Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), often cited as a forerunner of Dada and the Surrealist and Futurist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics.
Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki was a Polish composer and conductor. His best-known works include Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Symphony No. 3, his St Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, Anaklasis and Utrenja. His oeuvre includes four operas, eight symphonies and other orchestral pieces, a variety of instrumental concertos, choral settings of mainly religious texts, as well as chamber and instrumental works.
An oratorio is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like most operas, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form. In an oratorio, the choir often plays a central role, and there is generally little or no interaction between the characters, and no props or elaborate costumes. A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, including age-old devices of romance, deception, and murder, whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics, making it appropriate for performance in the church. Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints and histories from the Bible while Protestant composers only to Biblical topics. Oratorios became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy partly because of the success of opera and the Catholic Church's prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorios became the main choice of music during that period for opera audiences.
Ubu Roi is a play by French writer Alfred Jarry, then 23 years old. It was first performed in Paris in 1896, by Aurélien Lugné-Poe's Théâtre de l'Œuvre at the Nouveau-Théâtre. The production's single public performance baffled and offended audiences with its unruliness and obscenity. Considered to be a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms and conventions, it is seen by 20th- and 21st-century scholars to have opened the door for what became known as modernism in the 20th century, and as a precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a German composer. He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten, which is regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century, after those of Berg. His eclectic music, which employs a wide range of techniques including dodecaphony and musical quotation, encompasses the styles of the avant-garde, serial, and postmodern.
The National Theatre on Max-Joseph-Platz in Munich, Germany, is a historic opera house, home of the Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra and the Bavarian State Ballet.
Claude Terrasse was a French composer of operettas.
Polish Requiem, also A Polish Requiem, is a large-scale requiem mass for soloists, mixed choir and orchestra by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The Lacrimosa, dedicated to the trade union leader Lech Wałęsa, was written for the unveiling of a statue at the Gdańsk Shipyard to commemorate those killed in the Polish anti-government riots in 1970. He expanded the work into a requiem, writing other parts to honour different patriotic events over the next four years.
Die Teufel von Loudun is an opera in three acts written in 1968 and 1969 by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, and then revised in 1972 and 1975. It has a German libretto by the composer, based on John Whiting's dramatization of Aldous Huxley's book of the same name.
Polish opera may be broadly understood to include operas staged in Poland and works written for foreign stages by Polish composers, as well as opera in the Polish language.
A choral symphony is a musical composition for orchestra, choir, and sometimes solo vocalists that, in its internal workings and overall musical architecture, adheres broadly to symphonic musical form. The term "choral symphony" in this context was coined by Hector Berlioz when he described his Roméo et Juliette as such in his five-paragraph introduction to that work. The direct antecedent for the choral symphony is Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beethoven's Ninth incorporates part of the Ode an die Freude, a poem by Friedrich Schiller, with text sung by soloists and chorus in the last movement. It is the first example of a major composer's use of the human voice on the same level as instruments in a symphony.
Oakley "Tad" Hall III was an American playwright, director, and author. The co-founder and first artistic director of Lexington Conservatory Theatre, in 1978 he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a fall from a bridge; he spent decades in recovery and in the process of creating a new life.
Richard J. Zobel Jr. was an American actor. He starred as the attorney Aaron Levinsky in the original Broadway run of Nuts in 1980. Over the course of his career, he was also a singer, instrumentalist, animator, writer, and producer.
David Michael Schuster is an American spinto tenor.
Sergio Rendine was an Italian composer of operas, ballets, symphonies, cantatas and chamber music. He worked as a lecturer at the Conservatorio Alfredo Casella, for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and for SIAE. He was artistic director of the Teatro Marrucino in Chieti from 1997 to 2007. He received awards for Alice, a "radiophonic opera". His opera Un segreto d'importanza was premiered by the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. His Missa de beatificatione in onore di Padre Pio da Pietrelcina, a mass written for the beatification of Pio of Pietrelcina, was premiered in 1999 in Vatican City, with José Carreras as a soloist. His oratorio Passio et Ressurrectio was recorded live and broadcast from the cathedral in Chieti premiere, and his two symphonies were recorded by Chandos Records.
Grigori Yefimovich Zhislin was a Russian violinist and pedagogue.
Krzysztof Penderecki's setting of the biblical canticle Magnificat was commissioned for the 1,200th anniversary of Salzburg Cathedral and premiered there on 17 August 1974 under the composer's baton. It is a vast work, being scored for bass vocal soloist, boys’ voices, seven other men’s voices, two 24-part mixed choirs and orchestra.
Michael Boder is a German conductor of opera and concert who works internationally. The chief conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre, he has conducted regularly at the Vienna State Opera, including the premieres of Cerha's Der Riese vom Steinfeld and Reimann's Medea. He also conducted the premieres of operas by Dusapin, Enescu, Henze, Lombardi, Penderecki and Trojahn.
Agnieszka Rehlis is a Polish operatic mezzo-soprano who has made an international career. She is known for portraying Verdi characters including Amneris and Azucena. She participated in music by Krzysztof Penderecki, including the world premiere of his Eighth Sinfonie and the Grammy Award–winning collection Penderecki Conducts Penderecki.
