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The Princeton Festival | |
---|---|
Status | Non-profit |
Venue | Richardson Auditorium, Miller Chapel, Princeton University |
Location(s) | Princeton, New Jersey |
Founded | 2004 |
Attendance | 8,000 |
Leader | Richard Tang Yuk, Founding Artistic Director |
The Princeton Festival is a performing arts company located in Princeton, in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. The festival typically takes place over the course of three weeks in June and consists of opera, musical theater, chamber music, jazz, dance, drama, and more. [1]
The Princeton Festival was launched in 2004 by its founding artistic director Richard Tang Yuk, who had formerly served as the Assistant Conductor of the Opera Festival of New Jersey. Recognizing the need not only for opera but diverse programming capable of reaching a larger audience in the area, Richard Tang Yuk assembled a program of five events to run in the summer of 2005, which culminated in a performance of Sweeney Todd . Over the years, the festival has grown to encompass as many as fifty different events at venues across central New Jersey, adding public lectures, master classes, and a piano competition to the traditional performing arts lineup. [2] [3]
The Princeton Festival is known for alternating traditional opera works with more modern pieces that are rarely staged in the New Jersey area. [4] [5] Past notable performances include John Adams' Nixon in China , Gershwin's Porgy and Bess , Handel's Ariodante , Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress , and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream , the last of which was praised by The New York Times for its strong cast and imaginative production style. [6] For four consecutive years, The Princeton Festival received the People's Choice Award from the Jersey Arts organization, in recognition of the highest quality opera produced in the state of New Jersey. [7]
Common performance venues include Miller Chapel, the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University Chapel, Richardson Auditorium, the Princeton Abbey, and Taplin Auditorium. Though the opera and musical theater performances are cast nationally, The Princeton Festival also partners with local groups such as LustigDanceTheatre, Bucks County Choral Society, VOICES Chorale, Concordia Chamber Players, Jazz Nights, and The Westminster Solo Vocal Institute, in order to offer a broader range of orchestration and programming. The Princeton Festival Baroque Orchestra was introduced in 2015 and regularly performs a wide cross section of music from the baroque period.
The Festival is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization made possible by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts, among other groups and foundations. [8] Additional annual fundraisers are held in the Princeton area to support musical programming. The Princeton Festival is not connected to Princeton University, though some of their performances take place in University venues.
The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on Snape Maltings Concert Hall.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a 16.3-acre (6.6-hectare) complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It has thirty indoor and outdoor facilities and is host to 5 million visitors annually. It houses internationally renowned performing arts organizations including the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Juilliard School.
The American state of New Jersey is located in the Northeastern United States and is part of the Mid-Atlantic region.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 64, is an opera with music by Benjamin Britten and set to a libretto adapted by the composer and Peter Pears from William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was premiered on 11 June 1960 at the Aldeburgh Festival, conducted by the composer and with set and costume designs by Carl Toms. Stylistically, the work is typical of Britten, with a highly individual sound-world – not strikingly dissonant or atonal, but replete with subtly atmospheric harmonies and tone painting. The role of Oberon was composed for the countertenor Alfred Deller. Atypically for Britten, the opera did not include a leading role for his partner Pears, who instead was given the comic drag role of Flute/Thisbe.
A music venue is any location used for a concert or musical performance. Music venues range in size and location, from a small coffeehouse for folk music shows, an outdoor bandshell or bandstand or a concert hall to an indoor sports stadium. Typically, different types of venues host different genres of music. Opera houses, bandshells, and concert halls host classical music performances, whereas public houses ("pubs"), nightclubs, and discothèques offer music in contemporary genres, such as rock, dance, country, and pop.
The English Opera Group was a small company of British musicians formed in 1947 by the composer Benjamin Britten for the purpose of presenting his and other, primarily British, composers' operatic works. The group later expanded to present larger-scale works, and was renamed the English Music Theatre Company. The organisation produced its last opera and ceased to run in 1980.
