I have called to ask composer Lori Laitman about the upcoming world premiere of her new opera, Come to Me in Dreams, at Cleveland Opera (June 9, 11, 12, 13). But the first words heard from Ms Laitman this morning are an apology for her hoarse voice. She has been composing.
"Whenever I'm writing a song, I sing it, though I'm not a singer at all. It's really hideous! I feel sorry for my poets sometimes. If I'm meeting a poet - a poet who's alive, of course - I will sing for them - because I'm always so excited about my music! I ask them to use their imagination."
Ms Laitman tends to speak with the charm and disclosure of sentence fragments, free associations and restarts, all suggesting her high energy and keen attention to changes in moments as they pass, in her busy mind.
"I don't normally sound like this! But I got a commission the other day for this piece and I just got the poem in the mail yesterday. All of a sudden, I have to work quickly for it - it's scheduled for performance on June 12. But right now I have a lot of ideas and I'm already halfway done. That doesn't always happen - at all - but when it does happen, it's nice."
One measure of composer Lori Laitman's gifts is that poets and performers with widely diverse specialties believe in common that her musical voice is ideally matched to their own....
In Ms Laitman's Come to Me in Dreams, a man (baritone Sanford Sylvan) who has survived the horrors of World War II, remembers his wife (mezzo-soprano Fenlon Lamb) and a daughter (soprano Megan Tillman) who died at the hands of the Nazis, as he finally reveals his story to his surviving daughter (a non-singing role). Ultimately he comes poignantly to terms with the past, and therefore his future. But what, I wonder, was so persuasive about the Cleveland commission that it wooed this highly sought-after composer of contemporary lyric art song to the operatic stage?
Read the complete interview
6/08/2004 01:45:38 PM
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