David Carlson, Composer

Although David Carlson has composed in many genres including orchestral music and chamber music, he is best-known for his operas. His works have been performed by many of the country's leading orchestras and chamber ensembles. A recipient of a number of awards and honors, he has received four grants from Meet the Composer and commissions from Chamber Music America and commissions from opera companies in several states. In 1995 he was given an Academy Award in composition by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has recently been commissioned by the ambitious Magnum Opus project to compose a set of songs with orchestra for the internationally-acclaimed American soprano Christine Brewer.

Carlson's operas have received international acclaim and numerous performances. His first, The Midnight Angel, with a libretto by Peter S. Beagle, received its premiere in 1993 by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. It was performed by Glimmerglass Opera in New York and by the Sacramento Opera, which, along with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, co-commissioned the work. Carlson's next opera, Dreamkeepers, commissioned by the Utah Opera in 1996 in celebration of the state's centennial, is a story about the Ute Indians, with a libretto by Aden Ross. It premiered in 1996 and was revised in 1998 for a production by the Tulsa Opera. Dreamkeepers was featured at the International Theatre Institute's 1998 conference in Germany--the only opera chosen to represent the United States. Carlson has adapted material from Dreamkeepers into two orchestral works, Symphonic Sequences and Bear Dance on Ute Indian Rhythms, which was tremendously successful in a series of children's performances at the San Francisco Symphony and National Symphony Orchestra, as well as the Boston University Orchestra at Tanglewood.

Carlson’s most recent opera, Anna Karenina, received wide acclaim from both audiences and critics alike. It was commissioned by Florida Grand Opera to celebrate the opening of the Ziff Opera House in Miami, and co-produced by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Michigan Opera Theatre. The libretto is by the noted late director/librettist Colin Graham. The New York Times called David Carlson’s music “romantic and luxuriantly textured, with soaring vocal writing which retains interest with an underlying tension....” “A great American opera has finally been written,” said Opera Today. “This new Anna Karenina is already guaranteed an ongoing life. It deserves one,” wrote the Toronto Star. Anna Karenina will be released on a commercial CD early in 2008 on the Signum Classics label.

Perhaps because David Carlson’s orchestral works are so richly textured and structurally innovative, his orchestration for the operas achieves a kind of momentum containing sumptuous detail not often heard in contemporary stage works, not only supporting the singers voices physically but moving the action forward in a symphonically-driven forward motion. Music from his operas has been adapted into three pieces for orchestra which are frequently performed, and can be heard on a New World Records CD. David Carlson lives and composes in Connecticut and Assisi, Italy.

J. D. McClatchy, Librettist

J. D. McCLATCHY is the author of five collections of poems: Scenes From Another Life (Braziller, 1981), Stars Principal (Macmillan, 1986), The Rest of the Way (Knopf, 1990), Ten Commandments (Knopf, 1998), and Hazmat (Knopf, 2002, a Pulitzer Prize finalist). In addition, his selected poems, Division of Spoils, appeared in England in 2003. His literary essays are collected in White Paper (Columbia, 1989), which was given the Melville Cane Award by the Poetry Society of America, and in Twenty Questions (Columbia, 1998). He has also edited several other books, including Edna St. Vincent Millay's Selected Poems (2003), James Merrill's Collected Novels and Plays (2002) and his Collected Poems (2001), Horace: The Odes (2002), Bright Pages: Yale Writers 1701-2001 (2001), Longfellow's Poems and Other Writings (2000), The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (Vintage, 1996), Woman in White: Poems by Emily Dickinson (Folio Society, 1991), The Vintage Books of Contemporary American Poetry (Vintage, 1990; revised edition, 2003), Poets on Painters (California, 1988), Recitative: Prose by James Merrill (North Point, 1986), and Anne Sexton: The Poet and Her Critics (Indiana, 1978). He also edits the acclaimed series The Voice of the Poet for Random House AudioBooks; to date he has written booklets to accompany readings by W. H. Auden, James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Five American Women (Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, and Muriel Rukeyser), Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, John Ashbery, Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, and American Wits (Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and Phyllis McGinley). In addition, he has published fiction and translations. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and many other magazines.

Mr. McClatchy has had a busy academic life as well. For many years has taught at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and other universities, and is now Professor of English at Yale. Since 1991, he has served as editor of The Yale Review. In addition, he has an increasingly prominent role in the opera house as a librettist; he has written four libretti that have been produced--for William Schuman's A Question of Taste (commissioned and premiered by the Glimmerglass Opera Theater in Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1989, the next year produced at Lincoln Center by the Juilliard Opera Center, and recorded on Delos DE1030 ), for Francis Thorne's Mario and the Magician (given its world premiere in 1994 by the Brooklyn College Opera Theater), for Bruce Saylor's Orpheus Descending (based on the Tennessee Williams play, commissioned by the Chicago Lyric Opera, premiered there in 1994, and subsequently broadcast on NPR's "World of Opera", and Tobias Picker's Emmeline (commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera, premiered there in 1996, subsequently telecast on PBS's "Great Performances",revived at the New York City Opera in 1998, and recorded on the Albany label, Troy 264-65). He has recently completed (with Thomas Meehan) a libretto of 1984 (music by Lorin Maazel, scheduled to premiere at Covent Garden in 2005), and is at work on other new projects with Lowell Liebermann (Miss Lonelyhearts, commissioned for the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Juilliard School of Music to premiere April, 2006), with Elliot Goldenthal (Grendel, with co-librettist Julie Taymor, commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera), and with Ned Rorem (Our Town, scheduled to premiere in 2006 at ten different opera companies around the US).

In 1996 he was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and served until 2003 when he was named to the Academy's Board of Directors. In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the following year was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors, Mr. McClatchy has been awarded the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets and the Governor's Arts Award in Connecticut, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. When he was given an Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1991, the citation read: "J. D. McClatchy is a poet who has emerged into highly distinctive achievement in his third collection, The Rest of the Way. Formally a master, with enormous technical skills, McClatchy writes with an authentic blend of cognitive force and a savage emotional intensity, brilliantly restrained by his care for firm rhetorical control. His increasingly complex sense of our historical overdeterminations is complemented by his concern for adjusting the balance between his own poems and tradition. It may be that no more eloquent poet will emerge in his American generation."

James Robinson, Director