Posts Tagged ‘Lori Laitman’

Dana, Lori, and a very tall Frog King

I wrote about the new children’s opera, Three Feathers, a week or two ago here. Since then, the collaboration of composer Lori Laitman and librettist (and friend) Dana Gioia made its world premiere on October 17 at the new Moss Arts Center in Blacksburg, Virginia. I haven’t been able to find an actual review online, but I did find an October 14 article in The Huffington Post here. An excerpt:

“‘We wanted to have a strong story that appealed to both kids and adults,’ Mr. Gioia explains in an email: ‘There’s nothing better than Grimm’s Fairy Tales for compelling plots and memorable characters that quietly speak to our deepest fears, fantasies, and desires. At the heart of Grimm’s best tales is a young person’s quest to find love and meaning in a world that seems scary and chaotic. Lori and I chose The Three Feathers because it was a great story that almost no one in America knew. Disney or Broadway had never touched it…And who can resist an underground world ruled by a giant Frog King?’

“Lori Laitman adds, ‘There’s also an upperworld with three princesses: Dora, the heroine, sings a soul-searching aria, ‘Just Once,’ and there’s an aria for the shopaholic Gilda and one for the athletic, bossy Tilda. While there are similarities in the lyrics for these princesses, I wanted to create distinct character differences in the music so each one had her own motif. When they return you can instantly tell which princess it is because of what’s happening in the orchestra.’

“‘Also, since there are three children’s choruses,’ Ms. Laitman says, ‘we wanted to have bats, rats, and frogs, the denizens of the underworld. The opera has a very large cast, and all the kids sing except for a few supernumeraries. Here’s where my prior experience was helpful, because I’d written the oratorio Vedem for a boys choir. And when you’re constructing musical lines for children you have to keep in mind that their ranges are different [from adults], and you have to create music they can learn that is instantly memorable to them.’

“Given the whimsical tone of the text, Dana Gioia chose to write all the songs and choruses in rhyme. ‘That’s what kids want, and so do adults, even if they won’t admit it. Our opera needed to be both fun and at times mysterious. Comic opera needs rhymes and magic naturally lends itself to rhyming spells. Oddly, writing a rhyming libretto nowadays is slightly avant-garde. Most of the new libretti I see are in free verse.'”

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.

The three K's: Kirsch, Kelsey, Ketchum

All this talk about Emily Dickinson and new photos that may or may not be the poet, and so on, inspired a letter from a reader, Laura Dahl:

I recently read your blog about Emily Dickinson with special interest. On October 7 [click on date for details], the A. Jess Shenson Recital Series at Stanford is very excited to present  “This, and My Heart,” a theater/concert performance combining dramatic readings of Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters with song settings by American composers [Aaron] Copland, Tom Cipullo, Lori Laitman and Steve Heitzeg. Performers are actress Linda Kelsey (Lou Grant Show, M*A*S*H*, Rockford Files, Murder, She Wrote, etc.), Soprano Anne Marie Ketchum and pianist Victoria Kirsch.

Well, we couldn’t have put it much better ourselves.  Except to add that Kelsey appears to be an old hand at Dickinson.  There’s a 2009 write-up in the L.A. Weekly here.  Moreover, decade ago, she also performed the one-woman show Belle of Amherst in Minneapolis (she’s a native of St. Paul).  The Star Tribune added that she was selling “a self-published book of Dickinson’s poetry.” (Where is an editor when you need one?)

The Star Tribune had a more sensible write-up here, describing the play’s reference to Dickinson’s signature “Black Cake” (recipe here).

Says Kelsey:

Famous Black Cake

“I get the first laugh after I say, ‘Two pounds of butter,’ ” said Kelsey. “And, when I get to ’19 eggs’ and ‘you’d better leave it in the oven for six to seven hours,’ I get a lot of laughs.”

It probably takes a front-row seat – and a pair of finely calibrated opera glasses – to determine that the Black Cake Kelsey eats on stage isn’t the genuine article. It’s a prop substitute. Chocolate, perhaps?

“I can’t give away all our secrets,” she said. “But it’s very black looking, and quite delicious.” Why not the real thing? “I don’t think the expense associated with five pounds of raisins is in the Park Square budget,” Kelsey said. …

But counterfeit or legit, the cake is a key plot device. In the show’s final moments, Dickinson pours tea and shares a few last thoughts with the audience. “Oh, and when you make my cake, please tell me how you like it,” she says. “And when next we meet – I’ll give you my recipe for gingerbread! Gingerbread! Now there’s a word to lift your hat to.”

