COMPOSER LORI LAITMAN
Lori Laitman is one of America’s most prolific and widely performed composers of vocal music. She has composed two operas, an oratorio, choral works and over 200 songs, setting the words of classical and contemporary poets, among them the lost voices of poets who perished in the Holocaust. The Journal of Singing has written: “It is difficult to think of anyone before the public today who equals her exceptional gifts for embracing a poetic text and giving it new and deeper life through music.”
The Scarlet Letter, Laitman’s full-length opera, will receive its professional world premiere at Opera Colorado in Denver in May 2013. This new production, celebrating the company’s 30th anniversary, will be directed by Beth Greenberg. The leading roles will be sung by Elizabeth Futral, James Valenti and Morgan Smith. Dean Williamson will conduct and the design team is comprised of Wendall Harrington, projection design; Erhard Rom, set; Robert Wierzel, lighting and Terese Wadden, costumes. The libretto, based on the Hawthorne classic, is by American poet David Mason, the current poet laureate of Colorado. Laitman’s oratorio Vedem, another collaboration with Mason, was commissioned by Music of Remembrance and saw its world premiere in Seattle in May 2010. Naxos released a CD of the work in May 2011, about which Fanfare Magazine wrote: “A most touching experience, and one that further confirms Laitman’s status as one of the most talented and intriguing of living composers.” Laitman and Mason are currently developing Ludlow, a new opera based on Mason’s award-winning verse novel about the 1914 Colorado mining town disaster. Excerpts will be presented at The University of Colorado’s New Opera Workshop in June 2012.
Since she launched her career in 1991, Laitman’s music has steadily gained recognition, both in the U.S. and abroad. The Washington Master Chorale recently commissioned and premiered The Earth and I, a choral song cycle. Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair commissioned and premiered Todesfuge Songs inNY and DC in February 2012 with French-American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, and will present the London premiere this July at Wigmore Hall. Laitman was a Featured Composer on Thomas Hampson’s online resource, Song of America and The Grove Dictionary of American Music will include an entry on Laitman in its 2012 edition.
Laitman’s four solo CDs, released by Albany Records, have received enthusiastic reviews. The composer’s latest, Within These Spaces (2009), garnered exceptional praise: “One hundred years hence, when critics look back at the art songs of our era, there will be many fine composers to laud and applaud, but few will deserve higher praise than Lori Laitman.” (The Journal of Singing); “This is music of depth and richness that connects with the soul.”(American Record Guide); “Her affinity for the voice...is beyond doubt...her songs represent outpourings of great beauty.” (Fanfare Magazine)
Laitman graduated magna cum laude from Yale College and received her Master of Music degree from The Yale School of Music. For more information, please visit artsongs.com.
Librettist DAVID MASON
David Mason's books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007, and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS News Hour. Author of a collection of essays,The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, his memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010. Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry V. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. Mason has also written the libretti for composer Lori Laitman's opera of The Scarlet Letter and her Holocaust oratorio, Vedem. In 2009 he won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize, allowing him to adapt Ludlow into a new libretto for Laitman. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, Mason was recently named Poet Laureate of Colorado. Click here to listen to Mason's interview with Colorado Public Radio.
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