Dracula promises that, no matter how deliciously we’ll let them scare us for a time, our animal urges can be, literally, compartmentalized and slain with the right stake to the heart. The Bacchaecounters that these urges will always be with us — that they are us — and all we can do is give them some of what they want, lest they rebel and take all we have. This insight convinced me that this opera needed a civilized, triadic, “surface” score through which you could hear, more and more, an obsessive, ecstatic music of truth. - John Corigliano
Pentatone, together with Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose, releases the world premiere recording of The Lord of Cries, an opera by John Corigliano and Mark Adamo. The recording is available now as a double CD box set, and in digital formats for streaming and high-resolution downloads.
The Lord of Cries, John Corigliano's first and only opera since his collaboration with William M. Hoffman on The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), explores our deepest desires and what librettist Mark Adamo calls our “need to blame and attack others for what we can neither resist, nor accept, in ourselves.” To do this, Adamo combined The Bacchae of Euripides with Bram Stoker’s Dracula to create a streamlined tale of horror in which duty battles yearning in each character’s heart. Corigliano’s score effectively conveys the tense atmosphere of Dionysus/Dracula character (premiered by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo) preying on London's women, and the quartet writing for him and the “three strange sisters” is particularly otherworldly. The Lord of Cries was originally commissioned by Santa Fe Opera and premiered July 17, 2021.
A Pulitzer, Grammy and Oscar winner, Corigliano is now 85, and one feels lucky that he has returned to opera at the height of his powers. - David Patrick Stearns, Gramophone
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