The American Opera Society (AOS) was a which city based musical organization, that presented concert and semi-staged performances of operas between 1951 and 1970, the AOS also presented many operas to the American public for the first time, including the United States premieres of "Billy Budd", by Edward Benjamin Britten, an English composer, conductor and pianist, and a central figure of 20th-century British classical music?
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American Opera Society The American Opera Society (AOS) was a New York City based musical organization that presented concert and semi-staged performances of operas between 1951 and 1970. The company was highly influential in sparking and perpetuating the post World War II bel canto revival, particularly through a number of highly lauded productions of rarely heard works by Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini. The AOS also presented many operas to the American public for the first time, including the United States premieres of Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd", Giuseppe Verdi's "Giovanna d'Arco", George Frideric Handel's "Hercules" and Hector Berlioz's "Les troyens" to name just a few.
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Benjamin Britten Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten {'1': ", '2': ", '3': ", '4': "} (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera "Peter Grimes" (1945), the "War Requiem" (1962) and the orchestral showpiece "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (1945).
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Society for Private Musical Performances The Society for Private Musical Performances (in German, the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) was an organization founded in Vienna in the Autumn of 1918 by Arnold Schoenberg with the intention of making carefully rehearsed and comprehensible performances of newly composed music available to genuinely interested members of the musical public. In the three years between February 1919 and 5 December 1921 (when the "Verein" had to cease its activities due to Austrian hyperinflation), the organisation gave 353 performances of 154 works in 117 concerts that involved a total of 79 individuals and pre-existing ensembles.
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Peter Pears Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears, CBE ( ; 22 June 19103 April 1986) was an English tenor. His career was closely associated with the composer Benjamin Britten, his personal and professional partner for nearly forty years.
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Emmanuel Music Emmanuel Music is a Boston-based collective group of singers and instrumentalists founded in 1970 by Craig Smith. It was created specifically to perform the complete cycle of over 200 sacred cantatas of J. S. Bach in the liturgical setting for which they were intended, an endeavor twice completed and a tradition which continues today. Over the years, Emmanuel Music has garnered critical and popular acclaim through its presentations of large-scale and operatic works by Bach, Handel, Schubert, and Mozart as well as its in-depth exploration of the complete vocal, piano, and chamber works of Debussy, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, and currently, Beethoven.
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English Music Festival The English Music Festival (also known as EMF) is an annual four-day event held over the second May bank holiday, dedicated to the performance of British composers from the mediaeval to the present day with a strong focus on the early to mid twentieth century. Founded and organised by Em Marshall in 2006, the Festival takes place in Dorchester on Thames, Oxfordshire and the surrounding area. Now in its seventh year, the festival is rapidly expanding to become one of Britain’s major classical music festivals, performing many neglected and previously unperformed works by composers as diverse as Britten and Holst to Joseph Holbrooke and Edwin York Bowen. The festival also presents world premiers by contemporary composers such as Matthew Curtis, Cecilia McDowall, Paul Carr and Tom Rose. EMF's concerts are regularly broadcast by BBC Radio 3, and the festival has established relationships with such orchestras as the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Orchestra of St Paul's and City of London Choir, and artists such as David Owen Norris, James Gilchrist and Janice Watson.
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Gustav Hinrichs Gustav Ludwig Wilhelm Hinrichs (later Anglicized to Hinricks) (10 December 1850 - 26 March 1942) was a German-born American conductor and composer. He immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty, conducting opera in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia where he founded his own opera company. His compositions include an opera and an accompanying score to the 1925 silent film "The Phantom of the Opera".
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String Quartet No. 2 (Britten) String Quartet No. 2 in C major, Op. 36, by English composer Benjamin Britten (191376), was written in 1945. It was composed in Snape, Suffolk and London, and completed on 14 October. The first performance was by the Zorian Quartet in the Wigmore Hall, London on 21 November 1945, in a concert to mark the exact 250th anniversary of the death of English composer Henry Purcell (165995). The work was commissioned by and is dedicated to Mary ("Mrs J. L.") Behrend, a patron of the arts; Britten donated most of his fee towards famine relief in India.
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Edward Auer Edward Auer (born December 7, 1941, New York City) is an American classical pianist. In 1965, he became the first American to prize in the International Chopin Piano Competition. Due to his frequent and subsequent touring in Poland, Mr. Auer is recognized worldwide as one of the leading interpreters of Frédéric Chopin. Auer has also displayed his consummate skill and broad repertoire—from Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann to Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and others—while touring the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is currently a Professor of Piano at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
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An American in Paris An American in Paris is a jazz-influenced orchestral piece by the American composer George Gershwin, written in 1928. Inspired by the time Gershwin had spent in Paris, it evokes the sights and energy of the French capital in the 1920s and is one of his best-known compositions.
