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Project
"...solid dramatic timing, compassionate characterizations, and huge potential.”
- The Philadelphia Inquirer's Best in Classical Music for 2009
PAUL'S CASE
Music by Gregory Spears
Libretto by Gregory Spears and Kathryn Walat
Based on the story by Willa Cather
About Paul's Case
Paul’s Case is a two act evening length chamber opera for seven singers [S.S. M-S.T.T.B.B] lasting approximately 85 minutes. The opera chronicles the dissolution of a high school dandy living in sooty turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. Paul, who spends his free time working as an usher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Hall, eventually runs away to revel in the luxury of New York City's Waldorf Astoria hotel. The vocal lines, both pastoral and mechanistic, suggest the world of nature, luxury and art that Paul loves and the gilded-age machinery that will eventually destroy him. The opera may be performed with or without an intermission in small to medium sized opera houses. The piece will be scored for a 14-piece chamber orchestra [0.0.2.0/0.2.0.0/piano/perc./hrp./strings (min. 3.3.2.1.1)], but may also be performed in its current piano vocal version.
Paul's Case is being developed in part with generous grants from the BMI Foundation, the Virgil Thomson Foundation and the "Composers & the Voice Circle of Friends".
About the Creators
 GREGORY SPEARS (composer / co-librettist)
Gregory Spears has written music for So Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, the NOW Ensemble, the Present Music Ensemble and Center City Opera Theater. His works have won prizes from BMI, ASCAP and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2001 the American Composers Orchestra played his orchestral work Circle Stories during their annual Whitaker New Music Readings. More recently the ACO performed his work Finishing in Zankel Hall. In 2007 Spears collaborated with musicologist Simon Morrison to realize the original score for Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet for premiere by the Mark Morris Dance Group. His latest work, a Requiem, will be premiered in New York in June. For next season, Spears is writing a piece for the JACK Quartet underwritten by the American Composers Forum Jerome Composers Commissioning program. He studied composition at Eastman, Yale and Princeton and was a participant in American Opera Projects’ Composers and the Voice. (www.gregoryspears.com)
KATHRYN WALAT (co-librettist)
Kathryn Walat’s play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen premiered Off-Broadway at the Women’s Project, and was published in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2007, in Dramatics magazine, and by Samuel French. Her other plays include Bleeding Kansas (Hangar Theatre), awarded a 2010 Francesca Primus Citation; Know Dog (Salvage Vanguard Theater); and Johnny Hong Kong (Perishable Theatre). She has been commissioned by Yale Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, and Actors Theatre of Louisville; and her work has been developed at The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, Ars Nova, Electric Pear, Sundance Theatre Lab, Voice & Visions, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Kate received her BA from Brown University, and MFA from the Yale School of Drama. In 2010 she will be in residence at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center with a workshop of her new play Creation, about music, obsession, and the creative process.
Media
Listen to music from
Paul's Case - Act I
View images from
Paul's Case
Press
September 13, 2009 - MUSIC WEB INTERNATIONAL
Opera review: Workshop of PAUL'S CASE
December 13, 2009 - PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Best of 2009: Workshop of PAUL'S CASE
AOP Presentations
UPCOMING!
June 11, 2010 - 4:30 p.m.
New Works Sampler at OPERA America’s Opera Conference 2010: New Realities | New Strategies
Concert reading of scenes
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
250 South Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
DIRECTIONS
PERFORMANCES BY: members of LA Opera’s Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program
CLICK HERE for more info.
March 14 & 20, 2010
In association with Manhattan School of Music and Opera Index's New American Opera Previews: From Page to Stage
Staged Workshop of Act II
March 14, 2010 - Manhattan School of Music, Greenfield Hall, 120 Claremont Ave., NYC, 10027
March 20, 2010 - South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NY 11217
MUSIC DIRECTION: Silas Huff
STAGE DIRECTION: Patrick Diamond
PERFORMANCES BY: Thomas Wazelle
May 29-31, 2009
South Oxford Space, Brooklyn, NY and Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Developmental workshop of Act I
MUSIC DIRECTION: Jennifer Peterson
PERFORMANCES BY: Marcus DeLoach, Chad Johnson, Hai-Ting Chinn, Kirsten Chambers, Katherine Wessinger
October 3-4, 2008
South Oxford Space
Composers & the Voice: Six Scenes presents Scene 1
MUSIC DIRECTION: Jennifer Peterson
STAGE DIRECTION: Ned Canty
PERFORMANCES BY: Jennifer Berkebile, Marcus DeLoach, Abigail Fischer, Melissa Fogerty, Thomas Wazelle
Other Presentations
September 9-13, 2009
The Lantern Theater, Philadelphia, PA
Center City Opera Theater presents
Concert workshop of Act I & II
MUSIC DIRECTION: Andrew M. Kurtz
STAGE DIRECTION: Albert Innaurato
PERFORMANCES BY:
Siddhartha Misra, Paul
Branch Fields, Principa
Chloe Moore, History Teacher & Maid 1
Toni Marie Palmertree, Drawing Teacher & Maid 2
Hai-Ting, Chinn, English Teacher & Maid 3
Jean Bernard Cerin, Father
Kyle Bielfield, Yale Freshman
Paul's Case image photo by Matthu Placek.
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