Alessio Verna News
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2024-04-24
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2022-02-25 01:19:17
Indiana University: Black cast and director bring revered Black composer's opera to life [William Grant Still's "Highway 1, USA"]
[…] Outlaw said "Highway 1, USA" was a fitting opera for her first stage role at Jacobs because it feels accessible and relatable. Still wrote the opera about Black American characters. It is sung in English, and the characters deal with real-world issues of family, love and marriage. Love was an important theme in Still's life. In 1939, he went to great lengths to marry his second wife, pianist Verna Arvey. She was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Since interracial marriages were still illegal in California, the couple traveled across the border to Tijuana to marry. They later collaborated on "Highway 1, USA," with Still creating the composition and Arvey the libretto. At the story's center is the strong, loving bond between the main characters, Bob and Mary. Baritone Marvin Wayne Allen played the role of Bob. […]
2021-06-18 19:02:36
A student of Daniel Gaede at the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Verna currently studies with Herwig Zack at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg. She has performed in the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and Verbier Festival Orchestra in addition to serving as a concertmaster of the Bavarian State Youth Orchestra — where she worked with renowned […] The post appeared first on The World's Leading Classical Music News Source. Est 2009..
2021-05-31 00:23:00
STLToday.com: 'Highway 1, U.S.A.' is momentous tribute by OTSL to long-neglected composer
[…] widely performed. Still composed classical music with an American signature and an African American voice. “My musical training emphasized European musical culture,” Still said in a historic radio interview, “but this failed to satisfy me completely as a basis for an idiom of expressing myself. Therefore, I sought to create an idiom unmistakably American.” With a libretto by Verna Arvey, Still’s second wife, “Highway 1, U.S.A.” tells the distinctly American story of a married couple, Bob and Mary, who help Bob’s younger brother, Nate, through college. Tensions build as Bob tells Mary that Nate needs more time to “establish himself.” The score blends elements of Romanticism, blues and musical theater. Stage director Ron Himes (Black Rep founder and producing director) set the production in the early 1960s, […]
2021-05-30 00:55:00
NYTimes.com: A Black Composer’s Intense Opera Gets a Rare Staging: William Grant Still’s one-act “Highway 1, U.S.A.” runs in St. Louis through June 17
[…] Handy and the creator of the enduringly winning “Afro-American Symphony.” Thanks to his rich catalog of symphonic and chamber music, Still, who died in 1978 at 83, was widely known as the pathbreaking “dean” of Black American composers. But his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire. “Troubled Island,” about the Haitian revolution and its aftermath, boasted a libretto by Langston Hughes and additional lyrics by Verna Arvey, a writer who was married to Still. It premiered at New York City Opera in 1949, but continues to wait for a second production. (A fascinating, if scratchy, recording of the premiere can be purchased from the Still estate.) Credit...Carl Van Vechten Collection/Getty Images Still’s one-act stunner “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” premiered in 1963, has also been a rarity. But it will enter the limelight this weekend with […]
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