The Auditorium Theatre is a music and performance venue located inside the Auditorium Building at 50 Ida B. Wells Drive in Chicago, Illinois. Inspired by the Richardsonian Romanesque Style of architect Henry Hobson Richardson, the building was designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and completed in 1889. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed in the theatre until 1904 as well as the Chicago Grand Opera Company and its successors the Chicago Opera Association and Chicago Civic Opera until its relocation to the Civic Opera House in 1929. The theatre currently hosts performances by the Joffrey Ballet, in addition to a variety of concerts, musicals, performances, and events. Since the 1940s, it has been owned by Roosevelt University and since the 1960s it has been refurbished and managed by an independent non-profit arts organization.
James Thomas Bowman was an English countertenor. His career spanned opera, oratorio, contemporary music and solo recitals. Arguably, he was after Alfred Deller the most important countertenor in the 20th century revival of the voice part. He combined early and baroque repertoire with contemporary work, becoming recognised for his portrayal of Oberon in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and performing world premieres.
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Russell Keys Oberlin was an American singer and founding member of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua ensemble who became the first, and for years the only, countertenor in the United States to attain general recognition—in The New Yorker's words, "America's first star countertenor." A pioneering figure in the early music revival in the 1950s and 1960s, Oberlin sang on both sides of the Atlantic, and brought a "full, warm, vibrato-rich tone" to his recitals, recordings, and his performances in works ranging from the thirteenth-century liturgical drama The Play of Daniel to the twentieth-century opera A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) is a multi-venue, multi-purpose cultural centre in Mumbai, India, which aims to promote and preserve India's heritage of music, dance, theatre, film, literature and photography. It also presents new and innovative work in the performing arts field.
The Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music is the music and performance arts school of Northwestern University. It is located on Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, United States.
The Hillman Center for Performing Arts is a multi-stage performing arts venue on the campus of Shady Side Academy's Senior School in Fox Chapel, a northern suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Facilities include Richard E. Rauh proscenium Theater, the Peter J. Kountz black box theater and the Hillman Center performing arts classroom.
Michael Ching is an American composer, conductor, and music administrator. A prolific and eclectic composer, he is best known nationally as the composer of innovative operas, including his a cappella adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2011). His other major operas include Buoso's Ghost (1996), Corps of Discovery (2003), Slaying the Dragon (2012), Speed Dating Tonight! (2013), and Alice Ryley (2015). He has written the librettos of many of his own operas, and has done so for all of his operas composed after 2012.
John Thomas Holiday Jr. is an American operatic countertenor. His repertoire focuses on the Baroque and contemporary composers, including staged opera and opera in concert, works for voice and orchestra, and experimental mixed-media. He has participated in several world premieres. He has performed with several opera companies in the United States, toured with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and sung in Shanghai and several European cities. He also sings gospel, pop, and jazz; he was a contestant on season 19 of NBC's The Voice, a vocal competition television series.
The Grange Festival is a summer opera festival established in 2017 to continue performances at The Grange opera house in Hampshire.
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Randall Scotting is an American countertenor performing internationally at opera houses and concert venues. As a young singer, he made his American stage debut performing the role of Nireno in Handel's Giulio Cesare at Opera Colorado. Randall's first leading role in an opera was singing Oberon in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in New York as part of the Juilliard Opera Center. The next year he made his European stage debut performing the role of Teseo in Vivaldi's Ercole sul Termodonte at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. In December 2019, Scotting made his Royal Opera House Covent Garden mainstage debut in London performing the role of Apollo in a production of Britten's Death in Venice In May 2022, Scotting made his Bayerische Staatsoper debut in Munich performing the role of Michael in a production of Haas's micro-tonal opera Thomas. On 2 September 2022, Scotting's debut solo album with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Crown: Heroic Arias for Senesino was released by Signum Classics.
Cameron Shahbazi is a Persian-Canadian operatic countertenor who has performed leading roles at opera houses and festivals in Europe, performing both Baroque and contemporary opera. He has sung the title role of Handel's Tolomeo at the Karlsruhe Handel Festival, Oberon in Britten's A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Oper Frankfurt, two roles in George Benjamin's Written on Skin, premiered in 2012, at the Cologne Opera, and in the world premiere of Ritratto by Willem Jeths at the Dutch National Opera in 2020.