Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Rorem: Our Town

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

It was a hit when the original play was first staged in 1938; then in 1940 came the movie version, with film music by none other than Aaron Copland. Now Thornton Wilder's Our Town has been made into an opera! In 1951 Copland was asked to expand his film score into an opera, but Wilder wouldn't permit it. The playwright was notoriously picky about authorizing musical arrangements of his stageworks. Our Town had to wait until long after Wilder's passing when in 2006 Ned Rorem's operatic version was premiered at the Indiana University Opera Theater and subsequently professionally produced by Lake George Opera in upstate New York.

Rorem treats the play as a chamber opera; his scoring is light and transparent. The formal structure of scenes closely follows Wilder's stage conception. Wilder wanted to depict stories of the lives of common laboring folk in an early twentieth century American town. Our Town the opera is perfect for broadcast on the Sunday of the Labor Day holiday weekend. And not only is Ned Rorem's Our Town an American working people's opera: it's a quintessentially New England opera as well. Wilder's town, Grover's Corners, is modelled on Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Our Town was recorded in 2013 at the Rogers Center for the Arts, Merrimack College, in North Andover, Massachusetts, also in New England and not all that far from Peterborough. Gil Rose conducts the instrumentalists and chorus of Monadnock Music, with a large cast of Grover's Corners townies. Our Town the opera was released just this year on two compact discs through New World Records.