Ashley, Robert - Foreign Experiences (due to weight, this price for the USA only. Outside of the USA, the price will be adjusted as needed)
SKU
05-LCD 5003CD
“This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe.
Foreign Experiences is one of the opera tetralogy that Ashley wrote in the early 1990s, following Perfect Lives) and Atalanta (Act of God). He would give it the overall title (also the name of one of the component operas) Now Eleanor's Idea. These four operas would follow the stories of some of the characters who populated Perfect Lives a decade earlier.
We met Don last year when Lovely Music released a CD of a new Ashley "band" performing Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) at the Kitchen, New York.
In Foreign Experiences "Don gets a job at a small college in the southwest. Once there, against all expectations, everything goes wrong. He loses his family and friends, he loses his car, he fears that he will lose his mind." He comes to believe that he has been given a mission, to learn about premonitions and he embarks on a journey to find the wise man who will give him priceless information. Linda thinks he plan is foolish; Don thinks he has no choice. But is the opera really "about" Don and Linda? "Opera likes to simplify and enlarge its characters to make them fit grand themes. Mr. Ashley goes in the opposite direction and arrives at the cosmos just as easily. Mundane chitchat about good eating habits or car repair turns to metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, not to mention psychiatry, before we know it."-Bernard Holland, The New York Times (November 21, 1994)
The live recording was made by Tom Hamilton and Cas Boumans, and this release has been edited mixed by Tom Hamilton. A slipcase includes a jewel case with a four-page folder, and a 96-page booklet of the full libretto.
- LabelLovely Music
- UPC745295500322