Though perhaps less well known than the great classical and romantic operas -- most commonly written in Italian, French, or German -- composers over the past century have created fresh, appealing, and well-crafted operas in English that are every bit as beautiful and moving as their earlier predecessors. In this adventure, we'll hear lovely scenes from operas like Benjamin Britten's masterful 'Albert Herring' and Dominick Argento's tangy 'Postcard from Morocco'. Great American masterpieces like George Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess' and John Corigliano's 'The Ghosts of Versaille' share stage with operas by Leonard Bernstein, John Adams, and Igor Stravinsky. We'll even hear a truly modern opera, 'What Next?' by the oldest living American composer, Elliott Carter, who at 103 is still going strong). We'll finish the afternoon with a complete one-act chamber opera from the great Italian-American opera composer Gian-Carlo Menotti. Which one? Come and find out!
Cellist David Sims studied at the Indiana University and Yale schools of music and has performed at the Tanglewood and Waterloo festivals, as well as the North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, where he was also a faculty performer for the June in Buffalo young composer seminars. In January he was awarded an Alumni Ventures grant from the Yale School of Music allowing him to expand the scope of his music classes and offer them more widely throughout Connecticut.