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Ralph Vaughan Williams Ralph Vaughan Williams {'1': ", '2': ", '3': ", '4': "} ( 12 October 1872– 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over nearly fifty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
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Variations on an Elizabethan Theme Variations on an Elizabethan Theme (also seen as Variations on Sellinger's Round) is a set of variations for string orchestra, written collaboratively in 1952 by six English composers: Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett and William Walton.
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Lorna Cooke deVaron Lorna Cooke deVaron (born January 17, 1921) is an American choral conductor. She is one of the pre-eminent choral conductors of the 20th century, having given the world premiere or American premiere of many important works by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, Gunther Schuller, Daniel Pinkham, and others. DeVaron founded the New England Conservatory Chorus, which she directed from 1947 to 1988.
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Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Songs and Proverbs of William Blake is a song cycle composed by Benjamin Britten (191376) in 1965 for baritone voice and piano and published as his Op. 74. The published score states that the words were "selected by Peter Pears" from "Proverbs of Hell", "Auguries of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" by William Blake (17571827). It was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1965 by the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (19252012) and the composer. The critic William Mann thought that the cycle would be judged "Britten's deepest and most subtle song-cycle"; and John Warrack wrote in "The Daily Telegraph" that Britten "has, I feel, here come to terms with the darkness and sense of cruelty that has always stalked his art".
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Paul Hastings Allen Paul Hastings Allen (28 November 1883, Boston, Massachusetts – 28 September 1952, there) was an American composer.
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List of Christmas operas Christmas operas are operas which are thematically based on either the Nativity of Jesus or secular Christmas stories. The earliest Christmas operas appeared in the early 17th century, not long after the creation of the art form. Because of the ban on secular theatrical works during the season of Advent, these early Christmas operas, while elaborately staged, were based on religious themes relating to the Nativity. By the mid 19th century the ban on secular operas during Advent had ceased, and operas based on a wider array of Christmas themes, such as Santa Claus and King Wenceslaus, emerged. Several operas have been inspired by Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", including works by composers Bernard Herrmann and Thea Musgrave. The story of the Magi has also been the basis of several operas, including Gian Carlo Menotti's 1951 opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors". Initially written for television performance, Menotti's opera has become the only modern Christmas opera to earn an enduring place in the live opera performance repertoire. In the 21st century, composer Kevin Puts' "Silent Night" (2011) achieved critical success and won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2012.
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Music for a Time of War Music for a Time of War is a 2011 concert program and subsequent album by the Oregon Symphony under the artistic direction of Carlos Kalmar. The program consists of four compositions inspired by war: Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question" (1906), John Adams' "The Wound-Dresser" (1989), Benjamin Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem" (1940) and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 4 (1935). The program was performed on May 7, 2011, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, and again the following day. Both concerts were recorded for album release. On May 12, the Oregon Symphony repeated the program at the inaugural Spring for Music Festival, at Carnegie Hall. The performance was broadcast live by KQAC and WQXR-FM, the classical radio stations serving Portland and the New York City metropolitan area, respectively. The concerts marked the Oregon Symphony's first performances of "The Wound-Dresser" as well as guest baritone Sanford Sylvan's debut with the company.
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Gilbert Levine Sir Gilbert Levine, GCSG (born January 22, 1948) is an American conductor. He is considered an "outstanding personality in the world of international music television." He has led the PBS concert debuts of the Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the PBS premieres of works including the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, Bach Magnificat in D, Haydn Creation, and Bruckner Symphony 9.
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Odyssey Opera Odyssey Opera is an opera company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 2013 by Gil Rose, it quickly earned an "enthusiastic following" in New England for its programming which features "performances of works that are well off the beaten path for most companies." It typically begins its season with a concert performance of a large, rarely heard opera in the fall, continuing the season with fully staged renditions of early, classical, and contemporary opera. The company is known for performing "offbeat, neglected repertoire, with a special nod to those never, or rarely, performed in Boston" and New England.
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Peabody Orchestra Formed in 1866, the Peabody Orchestra, was the first professional orchestra in the city of Baltimore. Based at the Peabody Conservatory, its leaders included Lucien Southard, Asger Hamerik and James Monroe Deems. The Orchestra premiered several influential works by Americans, as well as providing the first United States performance of several European pieces, especially from Hamerik's own Denmark. Among the Peabody Orchestra's players were flautist Sidney Lanier and pianist Harold Randoph. The Orchestra disbanded in 1896.
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Boston Lyric Opera Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) is an American opera company based in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1976.
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Opera Opera (] ; English plural: "operas"; Italian plural: "opere" ] ) is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. In traditional opera, singers do two types of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style and arias, a more melodic style, in which notes are sung in a sustained fashion. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor.