Urban Arias & American Modern Ensemble: Paul’s Case (Gregory Spears | Kathyrn Walat)
Urban Arias | American Modern Ensemble | Gregory Spears | Kathryn Walat | Willa Cather | Robert Wood | The American Opera Project
Available on Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming services, and as a digital download on Bandcamp
Digital Album Booklet
About The Album
In Willa Cather’s remarkable story Paul’s Case (1905), an enigmatic high school student, on the cusp of maturity and with no productive outlet for his artistic energies, cultivates the image of a dandy in response to his middle-class Pittsburgh surroundings. Paul’s interaction with his teachers and his journey to New York culminate in a heartbreaking climax: Paul’s suicide.
In our operatic adaptation, we tried to create an overarching mood that is reflective and expansive, as if the story were being retold in memoriam using Paul’s favorite art forms: music and theater. With recent media accounts of bullying and teenage suicide in the news, we feel that Cather’s tale of a young outcast seems more relevant than ever. It is our hope that the words and music do justice to the story by creating a strong character who reminds us of our own struggle to cope with what Cather calls “the homilies by which the world is run.”
Paul’s music superimposes new and old styles—post-minimal and baroque—in order to explore the defiant and fragile sides of his personality. His vocal lines consist of small melodic fragments repeated with slightly different dramatic accents, illustrating both the lockstep industrial world of early 20th-century Pittsburgh and the doggedness of the tale’s protagonist. In contrast, Paul's teachers often sing in train-whistle-like harmony, foreshadowing both Paul's escape to New York and the opera's tragic denouement. Much of the accompanying music in the chamber orchestra is also designed to evoke train-like sounds.
About Urban Arias
Founded by General Director Robert Wood in 2010, UrbanArias has produced over 30 operas, including 15 world premieres, 12 of which were UrbanArias commissions. In 2021, Shawn Okpebholo’s Unknown, a song cycle commemorating the centenary of the founding of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, received national attention when the accompanying film was featured on PBS Newshour. Two years earlier, UrbanArias’ first commercial recording, Gregory Spears’ Paul’s Case, was selected by Opera News as one of the best albums of the year.
Since the company’s inception, UrbanArias has demonstrated a commitment to the highest quality of musical and theatrical performances. Recognized by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other leading media outlets as the premiere purveyor of contemporary chamber opera in the DC region, UrbanArias is seen as a company with national significance to the opera industry. UrbanArias has produced works by established and upcoming composers including Jake Heggie, Gregory Spears, Shawn Okpebholo, Laura Kaminsky, Tom Cipullo, Peter Hilliard, Susan Kander, Marc Migó, Michael Nyman, and Jeffrey Smith, among many others.
UrbanArias’ debut performance was Lucy, a 15-minute opera by Tom Cipullo presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The company then produced repertory festival seasons in 2011 and 2012 before settling into a format of two or three stand-alone productions in a regular season. Throughout the year, UrbanArias produces digital content to complement and enhance mainstage productions, and works to build deeper connections with community partners through interview and discussion panels and artistic and social collaborations.
World premiere productions include Paul’s Case in 2013; Tom Cipullo’s Josephine in 2016; Peter Hilliard and Matt Boresi’s Blue Viola in 2015 and The Last American Hammer in 2018; Sidney Boquiren’s and Daniel Neer’s Independence Eve in 2017; Jeffrey Smith and David Johnston’s Why Is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?: A Love Story in 2018, and Stephen Eddins’ and Michael O’Brien’s Why I Live at the P.O.; 70% of UrbanArias’ world premieres have gone on to have second (or third) productions with professional companies, something that is not always a guarantee for new work. This track record speaks to UrbanArias’ dedication to discovering and supporting excellent composers and helping bring their works to the stage.
Other notable productions include the third professional production of Laura Kaminsky, Mark Cambell, and Kimberly Reed’s As One in 2015, the second professional production of Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied in 2011, and a new adaptation of Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters in 2019.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, UrbanArias continued to produce new operas created for film. As part of the national Decameron Opera Coalition in 2020, UrbanArias commissioned and produced its first opera-in-film, The Roost, by John de los Santos and Marc Migó. 2021 brought two films: Susan Kander and Roberta Gumbel’s dwb (driving while black) and Shawn Okpebholo and Marcus Amaker’s Unknown.
