The Peabody Camerata
in association with
The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
and the Peabody Chamber Opera
presents
The World Premiere of
If I Were a Voice
by Daniel Thomas Davis
Peabody Camerata
Gene Young, conductor
John Bowen, stage director
Saturday, April 3, 2004, at 7:30 PM
Sunday, April 4, 2004, at 3:00 PM
Leith Symington Griswold Hall, Peabody Conservatory
Admission free
| Current season calendar |
On April 3 and 4, the Peabody Opera Workshop and the Peabody Camerata join together in the world premiere of Peabody composer Daniel Thomas Davis’s historically based opera, If I Were a Voice. Under the baton of Gene Young and directed by Peabody alumnus and Opera Vivente founder John Bowen, the chamber opera is a joint project co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Department of History as well as Peabody.
Set in the capricious and burgeoning world of America in the 1840s, If I Were a Voice follows the stranger-than-fiction lives of the Hutchinsons, a once well-known family of singers and social activists. With a libretto fashioned by the composer from a wealth of memoirs, newspaper clippings, diaries, and poetic fragments, the opera centers on a quartet made up of three brothers and a sister, who together became one of the first groups of popular singers in America. The Hutchinsons were unique in their fusion of raw, radical activism for emancipation and women’s suffrage with a widespread, popular music idiom analogous to that of Stephen Foster.
The opera is divided into four parts and an epilogue, with each of the four parts inspired by the ubiquitous nineteenth-century song form. Each of these sections begins with a short, public scene from the family’s career before moving to the opera’s main narrative, which follows the domestic yearnings and subsequent decline of the family as a unit—in both public and private. Perhaps subconsciously, the work has emerged with strong yet unspecific political inflections. It remains throughout a private, domestic narrative: the story of individuals struggling to come to terms with themselves as artists, as members of a troubled society, and as needy human beings.
If I Were a Voice is twenty-two year old Davis’s second opera. The first, From Obscure People (2000), was developed under the guidance of Roger Brunyate in the Opera Etudes program. After graduating from Peabody and Johns Hopkins with two undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree in composition and history, Davis will be moving to London upon the invitation of the British Government as a Marshall Scholar, continuing his training at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal National Theatre.
|
PRINCIPAL SINGERS
| John | Joseph Regan |
| Judson | Alyssa Bowlby |
| Asa | William Waldrop |
| Abby | Kristen Dubenion-Smith |
| Unknown Woman | Alysia Lee |
| Criers | Elisabeth Halliday, Hilary Hogan, Dan Kempson |