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Griffelkin
''Griffelkin'' is an opera by Lukas Foss with a libretto by Alastair Reid. The opera was first performed on November 6, 1955, in a nationwide telecast by the NBC Opera Theatre. Background Following the success of Gian Carlo Menotti's '' Amahl and the Night Visitors'', NBC decided to present new operas by other American composers and gave Foss a commission for the work. (Other composers involved in the project included Norman Dello Joio, Stanley Hollingsworth, and Leonard Kastle.) ''Griffelkins plot is based on a story that Foss's mother told him when he was a child. Foss composed an early version of the opera shortly afterward. Roles Synopsis Griffelkin is a young devil residing in hell's nursery. On his tenth birthday, he is allowed to spend a day on earth to do as many bad deeds as he can. To aid him in the task, he is given a magic potion that will bring objects to life. Griffelkin arrives in a city and causes havoc by bringing a statue, a mailbox, and a pair of s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NBC Opera Theatre
The NBC Opera Theatre (sometimes mistakenly spelled NBC Opera Theater and sometimes referred to as the NBC Opera Company) was an American opera company operated by the National Broadcasting Company from 1949 to 1964. The company was established specifically for the purpose of televising both established and new operas for television in English. Additionally, the company also gave live theatrical presentations of operas, sponsoring several touring productions in the United States and mounting works on Broadway."Less Tuneful Season in the Offing for TV" by Larry Wolters, ''The Chicago Tribune'', October 18, 1964 Conductor Peter Herman Adler served as the NBCOT's music and artistic director, and Samuel Chotzinoff as the company's producer. Conductor Herbert Grossman was an associate conductor with the company when it was founded, but was later promoted to conductor in 1956. From that point on Adler and Grossman shared the conducting load while Adler remained Music Director. NBC disban ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mildred Allen (soprano)
Mildred Allen (October 26, 1929 – May 15, 2021) was an American operatic soprano who had an active career during the 1950s and 1960s. She notably was a regular performer at the Metropolitan Opera between 1957 and 1962. She later became a member of the voice faculty at Birmingham-Southern College where she taught from 1987–2009. Biography Allen grew up in Mississippi and Tennessee and studied piano as a child. She attended the University of Mississippi where she earned a B.A. of Music in 1954 and then pursued graduate studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston, earning a master's degree in Vocal Performance in 1956. While in Boston she studied under impresario and conductor, Boris Goldovsky. She made her professional opera debut at the age of 24 on August 6, 1956 portraying the title role in the first staged production of Lukas Foss's '' Griffelkin'' at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Early on in her career Allen joined the roster of sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew McKinley
Andrew McKinley (1903 – 11 January 1996) was an American operatic tenor, violinist, arts administrator, music educator, and school administrator. Although he mainly performed in the United States, he had an active international singing career with major opera companies and symphony orchestras from the 1940s through the 1960s. His repertoire spanned a wide range, from leading tenor parts to character roles. As a performer McKinley is best remembered for creating roles in the world premieres of two operas by Gian Carlo Menotti: Nika Magadoff in the Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Consul'' (1950) and King Kaspar in the Peabody Award winning ''Amahl and the Night Visitors'' (1951).John Ardoin. ''The Stages of Menotti'', Doubleday Press, 1985 The latter opera was made by the NBC Opera Theatre, and McKinley filmed several more operas with that organization during his career. He also taught violin at the Juilliard School of Music for almost four decades and in 1968 founded the Usdan Cent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Ukena
Paul Ukena (August 19, 1921 in Lakota, Iowa – March 10, 1991 in Flemington, New Jersey) was an American operatic baritone and musical theatre actor who had an active career from the 1940s through the 1970s. After beginning his career entertaining American troops as a part of the Special Services during World War II, his first critical success was as the baritone soloist in the American premiere of Frederick Delius's ''Requiem'' in 1950. He was one of the founding members of the NBC Opera Theatre, a company he performed with throughout the 1950s in such productions as Benjamin Britten's ''Billy Budd'' and the world premiere of Norman Dello Joio's ''The Trial at Rouen''. Ukena also enjoyed a lengthy association with the New York City Opera (NYCO) from 1958 to 1979. At the NYCO he notably appeared in a number of world premieres including Hugo Weisgall's ''Six Characters in Search of an Author'' (1959), Robert Ward's ''The Crucible'' (1961), and Dominick Argento's ''Miss Havisham's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adelaide Bishop
Adelaide Bishop (23 June 1928 – 20 June 2008) was an American operatic soprano, musical theatre actress, opera director, stage director, and voice teacher. She began her career appearing in Broadway musicals as a teenager during the early 1940s. She became a principal soprano with the New York City Opera (NYCO) in 1948, where she performed through 1960 in a broad repertoire encompassing German, French, Italian, and English operas from a variety of musical periods. In the late 1950s, she started working actively as a stage director and as a voice teacher, working with many opera companies throughout the United States and serving on the music faculties of several different American universities. She also served as the artistic director of the Wolf Trap Opera for many years. Early life and career: 1928–1948 Born in New York City, Bishop started studying singing as a young teenager with various instructors, including Paul Breisach, Louis Polanski, Rose Landver, and at Luigi Ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City Opera
