Word: bolcom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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COMPOSER: WILLIAM BOLCOM...
...have hit an operatic mother lode. Within the past year, the Metropolitan Opera has staged two successful world premieres by Americans, John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles and Philip Glass's The Voyage. This month, through Nov. 24, Lyric Opera of Chicago is striking pay dirt with William Bolcom's McTeague. Eureka...
Until now, Frank Norris' 1899 novel was best known as the inspiration for Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent epic Greed. Bolcom has given the material a brash, distinctive voice. His score evokes turn-of-the-century America in a slick, seamless potpourri of retro modernism, long, loose-limbed melodies and irresistible rhythmic invention...
...Bolcom cheerfully quotes a colleague as saying that he is the only serious composer who drives a Cadillac. But he has worked hard for his popularity, and he still does. His tenth string quartet premiered last year, and Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will tour four cities with his cello-and-piano sonata in May. Casino Paradise (an opera about a gangster "that's more or less like a musical") premieres in Philadelphia in April. Other coming works: a "baby opera" about Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte; a song cycle of poems by American women for Marilyn Horne...
...Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...