Not-so-famous Coconut Cake

I actually don’t care for the William Luce play, which makes Emily sound dotty and eccentric – an interpretation that’s been blown apart by recent books on the steamy life of the Dickinsons.  But while visiting her old digs in Amherst, I did pick up her recipe book (according to this website, it is now “out of print with limited copies available on line” – how can there be limited copies if it’s online? Oh well, it’s that editor thingumme again.)

I tried making her coconut cake.  That’s a cake for people who are serious about their coconut.  At least the way I made it, guessing quantities from the poet’s very imprecise instructions.

"Fame gives you the freedom to pursue your interests" (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

The new September issue of World Literature Today is out, including an interview with poet, and former NEA Chairman, Dana Gioia. The Q&A was conducted by WLT‘s managing editor Michelle Johnson (who was also my editor for the July/August article on eminent Polish poet Julia Hartwig).

Not online, alas – but here are a few excerpts:

On fame:

I try to accept the good and the bad with equanimity.  As Oscar Wilde observed, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” I have been lucky to have enjoyed a degree of celebrity across my career, and the experience has taught me a lot about the nature of contemporary fame. Notoriety requires you to be simplified, usually into a neat and tidy headline. First, I was widely discussed as the “businessman-poet.” Then I became notorious as the ringleader of the New Formalists.  Soon thereafter I became famous as the literary maverick who wrote “Can Poetry Matter?” Then I became a public figure as the champion of arts and literacy who ran the National Endowment for the Arts. Each of these reputations contained an element of truth and a simplification. But it’s better to be noticed than ignored, and properly used, fame gives you the freedom to pursue your interests as a writer.

On his legacy as one of the proponents of “New Formalism”:

It’s easy to forget how odd things were back in the 1970s. Form and narrative were almost universally denounced as dead literary modes. They were considered retrograde, repressive, elitist, antidemocratic, phallocentric, and even (I’m not making this up) un-American. It was impossible to publish a formal or narrative poem in most magazines. One journal even stated its editorial policy as, “No rhyme or pornography.” Poems wee supposed to be free-verse lyric utterances in a confessional or imagistic style. I’m happy to say that journals and presses are now open to formal or narrative poetry. This is a direct result of the so-called “Poetry Wars,” the long and loud debates over these issues that lasted from the early 1980s through the 1990s. …

I had no interest in making rhyme and meter the dominant aesthetic. What I fought for – and one really did have to fight back then – was for the poet’s freedom to use whatever style he or she felt was right for the poem. I can’t imagine a poet who wouldn’t want to have all the possibilities of the language available, especially the powerful enchantments of meter, rhyme, and narrative. I never saw the movement as a rejection of modernism. Why throw away the greatest period of American poetry?

What’s next?

America's mystical composer gets National Medal of Arts

I am most eager to work with artists I admire unreservedly. Collaboration depends upon talent – the pairing of two talents that inspire each other. Morten Lauridsen, who seems to me one of the greatest living composers, wants to create a work together. That is very exciting. Helen Sung and I are going to write a jazz song cycle. The composer William Bolcolm has suggested doing a musical setting of my narrative poem “Haunted” for a pianist and an actor. Lori Laitman is writing a song cycle using my translations of Montale’s love poems. Paul Salerni and I have sketched out a dance opera. I also have a third opera subject in mind, but it is still in the early stages. But, of course, the important thing is to keep writing poems.

The article also included a poem from his forthcoming collection Pity the Beautiful (2011, Graywolf), titled “Finding a Box of Family Letters.” I thought it sounded familiar.  Indeed, it was. He read it to me a year ago, over wine at his house in Santa Rosa, at the same time he read “Haunted,” which I very much look forward to hearing with Bolcom’s musical setting.  The poem made a very strong impression on me then, and also when it was published in the Hudson Review some time later.

Some time ago, Dana sent me a DVD of Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna – please, please go find it, if you haven’t heard it.  He’s largely unheralded in the MSM, but is perhaps the most popular choral composer in the U.S.  Moreover, Lauridsen has been called “”the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic.”

By the by, the magazine also has an essay by Jane Hirshfield, on American poetry.  Haven’t read it yet.