UrbanArias debuted at the Keegan Theatre in Northwest DC in January 2020, and returned there for performances of Stephen Eddins’ Why I Live at the P.O. in April 2022 and Inbox Zero in 2023.
UrbanArias’ fresh approach to opera and commitment to excellence contributes to the DC area’s artistic growth and cultural diversity and focuses national attention on opera as an important, timely, and current art form.
About American Modern Ensemble
American Modern Ensemble (AME) spotlights contemporary music via lively programming and performs a wide repertoire, using a robust combination of instrumentalists, vocalists, and conductors. The ensemble often highlights house composer and founder Robert Paterson. Since its inception in 2005, AME has performed over 250 works by living composers and has received consistent praise in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. Sold-out crowds at BAM, Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, Lincoln Center, the Rubin Museum, and National Sawdust are a winning testament to what is 'right' about classical music today.
AME includes on-stage chats with composers and the creative team, allowing audience members to connect with the creative process. AME provides a welcoming environment for the audience, creators, and performers. The composers we program participate and attend our shows, including luminaries such as John Luther Adams, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Steven Mackey, Paul Moravec, Joan Tower, Chen Yi, and countless others. AME also enthusiastically performs works by America's most talented, emerging, and mid-career composers.
AME produces stellar recordings via its house label, American Modern Recordings (AMR), which has received fantastic reviews in Gramophone, the LA Music Examiner, The New York Times, Sequenza21, and New Music Box, and all our albums have made it to the Grammy® Ballot in past seasons.
AME’s summer home is at the Mostly Modern Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York. This festival celebrates the music of our time. It is educational, with robust outreach initiatives. Other residencies include Princeton University, James Madison University, Keene State College, the CUNY Graduate Center, Adelphi, Rutgers, and many more. AME is deeply invested in collaboration. Some examples are On-Site Opera, Sing for Hope, Ember, Cutting Edge New Music Festival, American Opera Projects, and the Dance Theater of Harlem.
About Gregory Spears
Gregory Spears is a New York-based composer whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (New York Times), "coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory'' (The Boston Globe). In recent seasons, he has been commissioned by The Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Cincinnati Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Seraphic Fire, The Crossing, BMI / Concert Artists Guild, Vocal Arts DC, New York Polyphony, The New York International Piano Competition, and the JACK Quartet. Spears' most recent evening-length opera, Fellow Travelers 2016, was subsequently produced at the PROTOTYPE Festival (NYC), The Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Minnesota Opera. Spears' children's opera Jason and the Argonauts, written with Kathryn Walat, also premiered in 2016 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His music is published by Schott Music and Schott PSNY.
Tracks
Scene la. Prelude
Scene lb. Ensemble "Paul, a high school boy"
Scene le. Tribunal Song "'It is his insolence"
Scene 1d. Duet "What do you have to say"
Scene le. Ensemble "And he bows how is that''
Scene 2a. Overture Now I'm lighthearted and free!"
Scene 2b. Father's Aria "The principal told me told me today”
Scene 2c. English Teacher's Aria "Years ago I walked down the aisle”
Scene 2d. Opera Scene "My life caught in the stubble of the world”
Scene 3. Paul"s Aria '"But now the gauntlet has been thrown”
Scene 4a. Prelude
Scene 4b. Quartet "At the Waldorf Astoria"
Scene 4c. Quartet "'Draw a bath'"
Scene 4d. Duet "Sunday morning”
Scene 4e. Quartet "And I wake at two in the afternoon”
Scene 41. Quartet "His father will go east"
Scene 4g. Intermezzo
Scene 4h. Aria “The Red Carnation”
Scene 5a. Quartet “The money was all spent”
Scene 5b. Ensemble “But it did not bring him back”
TOTAL TIME: 82:13
-
Release date: February 8, 2019
Re-release: 2024
Catalog Number: AMR1056
UPC: 1689509562World Premiere by UrbanArias, April 20, 2013
American Modern Ensemble
Conducted by Robert Wood and Directed by Kevin NewburyDeveloped by America Opera Projects
Recorded August 6-8, 2018, at the recital hall of The Performing Arts Center, Purchase College, State University of New York.
