the latter half of the twentieth century. Works are performed at all stages of development from readings to workshops to full productions on the professional stage. In line with its mission to promote an interest in new operatic and music-theater culture among the American public, the company presents panel discussions and colloquia, and publishes a bi-annual newsletter Opera Today. Since 2004, the company has been a regular participant in the New York City Opera's annual festival, "Vox: Showcasing American Composers".
Ben Moore is an American composer whose works include art song, musical theatre, cabaret, chamber music, choral music and opera. His songs have been recorded by Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham Nathan Gunn and Lawrence Brownlee on the EMI, SonyBMG, Warner Classics and Opus Arte labels. Other singers who have performed his music include Frederica von Stade, Jerry Hadley, Robert White, and Audra McDonald.
David T. Little is a Grammy-nominated American composer, record producer, and drummer known for his operatic, orchestral, and chamber works, most notably his operas JFK,Soldier Songs, and Dog Days which was named a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times. He is the artistic director of Newspeak, an eight-piece amplified ensemble that explores the boundaries between rock and classical music, and is the Chair of the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music.
Anna Rabinowitz is an American poet, librettist and editor. She has published five volumes of poetry: Words on the Street winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize 2017; Present Tense selected by The Huffington Post as one of the best poetry books of 2010; The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders ; Darkling: A Poem ; and At the Site of Inside Out winner of the Juniper Prize 1997.
Brokeback Mountain is an opera by American composer Charles Wuorinen, with a libretto in English by Annie Proulx, based on her 1997 short story "Brokeback Mountain". They began work on it in 2008 under a commission by Gerard Mortier of the New York City Opera. He took the project with him to the Teatro Real of Madrid, where the opera was premiered on January 28, 2014.
The Shining is an American opera in two acts and an epilogue, with music by composer Paul Moravec and a libretto by Mark Campbell, based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King. The opera received its world premiere on May 7, 2016 at the Ordway Music Theater, Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is part of the "New Works Initiative" of Minnesota Opera.
Steven Osgood is an American classical music conductor.
Abigail Fischer is an American mezzo-soprano.
Orphée is a chamber opera in two acts and 18 scenes, for ensemble and soloists, composed in 1991 by Philip Glass, to a libretto by the composer, based on the scenario of the eponymous film (1950) by Jean Cocteau. Commissioned by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, this is the first part of a trilogy in honour of the French poet. The world premiere of the work took place on 14 May 1993 under the direction of Martin Goldray and the European premiere in London on 27 May 2005 in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre.
Mark Campbell is a New York-based librettist and lyricist whose operas have received both a Pulitzer Prize in Music and a GRAMMY Award. Mark began writing for the stage as a musical theatre lyricist, but turned to libretto-writing after he premiered Volpone, his first full-length opera in 2004 at Wolf Trap Opera Company.