| Korde and Kremer - collaborators on |
Reviews |
| five successful music theatre works | |
| Chitra (2000) opera/dance drama for soprano, Balinese dancer/actor/puppeteer, Indian Classical dancer and chamber orchestra. On texts by Rabindranath Tagore "Shirish Korde’s musical scoring is an enormous feat in itself. A full ensemble of traditional western instruments (flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello) meets tabla, sitar, tamboura, harmonium and gamelan—an enormous palette to reckon with. Korde’s expert blending of not only three styles of music (Western, Indian and Balinese) but two different tuning systems, is no small feat. This makes the legendary 1960s concerts of Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin seem like children at play. Where Indian classical music can often sound thin to a Western ear, Korde has used the richness of the violin and cello, for example, to flesh out the orchestration." "Keusch was wonderful, but there was so much to see—puppets, moving screens, a stylized mountain backdrop with another screen behind it, the actors and musicians in gorgeous intense colors, the instruments themselves. The whole panoply deserved to be spread out in a space big enough to match its expansive concept.” RASA (1991, revised 1998) chamber opera for soprano, choir, ten actos/dancers, chamber ensemble, and electronic tape. Inspired by Bharati Mukerjee’s novel Jasmine. Texts by Kabir and Tagore. "In Rasa, “the listener encounters a truly post-modern blend of musical languages, ranging from the Orff-like rhythms of the Wheelchair Dance, through the parody of 19th century traditional tonal composition, to the Ives-like multi-level resonances of I Want Thee. All of these cross cultural resonances seem to have as their purpose the enrichment of Jasmine’s gradual enlightenment as she encounters a world full of new, unfamiliar ideas and feelings." “This multi-media chamber opera makes a strongly positive statement for the New England Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, both which commissioned it. Rasa, remarkable in its beauty and subtlety, is of considerable musical richness and is deserving of widespread performances.” |
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