Word: rochbergs
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...Rochberg's Confidence Man challengingly evokes an older idiom...
...more than a decade, Composer George Rochberg, 64, has been a point man in one of the bitterest musical skirmishes of the postwar era. With the appearance in 1972 of his Third String Quartet, a work at times frankly reminiscent of Beethoven and Mahler, Rochberg broke irrevocably from the dominant twelve-tone school of composition to write music that was more tuneful, more accessible and, in his opinion, more expressive. His apostasy puzzled and angered many of his colleagues, who felt that the tonal system used by the great classical and romantic composers was exhausted. "Why is George writing beautiful...
...Rochberg has since refined his neo-tonal style in such works as the String Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6, known collectively as the "Concord" Quartets after the ensemble for which they were written, and the Violin Concerto, premiered by Isaac Stern. But his most ambitious rapprochement with the past has come not in instrumental music but in opera. The Confidence Man, with a libretto by Gene Rochberg based on Herman Melville's bleak, cynical novel, is currently on display at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico...
...Rochberg has done his best to flesh out the unpromising material. The opera, his first, is filled with striking set pieces: a lyrical duet for China (Tenor Neil Rosenshein) and his wife Annabella (Soprano Sunny Joy Langton); an ominous interview between China and his moneyed friend Orchis (Tenor Michael Fiacco), whose threatening nature is underlined by a snap-pizzicato line in the low strings; a good-natured, bibulous ensemble lauding the joys of wine. In his handling of the choruses, Rochberg is especially skillful; indeed the final chorus, extolling the virtue of confidence, recalls the Falstaffian spirit of Verdi...
There is some adventure to be found. Summer is often the season for the offbeat in opera. The enterprising Santa Fe Opera will present the world premiere of American Composer George Rochberg's The Confidence Man this week, and is staging Strauss's rare Die Liebe der Danae as well; the Opera Theater of St. Louis in June presented the premiere of Stephen Paulus' ambitious The Postman Always Rings Twice, which it commissioned, and unearthed Prokofiev's youthful one-act shocker Maddalena...