Dieci Giorni - 10 DAYS

Description

The new collaborative opera Dieci Giorni-10 DAYS is inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, directed by Jim Cave with music composed by Erling Wold, Lisa Scola Prosek, Martha Stoddard and Davide Verotta.

Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in 1353, is set within a lush garden outside Florence, where ten young men and women escape the advance of the Black Plague by telling each other stories of blasphemous conduct, erotic encounters and moral instruction. During the darkest days the Italian Renaissance, Boccaccio’s stories tell of survival, triumph over adversity, destruction, retribution and the glory of love.

The operatic tales of Dieci Giorni-10 DAYS, inspired by those of Boccaccio, speak loudly to our times, inviting us to gather together to ward off the horrors of our own impending Armageddon,oil spills, religious wars and melting ice caps, by re-telling and re-imagining a few of the master’s comic, bawdy and poignant tales. Under the baton of Martha Stoddard, DIECI-GIORNI features singers Maria Mikheyenko, Crystal Philippi, William Sauerland, Wayne Wong, Sascha Joggerst; actors Robert Ernst and Roham Shaikhani, with set design and graphic design by Thomas Prosek.

Dieci Giorni 10 DAYS begins with Martha Stoddard’s Danse Macabre, a dark circus tune which introduces the unseen Ring Leader, Death, the evening's constant companion. Erling Wold’s tempestuous rendition of Boccaccio’s Prologue brings the audience into the Plague Time as it sweeps over the populace, eliciting a need for escape through diversion and the play of storytelling. Lisa Scola Prosek begins little tales of Boccaccio’s, some acted, some sung: a special twist as Gufardo gets laid and has the cuckold husband pay for it, Simona dies after making love in a garden of poison sage and Filippa’s domestic violence scene leads to a campy revelation of the age old quandary: what does one do in a monogamous relationship with all the “leftover love.” Davide Verotta recaptures of the tale of Ambrogiolo, sung in Italian, deeply pulling the audience into the classic heart of the Decameron, sailing through the Mediterranean world of traveling salesmen and tragic wagers: a morality tale of survival and revenge. Erling Wold creates a modern tale of five bachelorettes in Vegas getting a final whiff of debauchery before the grip of marriage vows. Lastly, the death defying gift of self-deception is revealed in the tale of the priest Alberto, who seduces a gullable housewife into believing he is the Angel Gabriel, in Scola Prosek's comic romp. Each story is interspersed with poems translated from the Decameron, and
set to music by Martha Stoddard.

Jim Cave (Director) has focused for the past three decades on the development of new theater, multi-disciplinary, and site-specific performances. Jim has directed and designed new music theater, opera, plays, dance, dance-theater, as well as site-specific spectaculars. Among Jim’s many critically acclaimed productions is the direction of; Erling Wold's chamber operas A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the collage novel by Max Ernst: Queer adapted from the William S. Burroughs text; Bob Ernst’s The John; and the direction and design of Bay Area dance legend Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes and Intensive Care for the Festival Díautomne at Centre Pompidou in Paris. A legendary award winning collaborator, Jim has worked with hundreds of artists and groups, including Word for Word, Campo Santo + Intersection, Aurora Theatre, Shotgun Players, John O’Keefe, Mobius Music, Darvag Iranian Theater, Josh Kornbluth, El Teatro Campesino, Bay Area Playwrights' Festival, Blake Street Hawkeyes, and Magic Theatre. 1992 Jim received a Bay Area Critics' Circle Award for his work on the Eureka Theater’s premier production of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play “Angels in America.”

Erling Wold is a composer, aesthete and a bon vivant, who recently saw the premiere of two of his large works, his Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi in St Gallen, Switzerland, and his solo opera Mordake for tenor John Duykers. He is working on several new operatic works as well as a series of pieces for the Denisova-Kornienko duo in Vienna. His dance opera Blinde Liebe, was recently performed in Europe and the US with Palindrome Dance of Nürnberg Germany. His chamber works have been presented in Philadelphia by Relâche, in San Francisco and Santa Cruz by New Music Works, and by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble. He completed a residency at ODC Theater with a presentation of his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on Pontius Pilate (also performed in Austria), a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early auto-biographical novel Queer, and his critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel. He has written a number of solo piano works, including Albrechts Flügel, premiered by Finnish pianist Marja Mutru and more recently Veracity, which he premiered. He is an eclectic composer whose teachers include Gerard Grisey, Robert Gross, Andrew Imbrie and John Chowning. He composed the soundtracks for four Jon Jost films. There are a number of CD and DVD releases of his music, and a DVD series is planned by MinMax over the next year.

