MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

Happy 80th Birthday, Meredith Monk!

To celebrate the art of Meredith Monk — who turns 80 today — Flotation Device is presenting a two-hour career retrospective from her experimental origins (w/Collin Walcott & Don Preston) through her recordings for ECM to the large-ensemble works she has written in recent years. Sunday 10pm to midnight PST, @KBCS 91.3fm https://kbcs.fm.

Filed under: Meredith Monk, music news

Yuval Sharon’s Radiant New Interpretation of Meredith Monk’s Avant-Garde Classic

Atlas-MathewImaging

Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, staged by Yuval Sharon; photo credit (c) Mathew Imaging

Yuval Sharon bid adieu this past week to his three-year residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic by boldly staging a work that changed his life: Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas, which before this had existed in just one production: the original, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera under David Gockley and staged there in 1991.

My review has been posted on Musical America (apologies for the paywall):

LOS ANGELES — A generation has already passed since Meredith Monk first charted an unprecedented operatic world in Atlas. Yet her ambitious stage work, which premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1991, retains an aura of singularity — not just in its radiant music and almost entirely wordless libretto, but in the process through which Atlas was shaped as well. Monk cast aside convention altogether, building her opera from performance practices she had pioneered. 

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Filed under: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Meredith Monk, new opera, review, Yuval Sharon

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