In the Wings

Featuring Simon Dyer. Our Emerging Artists do so much – not just within BLO but throughout the opera community. BLO helps to make this possible by providing staff time and mentorship in addition to employing Emerging Artists to perform in our community programs as well as our performances.

After Mark-Anthony Turnage studied at Tanglewood Music Center with Hans Werner Henze in 1983, Henze arranged a commission from him for the Munich Biennale, and thus Greek premiered in 1988. The “then unknown, twenty-five-year-old English composer” had “never written a piece longer than fifteen minutes,” but established a growing international reputation after the enthusiastic reception to Greek’s world premiere. Greek won two awards and was a highlight of the 1988 Edinburgh Festival.

Perhaps we could all use some diversion from the agonies of Eddy and Oedipus! Tom Lehrer has one of the most remarkable biographies I have come across recently. Check him out: Tom Lehrer. Long associated with Boston, Harvard, and MIT both as scholar and as an ultra-smart satirist, he here memorably sums up the eternal Oedipal dilemma.

The world premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s first opera, Greek, took place on June 17, 1988 in Munich, Germany. The British composer had just turned 28, and his violent, visceral, in-your-face adaptation of the Oedipus myth propelled him into the forefront of composers of his generation.

John Dryden’s reworking of Sophocles, entitled Oedipus, was one of the most performed plays of English Restoration drama, full of relish in the descriptions of the story’s more violent and bloodthirsty elements that appealed mightily to the public. In 1692 Purcell set parts of it to music, including “Music for a While,” one of his most familiar and striking works…however incongruous it seems in its restraint and calmness compared with the tumultuous drama of the narrative.

Greek, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1988 operatic setting of the Oedipus story, is set in the gritty, seething political turmoil of 1980s London: the era of Thatcherism, of extreme political and social changes, and of artistic and cultural revolt. The prosperity and triumph of capitalism that marked Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister from 1979-1990 were not without cost or controversy—especially in the arts.

BLO is moving into high gear with its upcoming production of Greek, by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Night Journey is a 1947 Martha Graham ballet performed to a harsh, dramatic score by William Schuman, with costumes by Graham and sets by her longtime collaborator, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. She noted that “the action takes place in Jocasta’s heart at the instant when she recognizes the ultimate terms of her destiny.”

Greek: A story written by a supervillain. This contemporary English opera is based on the 1980 play of the same title by actor and playwright Steven Berkoff. Greek: Where it’s at: Turnage’s opera Greek was premiered in the Carl-Orff-Hall of Munich’s Gasteig complex.