Orpha Phelan News
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2024-03-28
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2021-12-15 07:52:13
Jacob Peter Gowy's The Flight of Icarus (1635–1637) Those with long memories might remember Michael Zev Gordon's Icarus - Extract being performed ten years ago at Tête à Tête [there is even a video, available via the Tête à Tête website]. Now the piece is completely finished and Michael Zev Gordon's Raising Icarus, with a libretto by Stephen Plaice, will be premiered at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 28 April 2022 by Barber Opera. The work will be directed and designed by Orpha Phelan and Mads Boyd, and conducted by Natalie Murray Beale with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Raising Icarus is the latest in a rich history of Barber Opera, produced by Barber Concerts at the University of Birmingham. Traditionally focused on baroque revivals, Barber Concerts was the first British company to return Handel operas to the stage, with a production of Handel’s Xerxes in 1959. This production of Raising Icarus will be followed by a revival opera by […]
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ArtsJournal: music
2021-02-18 15:04:00
Marfa, Texas Is Getting An(other) Arts Center
“For the last year, Michael Phelan — a contemporary artist who has lived in Marfa full time since 2014 — has been quietly planning another destination within miles of both [of Donald Judd’s] sites: Marfa Invitational, an interdisciplinary, year-round arts and cultural foundation, set on five acres of high desert.” – The New York Times
2020-11-28 18:07:00
[…] day. But he hasn't replaced that piano every five or six years. Lastly: Back at my apartment, the technician finally dropped by, tuned my piano and made mechanical tweaks to a few of the keys. Afterward it felt and sounded vastly better. I have no idea what was involved. It's not too late to learn some details about piano maintenance, of course. Long ago, I took a weekend-long flute repair class from James Phelan, who is now an important flutemaker in Boston, the US's unofficial flute capital. At the end of the class, I could disassemble a flute, reassemble it, and make some simple repairs. Still, when my instruments needed repairs, back they went to the factory, or, if I was at my parents' home in NJ, to the flute technician there who worked on everyone's flutes (I wish I could remember his name...Herbert something, and he was a […]
2020-11-08 13:31:19
A Life On-Line: Phaedra, Blue Electric, Ecstatic Dances, Another Dawn, If you go down to the woods
[…] Tête à Tête in 2018 [see Anthony's review]. The opera is now complete and was performed at the Playground Theatre with substantially the same cast as the 2018 workshop but with a new director. Mimi Doulton and Jonathan Brown were the young girl Alba and her father, with an ensemble of Helen Charlston, Camilla Seale, Christopher Bowen, and Emily Wenman playing a number of roles. The conductor was Gabriella Teychenné and the director was Orpha Phelan. The opera is based on Alba Arikha's memoir of her childhood in Paris, Major/Minor, and Arikha (who is Smail's wife) wrote the libretto. It is an intense story, Alba is bullied as a child and made fun of because of a back brace, and has a complex relationship with her forbidding father. Only gradually does she, and we, learn of his terrible history during World War II. The opera unfolds in a series of […]