New Opera from American Classics - Scott Wheeler: The Construction of Boston
Posted by David in New Releases
Scott WHEELER: The Construction of Boston
The Boston Cecilia; Donald Tetters, Music Director
William Hite, Charles Blandy, Marcus DeLoach, Krista River, Christòpheren Nomura, Elizabeth Anker, Sharla Nafziger.
Naxos 8669018
“Scott Wheeler’s one-act opera The Construction of Boston, in which the city emerges from primordial verdancy while Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and even the opera itself comment,
cries out for an extravagant, Jacobean staging. The Boston Cecilia adopted the next best strategy on Sunday, appealing to the audience’s imagination with a concert performance … While Wheeler’s warm, tonal harmonies echo Thomson’s own neoclassical Americana, he deploys unexpected instrumental colors—a twanging banjo, a chirping, fife-like piccolo—with modernist verve. Like Thomson, he sets words with unfailing clarity …”
— Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe
The Construction of Boston (Naxos 8669018) began its life as a stage work, written by poet Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) for three New York artist friends: Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint-Phalle. Composer Scott Wheeler’s one-act opera was written as a tribute to his teacher Virgil Thomson and had its premiere in 1989 with the John Oliver Chorale. In February 2002, the Boston Conservatory produced a fully-staged version of the work, directed by Patricia Weinmann. This recording is from a live concert performance at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall on April 1, 2007. It features The Boston Cecilia, with
Donald Tetters, Music Director, and a cast that includes William Hite, Charles Blandy, Marcus DeLoach,
Krista River, Christòpheren Nomura, Elizabeth Anker and Sharla Nafziger.
The composer has written:
“The Construction of Boston has elements of comic opera, masque and dramatic cantata. Koch referred to it as ‘a postmodern Baroque opera.’ I dedicated the work to my teacher Virgil Thomson; it takes some of its aesthetic from Thomson’s Gertrude Stein operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All. As in the Thomson-Stein works, aspects of nonsense and opacity of meaning are no obstacle to the most serious artistic intent. In Construction, there is also a political (or at least civic) message.”
Scott Wheeler, Boston Cecilia Composer-in-Residence, was born in Washington DC in 1952. He studied at Amherst College, New England Conservatory and Brandeis University, where his principal teachers were Lewis Spratlan and Arthur Berger. He pursued further studies at the Tanglewood Music Center with Olivier Messiaen, the Dartington School with Peter Maxwell Davies, and privately with Virgil Thomson. In 1975 he was a founding member of the new-music ensemble Dinosaur Annex, which he continues to direct and conduct. Scott Wheeler’s first full-length opera, Democracy: An American Comedy, with libretto by Romulus Linney, was commissioned by the Washington National Opera and premièred in January 2005. Other ensembles to commission and/or perform Wheeler’s works include the orchestras of Minnesota, Houston, Toledo and Indianapolis, New York City Opera, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In January 2007, Kent Nagano and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin commissioned a new chamber symphony, City of Shadows, featured in a portrait concert of Wheeler at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berlin Philharmonie.
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