Lisa Scola Prosek (Composer) has composed 6 operas, in Italian and English, and was recently commissioned by Thick House Theater in SF for a new opera in 2011, ”Churchill in Moscow” based on Churchill’s narrative in “the Hinge of Fate”. Her first opera, Satyricon, was featured on KRON TV.Leonardo’s Notebooks, in Italian, premiered to capacity audiences, was featured on NPR’s West Coast Live. Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants and awards, including from the Argosy Foundation, for Belfagor, and from the LEF Foundation,for Trap Door, Meet The Composer, The Hewlett Foundation, the Zellerbach Foundation, and the American Composers Forum. Scola Prosek was raised in Rome, Italy, and graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss in New York. Lisa studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met, and in Italy, she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini. lisascolaprosek.com

Martha Stoddard (Composer) recieved a Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University, where she studied flute, conducting and composition. She is a 2009 recipient of an ASCAP PLUS AWARD For Composition. Her works have been performed at the American Composer's Forum, by Avenue Winds, by Carla Rees at the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival and in London, UK, by the San Francisco Choral Artists, The Oakland Civic Orchestra San Francisco Composers' Chamber Orchestra, schwungvoll!, the Community Women's Orchestra, Womensing, on the New Directions Series of the Bakersfield Symphony, in the Trinity Chamber Concert Series and the New Music Forum Festival of Contemporary Music. Ms. Stoddard is the Artistic Director of the Oakland Civic Orchestra (since 1997) and Associate Conductor of the San Francisco Composers' Chamber Orchestra. Other conducting credits include the 2007 and 2008 premieres of Lisa Proseks' operas, Belfagor and Trap Door, in San Francisco.

Davide Verotta (Composer) was born close to Milano and moved to the very much more exciting San Francisco in his late twenties Verotta's interest in music is intertwined with a lifelong academic occupation in mathematical modeling of biological systems. He studied piano in Milano (Isabella Zielonka) the San Francisco Conservatory (Peggy Salkind, Robert Helps), SFSU (Patricia Lee), and privately, in Kensinton, with the wonderful Julian White. Composition studies were at SFSU (Richard Festinger, Josh Levine), and at UC Davis (Kurt Rode and Laurie San Martin). Composition is a more recent endeavor and grown with a number or orchestral, chamber and solo works performed in the extended Bay Area and California. After concentrationg on orchestral and operatic writing, compositional projects for the coming year will turn to solo piano and chamber music, before swinging back to larger ensembles with a Piano Concerto.
Maria Mikheyenko, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Ms. Mikheyenko has sung with Bay Shore Lyric Opera, Berkeley Opera, Oakland Opera Theater, Pocket Opera, the Rome Festival, and the Austrian American Mozart Academy in Salzburg. Ms. Mikheyenko performed in Scola Prosek’s Leonardo's Notebooks, Machiavelli's Belfagor, and Trap Door. She received her MM from the San Francisco Conservatory. Crystal Philippi has appeared in numerous operatic roles, including: Charlotte in Werther, Mallika in Lakme, Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, Zita in Gianni Schicchi, and Mere Jeanne in Dialogues des Carmelites. Ms. Philippi has studied under Denise Ozden, Dr. Jessica Molin, and Cesar Ulloa. Countertenor William Sauerland returns from the Royal College of Music in London, England. Mr. Sauerland has sung for with the award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer. A professional countertenor, he has sung with Sorg and Whitewater Opera Companies, Tchaikovsky Hall and Shostakovich Hall Orchestras, the National Hall Orchestra of Tallinn, Florilegium, and performed at St. James's Palace for His Royal Highness Prince Charles. Wayne D. Wong has sung roles in more than 50 Bay Area opera productions over the past two decades, most often with Pocket Opera, Berkeley Opera, and San Francisco Lyric Opera. Roles include Don Alfonso in Cosi Fan Tutte, Frank in Die Fledermaus, Angelotti, Sciarrone and The Jailer in Tosca, and Antonio in Figaro. Sascha Joggerst most recent operatic credits include the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro and Frank in Die Fledermaus with Livermore Valley Opera, Le Dancaïre in Carmen and Perichaud in Puccini's La Rondine with Opera San Jose, Baron Duophol in Verdi's La Traviata with West

More Info

Link

http://www.diecigiorni.org

Call

415 282-5616 (Box Office)