Executive Producer Robert Wood
Recording Producer Gregory SpearsRecording Engineer, Mixing and Mastering Tom Lazarus
Assistant to the Engineer Rick Jacobsohn
Assistant Zachary CatronOriginally released on National Sawdust Tracks, Label Director Jeffrey Zeigler
UrbanArias' Recording of Paul's Case would not have been possible without the unflagging and very generous support of John Feather and Stephen Cramolini.
Jonathan Blalock's appearance was underwritten by a generous gift from The Savada-Stevenson Family.
Paul's Case was developed through American Opera Projects' First Chance and Composers & The Voice Programs with support provided by The BMI Foundation, The Virgil Thomson Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts' ArtWorks Initiative, and The Andrew T. Mellon Foundation.
UrbanArias is grateful for major funding from The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Joseph Illick, Bernice Lindstrom, Jo and Bruce Owen, and James M. Wood Sr.
Press Quotes
“[A] masterpiece... Tempting to call this show “The Best New Opera I’ve heard in Years””
“a taut, splendid operatic adaptation… Ms. Walat’s libretto turns Cather’s poignant story of alienation and unspoken longing into economical poetry. Mr. Spears’s elegantly spare music, with its gamelan-redolent modes and clockwork repetitions, Baroque vocal fillips, intricately woven ensembles and dramatically placed dissonances, further infuses the tale with a sense of ritual and inevitability.”
“an arresting little piece that communicates its haunting story with clarity and a sense of inevitability”
“I was haunted most of all by Gregory Spears’s ‘Paul’s Case,’ based on Willa Cather’s classic 1906 tale of a doomed young Pittsburgh aesthete. …his plaintive, eerie score delves into the inner world of Paul, who defies his teachers, steals from his employer, lives grandly in New York for a few days, and ultimately chooses death over shame. Spears, too, has minimalist roots, and draws also on the bittersweet textures of Renaissance consort music and the vocal ornaments of Baroque opera…. The ending is as quietly harrowing as anything in recent American opera.”
“Dance and opera certainly have been blended over the centuries, but not often with the sort of intensive interaction demanded by Williams and composer Gregory Spears, both in their mid-30s and seemingly fearless about striking out in new directions.”
“Gregory Spears combines minimalism, baroque gestures, and extended vocal techniques into a distinctive and pungent musical language. This haunting 90-minute work is based on a story by Willa Cather: Paul, a high-school boy with artistic and status yearnings beyond his middle-class life in 1906 Pittsburgh, steals money and goes to New York. He lives the high life in the Waldorf-Astoria for a few days, and when exposure is imminent throws himself under a train. Mr. Spears and Kathryn Walat distilled the tale into a surreal fever dream, with other characters continually commenting on Paul’s “case.” Unlike many contemporary opera composers, Mr. Spears has a gift for writing ensembles, and they are original. In the powerful opening scene, as three female teachers and the school’s principal try to articulate what disturbs them about Paul, short lines of text overlap, creating a tense, fragmented environment, like Cubism in sound.”
“The clear [Prototype Festival] highlight was Paul’s Case by Gregory Spears (seen on January 13). With a smart libretto by Kathryn Walat and Spears himself... And the music made the show. It was basically tonal, with an underlying minimalism that sounded nothing like the Glass-Reich template. There were many repeated phrases, vocal and instrumental, which may have alluded to Baroque practice. The vocal lines were eminently singable, without breaking down into obvious arias; many of them began with an odd, hiccup-like ornament. What was even more remarkable was the instrumental colour, with the piano providing intensely dramatic punctuation, a harp accenting quietly, two clarinets lending a soft, floating quality ideally evocative of Paul’s dreaminess, and a string quintet filling out harmonious pungent accompaniment, lush and billowing. To these ears, it was all very beautiful.”
“The compact grit-to-glamour tragedy, with its willowy protagonist and its chorus of disapproving adults, seems ready-made for opera. ...Finally, it arrived at the Prototype Festival, and the result is a compact, alluring, and attractively obsessive work that bangs around claustrophobically inside Paul’s mind.”
“Top 5 Buzzed-About Young American Opera Composers “Paul’s Case, taken from a Willa Cather short story, was developed over several years through American Opera Projects to become the hit of the 2014 Prototype Festival.”