directory  |  sites  |  press        Submit Site  |  Submit Press Release

Dear USOPERAWEB:

How wonderful to see your interview with Gordon Hawkins. He mentioned in the interview that he wasn't going to know how to sing Rigoletto if he never got the opportunity to do it. Well, thank goodness he finally found the opportunity to do it because he is truly one of the best Rigolettos I have ever seen/heard. He did that role for Arizona Opera Company in October 2001 and was absolutely wonderful. Not only is his voice sumptuous but his acting is superb also. And, having had the great pleasure of meeting him, I can also say he is an absolutely delightful, humble person.

Thank you for putting him in the limelight.

Bette Jones
Apache Junction, AZ

Dear USOPERAWEB:

I was delighted to read your current Blitzstein issue and its coverage of two of the important works by this great American opera composer, Regina and No For An Answer.

It may interest your readers to know that portions of these works, and many others by Blitzstein, have recently been published by Boosey & Hawkes in The Marc Blitzstein Songbook, Volumes 1 & 2, edited by Leonard Lehrman. One of the songs in No For An Answer, "Expatriate," appears in the libretto, though not in the Tams-Witmark score. It is readily available now in volume 1 of the Songbook, in a version by Lehrman based on what survives of Blitzstein's original conception.

Lehrman also completed the music for Blitzstein's unfinished opera, Idiots First, and for the work that Blitzstein struggled with over a number of years and was very dear to him, the opera Sacco and Vanzetti (commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera). Scores for both of these operas are available from Theodore Presser. Production photos and critical comments may be viewed at: www.artists-in-residence.com/~ljlehrman/IdiotsFirst.html and www.artists-in-residence.com/~ljlehrman/SaccoAndVanzetti.html.

Excerpts from these two works are likewise published in both volumes of the Songbook and have been recorded by Helene Williams, Gregory Mercer, James Sergi, and Leonard Lehrman on a recent compact disc: Original Cast Recordings OC 4441, A Marc Blitzstein Songbook. This CD makes clear just how stirring some of Blitzstein's lesser-known and even unfinished works can be today, especially now that the incomplete ones have been put into performable shape by Lehrman. The results, of course, may not be exactly what Blitzstein might have done himself - nobody can know that for sure, and he himself often had second thoughts about his own work, resketching some scenes as many as sixteen times. But Lehrman's completions convey much of what Blitzstein clearly had in mind when tackling these challenging (and still-relevant) musicodramatic projects.

Ralph P. Locke
Professor of Musicology
Eastman School of Music