Julian Wachner News

For its landmark fifth anniversary, National Sawdust a?" the performing arts institution in Williamsburg, Brooklyn a?" Takes Root by celebrating the artistic process, from incubation to dissemination, while honoring the local and global artistic community it serves. 

With its eighth innovative season in 2020, PROTOTYPE: Opera | Theatre | Now continues its rigorous exploration of the work, producing and presenting an abundance of provocative shows in the interstitial realms between music, operatic tradition, and theatre. This season, Beth Morrison Projects and HERE's meteoric annual festival lands on stages across New York from January 9-18, presenting 6 works by 23 composers and librettists along with hundreds of collaborators - productions ranging from black-box chamber opera to multi-media rock concerts. 

The 2019 Bard SummerScape festival takes a contemporary look at Hollywood's Golden Age in Acquanetta, a visual and musical tour-de-force inspired by the eponymous B-movie star with a mysterious past. Combining theater, opera, and film in a haunting meditation on identity, transformation, stereotypes, and typecasting from composer and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon and his longtime collaborator, librettist Deborah Artman, Acquanetta originally premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival, where it was a New York Times and New York magazine "Critics' Pick" and one of the New York Classical Review's "Top Ten Performances of 2018."by Daniel Fish, whose previous SummerScape staging (a revelatory new take on Oklahoma!), scoring the visionary director a 2019 Tony nomination.

The 2019 Bard SummerScape festival takes a contemporary look at Hollywood's Golden Age in Acquanetta, a visual and musical tour-de-force inspired by the eponymous B-movie star with a mysterious past. Combining theater, opera, and film in a haunting meditation on identity, transformation, stereotypes, and typecasting from composer and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon and his longtime collaborator, librettist Deborah Artman, Acquanetta originally premiered at the PROTOTYPE Festival.

Singers participating in the 2019 Grand Rapids Bach Festival's inaugural Linn Maxwell Keller Distinguished Bach Musician Award were promised a $10,000 cash prize meant to encourage and promote their careers as professional singers.

Linn Maxwell Keller, a world-class mezzo soprano who happened to live in West Michigan, performed with the orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland and Toronto, with opera companies from San Francisco and Cincinnati and across Europe, and at major Bach Festivals including Oregon, Carmel and Rochester before her death in 2016.

General Director Ken McConnell and Artistic Director Tobias Picker today announced Tulsa Opera's 72nd season comprising classics such as Bizet's Carmen and Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and a new production of Mr. Picker's 1996 opera Emmeline, to be performed in Oklahoma for the first time, and led by Mr. Picker in his opera-conducting debut.

Trinity Church Wall Street's Time's Arrow festival (March 5-9), known for its signature combination of early and new music, focuses this spring on amplifying the voices of female artists and exploring sensitive contemporary themes. The centerpiece of the festival is a juxtaposition of two musical portraits of the biblical figure Susanna: Handel's oratorio Susanna, and Artemisia, an opera by Laura Elise Schwendinger, with a libretto by Ginger Strand. Complementing these large-scale pieces is a concert centered on works by Barbara Strozzi, the most prolific composer of secular vocal music in Venice in the mid-17th century and a renowned poet who likely wrote many of her own texts. Performed by Trinity Choir soprano Molly Netter, the concert also features world premieres by Jessica Meyer, Doug Balliett, Alyssa Weinberg, and others (March 8). A Pipes at One concert on that same day, featuring Trinity Associate Organist Janet Yieh, will also reflect the Time's Arrow theme, with compositions by Rachel Laurin, Florence Price, Lili Boulanger, Clara Schumann, and others. All performances take place in the intimate surroundings of St. Paul's Chapel, a Georgian-era gem just a few blocks north of Trinity, and the oldest public building in continuous use in Manhattan.

Nearly 90 years ago, on the final Saturday in 1929, a group of 51 men and women took the stage at Central High School and gave Grand Rapids the best Christmas present of all, the gift of music.

Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) and new Music Director Jaime Martin announce sweeping programming for the 2019-20 Season that builds upon the Orchestra's illustrious legacy while blazing a path to its future.

Where are our Violettas, our Salomes, our Elektras--even our Lulus--for opera to move forward as an art form for the 21 century? They're all victims of stress and suffering of one sort or another, but still worth meeting up with--not only musically but dramatically--more than once. I began thinking about this while watching the three music-theatre/new opera pieces that I visited during the opening days of the current edition of PROTOTYPE:OPERA/THEATRE/NOW--The Infinite Hotel, 4.48 Psychosis and PRISM.

New York's PROTOTYPE OperaTheatreNow Festival returns for its seventh season from January 5 to the 13th and the one thing that you can't ask about it is “What's new?” That's not because there's nothing to answer. On the contrary--there's too much, in style, in content, in the sizes of its venues: This year's Festival is larger than ever, with a dozen works, 24 composerlibrettists and over 150 collaborators.

One of the most beloved traditions at Trinity Church Wall Street is its annual series of performances of Handel's Messiah. This winter, on December 13–17, the Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and Director of Music Julian Wachner give four accounts of the oratorio in the historically informed, period-instrument rendition that the New York Times considers “perhaps the essential New York 'Messiah.'

One of the most beloved traditions at Trinity Church Wall Street is its annual series of performances of Handel's Messiah. This winter, on December 13–17, the Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and Director of Music Julian Wachner give four accounts of the oratorio in the historically informed, period-instrument rendition that the New York Times considers “perhaps the essential New York 'Messiah.'

Creator and librettist Cerise Jacobs premiered her 'most technologically ambitious production to date' (Boston Globe) at Boston's Emerson Cutler Majestic Theater in September: the video game opera, PermaDeath, co-written by Jacobs and her son, Pirate Epstein, founder of the video game company SqueePlay and a former New England Halo champion. The score was composed by Rome and Berlin Prize-winning composer Dan Visconti, who also composed Opera Philadelphia's recent Andy Warhol-themed ANDY: A Popera. Now Jacobs's first opera, Madame White Snake, which premiered in Boston in 2010 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year for the score by composer Zhou Long, will be given its Hong Kong premiere in two performances at the 47th Hong Kong Arts Festival in March of next year.

LA Opera Off Grand presents the world premiere of a new work by composer Ellen Reid and librettist Roxie Perkins: 'p r i s m.' 

Bang on a Can All-Stars-joined by the Grammy Award-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, led by Julian Wachner-will perform Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields on Saturday, December 1 at 9:00 p.m. in Zankel Hall.

Encompass New Opera Theatre will present the World Premiere of Anna Christie with music by Edward Thomas, set to a libretto by Joseph Masteroff, with 12 performances beginning today, October 4, 2018 at 8pm and running through Sunday, October 21, 2018, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center (at 55 Lexington Avenue, entrance on 25th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues) in Manhattan.

Encompass New Opera Theatre will be presenting the world premiere of Anna Christie with music by Edward Thomas set to a libretto by Joseph Masteroff, beginning today, October 4, 2018 at 8pm, running through Sunday, October 21, 2018, at the Baruch Performing Arts Center (located at 55 Lexington Avenue, entrance on 25th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues).