Hoiby: 'Tempest' Premiere

1st March 2008

Lee Hoiby’s acclaimed opera, The Tempest, will debut its newly revised version in a new production by the award-winning Purchase Opera on 17 – 26 April at Purchase College. The opera has been recently revised by Mr. Hoiby, with collaboration from librettist Mark Shulgasser and Jacque Trussel, director of Purchase Opera (and the original Caliban in the Des Moines Metro Opera world premiere and the Dallas Opera production).

Its original format consisted of three acts played with two intermissions. The revised version is approximately 30 minutes shorter, and features only one intermission, with a pause between Acts II and III.

Hoiby’s retelling of Shakespeare’s last major play has been praised as a “beautifully written modern masterpiece” (Opera News), and “an elegant, masterful expression of American musical conservatism.…Mr. Hoiby captured the magic and wonder implicit in the Bard’s last romance” (The Wall Street Journal).

On 28 April, The Tempest will receive an unstaged performance of excerpts at Symphony Space, in New York City.

image: Facsimile of the first page of Shakespeare's The Tempest from the First Folio, published in 1623The Tempest 2h, 30 min
Libretto by Mark Shulgasser after Shakespeare's play
coloratura Soprano, 2 Sopranos, Mezzo-soprano, Countertenor, 2 Tenors, 4 Baritones, Bass-baritone, 2 Basses
SATB chorus
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