The New York City Opera (NYCO) is an American opera company located in Manhattan in New York City. The company has been active from 1943 through 2013 (when it filed for bankruptcy), and again since 2016 when it was revived. The opera company, dubbed "the people's opera" by New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was founded in 1943. The company's stated purpose was to make opera accessible to a wide audience at a reasonable ticket price. It also sought to produce an innovative choice of repertory, and provide a home for American singers and composers. The company was originally housed at the New York City Center theater on West 55th Street in Manhattan. It later became part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at the New York State Theater from 1966 to 2010. During this time it produced autumn and spring seasons of opera in repertory, and maintained extensive education and outreach programs, offering arts-in-education programs to 4,000 students in over 30 schools. In 2011, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chester Watson (bass‐baritone)
Chester Watson (September 6, 1911 – January 8, 1979) was an American bass-baritone singer who had an active performance career in operas and concerts from the late 1940s into the 1970s. He was particularly active as a performer in opera on American television with the NBC Opera Theatre. He also made appearances with several American opera companies, including the New York City Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Opera Society of Washington. He is best known for creating roles in the world premieres of several American operas, including the First Police Agent in Gian Carlo Menotti's ''The Consul'' (1950), Father Julien in Norman Dello Joio's ''The Trial at Rouen'' (1956), Palivec in Robert Kurka's ''The Good Soldier Schweik'' (1958), and Leonard Swett in Thomas Pasatieri's ''The Trial of Mary Lincoln'' (1972). He notably starred opposite Maria Callas as Goffredo in the American Opera Society's lauded 1959 production of Vincenzo Bellini's ''Il pirata'', which was recorded for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lukas Foss
Lukas Foss (August 15, 1922 – February 1, 2009) was a German-American composer, pianist, and conductor. Career Born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, Germany in 1922, Foss was soon recognized as a child prodigy. He began piano and theory lessons with Julius Goldstein erfordin Berlin at the age of six. His parents were Hilde (Schindler) and the philosopher and scholar Martin Foss. He moved with his family to Paris in 1933, where he studied piano with Lazare Lévy, composition with Noël Gallon, orchestration with Felix Wolfes, and flute with Marcel Moyse. In 1937 he moved with his parents and brother to the United States, where his father (on advice from the Quakers who had taken the family in upon arrival in Philadelphia) changed the family name to Foss. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, with Isabelle Vengerova (piano), Rosario Scalero (composition) and Fritz Reiner (conducting). At Curtis, Foss began a lifelong friendship with classmate Leonard Bernstein, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tenor
A tenor is a type of classical music, classical male singing human voice, voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. The tenor's vocal range extends up to C5. The low extreme for tenors is widely defined to be B2, though some roles include an A2 (two As below middle C). At the highest extreme, some tenors can sing up to the second F above middle C (F5). The tenor voice type is generally divided into the ''leggero'' tenor, lyric tenor, spinto tenor, dramatic tenor, heldentenor, and tenor buffo or . History The name "tenor" derives from the Latin word ''wikt:teneo#Latin, tenere'', which means "to hold". As Fallows, Jander, Forbes, Steane, Harris and Waldman note in the "Tenor" article at ''Grove Music Online'': In polyphony between about 1250 and 1500, the [tenor was the] structurally fundamental (or 'holding') voice, vocal or instrumental; by the 15th century it came to signify the male voice that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tanglewood Music Festival
The Tanglewood Music Festival is a music festival held every summer on the Tanglewood estate in Stockbridge and Lenox in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. The festival consists of a series of concerts, including symphonic music, chamber music, choral music, musical theater, contemporary music, jazz, and pop music. The Boston Symphony Orchestra is in residence at the festival, but many of the concerts are put on by other groups. It is one of the premier music festivals in the United States and one of the top in the world. '''' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Joffrey
Robert Joffrey (December 24, 1930 – March 25, 1988) was an American dancer, teacher, producer, choreographer, and co-founder of the Joffrey Ballet, known for his highly imaginative modern ballets. He was born Anver Bey Abdullah Jaffa Khan in Seattle, Washington to a Pashtun father from Afghanistan and a mother from Italy. Life and work Joffrey began his dance training at nine years old in Seattle as a remedy for asthma under instructor Mary Anne Wells. He later studied ballet and modern dance in New York City, and made his debut in 1949 with the French choreographer Roland Petit and his Ballet de l'Opéra National de Paris. From 1950 to 1955, he taught at the New York High School for the Performing Arts, where he staged his earliest ballets. He founded thJoffrey Ballet Schoolin New York City in 1953, where it remains as a separate organization from The Joffrey Academy of Dance in Chicago, which is the official school of the Joffrey Ballet Company. As one of the first prolific ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rouben Ter-Arutunian
Rouben Ter-Arutunian(Ռուբէն Տէր-Յարութիւնեան) (July 24, 1920 – October 17, 1992) was an American-Armenian costume and scenic designer for dance, opera, theater and television. Anderson, JackRouben Ter-Arutunian, 72, Dies; Designed City Ballet 'Nutcracker'" ''The New York Times'', October 19, 1992 Biography Born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), Georgia, he attended the Reimann Art School (Berlin) from 1939 to 1941, studied film music at the Hochschule fur Musik (Berlin) and took courses at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University (Berlin), 1941–43, and at the University of Vienna, 1943-44. He first designed costumes for dancers of the Berlin Staatsoper in 1940, going on to design for the Dresden Opera and the Vienna State Opera. He moved to New York in 1951, which started his twenty-five year association with George Balanchine and New York City Ballet. In 1964 he designed the sets for the New York City Ballet production of ''The Nutcracker''. He worked with the New Y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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