Author, author!
An email from Dana Gioia, poet, professor, and former NEA chairman: “I’m about to fly off to Washington to do a lecture at the Library of Congress and then attend the final rehearsals and premiere of my new opera with Lori Laitman, The Three Feathers. Here is a photo from the rehearsals – the Princess meeting the Frog King in the Underworld.” Librettist Dana retells the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and Laitman composes the music for the new one-act children’s opera, commissioned by the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech. As I wrote a dozen or so years ago in an article here, “Gioia-as-librettist isn’t a complete departure. As a Stanford undergraduate, he considered a career in music and spent his sophomore year studying music and German in Vienna.” That was one of my early interviews with him, about the time he was about to debut Nosferatu, his collaboration with composer Alva Henderson. (I’ve also written about Dana here and here and here, among many other places.) According to the opera’s website here: “The Three Feathers creates a mysterious world inhabited by a king, his three princess daughters, and courtiers; and the fantastical underworld kingdom of the Frog Prince and his chorus of rats, bats, and frogs.” World premiere is Friday, October 17, at the new Moss Arts Center in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Meanwhile, photos. The soprano is Nora Cotter. “How nice to have reality rhyme with fantasy,” Dana writes. And another website has cropped up here. And a vimeo clip of an aria here.
The Princess meets the Frog King in the Underworld, in “The Three Feathers”
Soprano Nora Cotter sings in the underworld.
Tags: "Dana Gioia", Lori Laitman