Gian carlo menotti biography of rory

Northern Ireland Opera is Northern Ireland's national opera company.

The company is based at the Carnegie Building, Donegall Road, Belfast, and its major funder is the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The company's patron is Sean Rafferty, and its artistic director is Cameron Menzies.

History

Origins

Northern Ireland Opera (originally "Opera Company NI") was founded in 2010 after a strategic decision by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to "incorporate the best resources from Castleward Opera and Opera Fringe" into a single new company. The Arts Council appointed former board member of Castleward Opera, Roy Bailie OBE as chairman, and former chairman of Opera Fringe Michael Coburn as vice-chairman.

Inaugural Season

In the following months Oliver Mears was appointed artistic director by the board, and the new company officially launched its inaugural season of events in December 2010, collaborating with Barry Douglas and his Camerata Ireland orchestra in a Christmas concert at the Ulster Hall. In February 2011 it co-produced its first NI-wide tour, with Second Movement Opera, a production of The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti which travelled throughout Northern Ireland.

Seasons 2011–present

2011–2012 season

The company's first major production was Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, in three different historic spaces in Derry in March 2011, featuring Giselle Allen in the title role, with Jesús León as Cavaradossi and Paul Carey Jones as Scarpia. The production won the Irish Times Theatre Award for best opera in February 2012.

In his review of the company's first production, Tosca in March 2011, where he notes the enthusiastic response of the first night audience Terry Blain continues by stating that:

[i]n a part of the United Kingdom where opera has suffered constantly over the years from chronic inattention and lack of proper funding, and for long periods has seemed simply an irrel

Although considered to be an American composer Gian Carlo Menotti kept his Italian citizenship all his life. He also kept close musical ties to his mother country most famously through his ‘Festival dei Due Mondi’ which he started in Spolento in 1958. As a student he moved to America to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia were he met lifelong friend and colleague Samuel Barber. Menotti was a very talented musician from a young age and wrote his first opera ‘Amelia al Ballo’ when he was just 25. He had relatively local success with a number of his early operas but it was not until ‘The Medium’, composed in 1946, that he achieved considerable international recognition and fame. A lot of Menotti’s operatic works are considered by some to be musically derivative and overtly dramatic. A mix of Italian verismo and American Hollywood. But this was a blend that proved very popular and rewarding for Menotti with later works like ‘The Consul’, ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors’ and ‘The Saint of Bleecker Street’ achieving great international success. The Consul was a Pulitzer Prize winner and also the first American opera to be staged at La Scala in Milan.

Though having great popular appeal many of Menotti’s works were shunned by the champions of modern musical trends. A contemporary observed:

‘Menotti has never written an original note in his life, and yet every note immediately has the signature of Menotti’

He was associated with what was seen as an outdated romanticism and lyricism while many of his contemporaries rushed headlong to embrace dissonance and serialism. Menotti was considered antiquated, a composer who especially in his later years was out of step with the musical establishment. This didn’t seem to bother Menotti too much and to quote the man himself:

‘Music history will place me somewhere,