The CD release of “A Dream Play – A Chamber Opera for Soloists and Small Orchestra”

News 01.10.2010 03:29

Composer S.J. Pettersson has followed up his 2007 Ballet “Gaudi – Dancing About Architecture” with a “Chamber Opera for Soloists and Small Orchestra” based on the 1901 stage play “A Dream Play” by famed Swedish playwright August Strindberg. S.J. Pettersson’s take on the play is often more akin to a song cycle interspersed with instrumental pieces that tell the story in an unusual and captivating style. We hear anachronistic elements of Bach, Shubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Shostakovich, Weill and Michael Nyman seamlessly mixed together into a flowing dream-like mélange of music and pure-tone voices.

Selected pieces of the work was first performed in New York Sept 2009 as part of Vox Novus Composer’s Voice concert series and again in May 2010 as part of a Metropolis Opera Project’s annual M.O.P Bucket concert.

The Los Angeles CD release concert/event was held June 19that Classical Music LA’s weekly classical concert series at The Lounge in Hermosa Beach (Los Angeles answer to New York’s Le Poisson Rouge) where large portions of the Chamber Opera was performed by a 12 person orchestra featuring many performers on the CD including such notable internationally known musicians such as pianist Yana Reznik, violinist Moni Simeonov, cellist Maksim Velichkin and Soprano Gian-Carla Tisera. Selections of the opera will also be performed at Los Angeles famed Classical Underground concert series in October 2010, featuring renowned Russian coloratura soprano Oxana Senina.

A full staging of “A Dream Play” is planned for fall 2010 in Los Angeles and early spring 2011 in New York.

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