Come Visit Us at Opera America!

The Opera America Conference invades Houston this year from April 29 through May 2 hosted by the venerable Houston Grand Opera, so please stop by the Schott Music/EAM booth in the exhibit hall! As always, we look forward to speaking with you about our music and offer the opportunity to peruse our scores, audio samplers, composer brochures and other goodies from the Schott Music, Universal Edition, Baerenreiter and Faber Music catalogues, among others. Some of the operas we'll be featuring this year include:

The operas of Gian Carlo Menotti: The 2010/2011 season will mark the 100th anniversary of the great composer's birth, and we're gearing up for the event by presenting the Menotti operas available from the Belwin-Mills catalogue including The Last Savage, Maria Golovin, The Old Maid and the Thief, and The Unicorn, The Gorgon and the Manticore.

Tobias Picker's Emmeline: Tobias Picker's opera set in early 20th-century New England about the tragedy that befalls 13-year-old Emmeline Mosher of Fayette, Maine sees a run of performances in its brand new chamber version at Dicapo Opera Theatre in New York beginning September 10 in a co-production with MezzoTV and the Mezzo Festival in Hungary. Following the New York performances, Dicapo takes Emmeline on the road to headline the Mezzo Festival in Szeged, Hungary on November 15 and 16. Emmeline will also be the subject of a documentary produced by MezzoTV to be aired at the festival.

Kurt Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: Following hugely-successful performances at Opera Boston, Tanglewood and Los Angeles Opera, the DVD of LA Opera's 2007 production received the 2009 Grammy Awards for Best Opera Recording and Best Classical Album. Visit our booth for a preview of Mahagonny and other Weill stage works, including the perennial favorite Threepenny Opera as well as The Firebrand of Florence, fresh from a critically-acclaimed concert revival in New York, and Der Protagonist. The last three are available in recent critical editions.

Peter Eötvös's Angels in America: Currently in a run of performances at Frankfurt's Bockenheimer Depot, Peter Eötvös' lauded opera based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tony Kushner sees its UK premiere at the Barbican Hall performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2010.

Franz Joseph Haydn's L'isola disabitata (The Desert Island): Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the composer's death, L'isola disabitata is being published in its first ever critical edition in the Haydn Complete Edition series, edited by Christine Siegert and Günther Thomas (performing materials available from Baerenreiter, full score published by G. Henle Verlag). This contains numerous corrections and new details for the first time, as well as two authentic versions of the Finale. The opera also just saw a successful run of performances at Gotham Chamber Opera last month in New York, conducted by Neal Goren in a production by Mark Morris.

Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur: Bennett's 1963 opera with a libretto by Beverly Cross, an eerie, Gothic story of murder and moral decay, received this year's Irish Times award for Best Opera Production after its staging last season at Wexford. The opera was also nominated for a Grammy in the Best Opera Recording category in 2007 for its recording by Glimmerglass Opera on the Chandos label.

George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill: George Benjamin's lyric retelling of the pied piper tale for soprano, contralto and an ensemble of 15 players received its London premiere this winter and garnered rave reviews. Rupert Christiansen of the Telegraph writes, "this is something quite exceptional, both in the originality of its form and the depth of its inspiration... not a note is wasted, the dramatic pacing is impeccably controlled." Andrew Porter writing in Opera comments, "Into the Little Hill, despite its brevity, lived on for days in my mind and lives on as I write as a ‘big' important opera."

Douglas J. Cuomo's Arjuna's Dilemma: The first opera by Douglas J. Cuomo saw its critically acclaimed world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in November 2008 produced by Music-Theatre Group. A meditation on the ancient Hindi Bhagavad Gita, the opera blends disparate musical styles including North Indian vocal music, jazz and four part choral writing. John Yohalem writes in Opera Today, "Arjuna's Dilemma has been created by a composer who trusts sound, a few fine voices and a few fine virtuoso instrumentalists, to reveal his message in the same way that the great opera composers trust the sounds will bring to us."

Stewart Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter: Based on the best-selling novel by Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter is a multi‐generational family epic that explores one family's history through three generations of mothers and daughters. The opera is set in China during the years before the Communist revolution, framed by the memories and forgotten history of an elderly Chinese mother in present day San Francisco. The story sweeps from fable‐like past to factual present, from Chinese village to urban America. Shifting times and locales are linked by a recurring quartet of women: a girl, a young woman, a mother and an ageless, ghost‐spirit known as Precious Auntie. They are the bones of this family throughout time and become the mothers and daughters in each generation. Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that the opera is, "a triumph! The Bonesetter's Daughter explodes onto the stage."

Morton Feldman's Neither: Feldman's collaboration with Samuel Beckett and meditation on self-awareness sees a workshop at the hands of the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York on May 13 and 14 and still awaits its fully staged US premiere.

Lee Hoiby’s Romeo & Juliet: The master opera composer’s latest grand opus is a brilliant setting of the Shakespeare classic to a libretto adapted from the play by Mark Shulgasser. The opera awaits its world premiere.

Robert Beaser’s The Food of Love: Part of the acclaimed triptych of one-act pieces collectively titled "Central Park" which share the same setting and found its origins in three writers: Wendy Wasserstein, A. R. Gurney and Terrence McNally who were paired with composers Deborah Drattell, Michael Torke and Robert Beaser respectively. "Central Park" had its first performances at the Glimmerglass Opera and the New York City Opera.

More information on the catalogues represented by Schott/EAM can be found at www.schott-music.com, www.universaledition.com, www.baerenreiter.com and www.fabermusic.com

Visit the Houston Grand Opera's website at www.houstongrandopera.org.