Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Machover: Death and the Powers: Du Jun/Vavrek: Angel's Bone

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Today's programming falls into the category of "the latest recordings of operas of our time," which I always mention in the introduction to this show. Both of the operas on the bill are products of the twenty-first century. Angel's Bone (2016) is emphatically a work of political art. It is an outcry against human trafficking and child exploitation. This is the second opera by Chinese composer Du Yun (b. 1977, Shanghai), written in collaboration with Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek and realized in performance in cooperation with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, NYC and National Sawdust. Angel's Bone won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in music. It was premiered during the 2016 PROTOTYPE Festival in Manhattan. The world premiere recording came the following year and was issued on a pair of compact discs through VIA Records.

The music of Tod Machover (b. 1953), "America's Most Wired Composer," has been featured on this program twice before. There was his sci-fi opera Valis (1987), based on the writing of Philip K. Dick, which was aired on Sunday, September 16, 1990, followed by Resurrection (1999), based on Tolstoy's book of that name, on Sunday, January 26, 2003. Death and the Powers, released on CD through BMOP Sound in 2021, is another work of operatic science fiction, with four robot singing characters. I'll let the reviewer of this recording, Fanfare's Andrew Desiderio, fill you in: "Death and the Powers concerns billionaire Simon Powers...who, facing his own mortality, decides to make himself immortal by uploading his being into The System, which he created for that purpose. A meditation on life and death, real experiences and virtual experiences, family, human relationships, the ethics of technology, etc., it's The Makropoulos Affair, Faust, The Tempest, and R.U.R. rolled into one..." (Fanfare, July/August, 2022). Gil Rose conducts the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Starring as Simon Powers, or the Robot Leader, is baritone, James Maddalena.