Nadia Boulanger: La ville morte Catapult Opera, Talea Ensemble & Neal Goren

• Raoul Pugno (1852 - 1914), Nadia Boulanger (1887 - 1979): La ville morte, Act I:
• 1 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: Introduction 00:57
• 2 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: Eros invaincu au combat 01:53
• 3 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: Comme tu aimes le soleil… 03:54
• 4 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: D'où viens-tu, Alexandre? 04:34
• 5 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: L'or, l'or... Une immensite d'or… 03:58
• 6 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act I: Non, non, Leonard! Je t'en prie! 05:12
• La ville morte, Act II:
• 7 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Introduction 01:21
• 8 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Ah, vous êtes seule… 01:52
• 9 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Ah! Les spirales… 13:13
• 10 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Alexandre!... Me voici, Anne! 04:52
• 11 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Tu regardes les joyaux de Cassandre? 06:10
• 12 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Oui, je parlerai 01:32
• 13 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act II: Tu la connais… 05:12
• La ville morte, Act III:
• 14 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act III: Les étoiles commencent à paraître? 08:37
• 15 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act III: Vous appelez Leonard? 06:24
• 16 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act III: Non, non ! Je ne veux pas! 03:56
• 17 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act III: Vous me voyez, mes soeurs, voyez ! 03:51
• La ville morte, Act IV:
• 18 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act IV: Prelude 05:41
• 19 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act IV: Ne la touche pas! 02:27
• 20 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act IV: Si elle se levait maintenant… 09:46
• 21 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act IV: Un pas! 02:56
• 22 Pugno, Boulanger: La ville morte, Act IV: Hébé! Hébé ! 01:31
• Total Runtime 01:39:49

Info for Nadia Boulanger: La ville morte

A coproduction of Catapult Opera and the Greek National Opera, La ville morte (The Dead City) held its world premiere in Athens, Greece, for a five-performance run in January 2024 and next will come to the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for its American premiere with three performances in April 2024.

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) is widely considered one of the most important women in the history of music, having taught iconic 20th-century composers including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Astor Piazzolla, Philip Glass, and Quincy Jones.

La ville morte, the only opera composed by Nadia Boulanger—one of the most important music educators and conductors of her time—was composed in collaboration with her mentor Raoul Pugno. The work is based on the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1899 play of the same title which he himself developed into its operatic French libretto.

“My goal was to make people aware of this brilliant work that synthesizes every musical style that was heard in Paris in the first decade of the 1900s, including Fauré (her teacher), Debussy (whose Pelléas et Mélisande received its premiere in 1902), and Wagner (whose final opera, Parsifal, received its Paris premiere in 1899.) If this recording brings you joy and awakens an awareness of Nadia Boulanger’s compositional genius, I will have achieved my goal.” - Neal Goren

La ville morte is hailed as Boulanger’s most important creative achievement. Although it had been scheduled to premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, it was never staged in its time because of the outbreak of the First World War, and the music was lost. More than a century later, Catapult Opera commissioned David Conte, one of Boulanger’s last protégés, to oversee the composition of a full orchestral score based on Boulanger’s recently discovered piano reduction of the orchestra. This sensational new production by acclaimed opera and film director Robin Guarino is conducted by Catapult Founder and Artistic Director Neal Goren leading instrumentalists from the Greek National Opera’s orchestra in Athens and the Talea Ensemble in NYC.

The opera tells the tragic and outrageous story of decadent passion set against the backdrop of the excavation of the ancient city of Mycenae. Its music moves in line with the wider aesthetics of musical impressionism, interspersed with echoes from the influential expressive palette of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande.

Ten years in the making, Catapult’s long-awaited production of La ville morte promises to be the highlight of the spring season, not to be missed!

Melissa Harvey, soprano
Laurie Rubin, mezzo-sopran0
Joshua Dennis, tenor
Jorell Williams, baritone
Talea Ensemble
Neal Goren, conductor

Catapult
is a community of artists, producers, business leaders, and opera lovers with a passion for the stage and a shared goal: Creating high-quality, transformative, and lasting opera experiences. From our base in New York City, we collaborate with artists, musicians, and composers from across musical genres and throughout the world.

From its inception, opera was conceived as the ultimate multi-media art from—enticing the ear, the eye, the intellect, and the heart equally. At Catapult, we are reinvigorating that tradition by engaging in new visual and digital media with the goal of delivering the emotional vitality of the classically trained voice, supported by a range of both unconventional and traditional instrumentation, and complemented by arresting visuals. Catapult is paving uncharted pathways in this new hybrid medium by creating an original body of work of uncompromising production quality and fresh ideas for delivery to both traditional and non-traditional audiences around the world.

Catapult Opera accomplishes this goal by providing grants to performers, musicians, and multimedia artists outside the classical realm to create short digital works at the intersection of their chosen genre and opera. These new works are sparking a global conversation about what opera can be in today’s world that is influencing the art form’s continued development in our current time and inspire future generations. As we look to the future of opera, we also engage with its past to find rare gems and overlooked masterpieces, producing live performances to expand the canon of accepted composers and librettists and bring a welcome freshness to the world’s opera houses.

Beyond the stage, we are committed to promoting a robust, sustainable future for opera by lifting up aspiring artists to reach for the highest artistic standards, and proliferating them across the opera community. This commitment includes interviews with influential leaders in the world of opera on topics such as artistry, personal and professional development, and marketability. Additionally, Catapult produces behind-the-scenes interviews with luminaries in the field of opera to deepen audience’s knowledge and appreciation of opera and its inner workings.

The question that animates all of this is: “What is opera?”

At Catapult, we are working to play a pivotal part in that question’s ever-evolving answer for today and for decades to come.

Talea Ensemble
The Talea Ensemble’s mission is to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience’s imagination long after a concert.

Recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, Talea has brought to life at least 80 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions combining music and other genres such as theater and visual art. Highlights from Talea’s most recent performance seasons have included world premieres by Wang Lu, Tyshawn Sorey, Sarah Hennies, Natacha Diels, Anthony Cheung, Agata Zubel, Mark Applebaum, Sanae Ishida, and more, as well as numerous US and New York premieres.

Engagements include performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Time of Music Finland, TIME:SPANS, NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series, and many more. Talea’s recordings have been distributed worldwide on the Kairos, Wergo, Gravina Musica, Tzadik, Innova, and New World Records labels, and been broadcast on ORF (Austria), HRF (Germany), and WQXR’s Q2.

Talea assumes an ongoing role in supporting a new generation of composers, and has undertaken residencies in music departments around the country. Since 2020, Talea has targeted support to early career composers through the growing Talea Access Project, which includes a commissioning program and a composer recording workshop.

Neal Goren
was the founder and Artistic Director of Gotham Chamber Opera, which popularized and legitimized the formerly ignored genre of chamber opera, which has now attained respect equal to the pillars of the operatic repertoire. In its fifteen years of existence, Goren conducted all of Gotham’s 27 productions, which included the world premieres by Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters and Lembit Beecher’s I have no stories to tell you; and the U.S. stage premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho, Toshio Hosokowa, Bohuslav Martinu, and Xavier Montsalvatge.

Gotham’s productions often featured unexpected elements, such as site-specific presentations in locales thematically related to the operas, such as Cavalli’s Eliogabalo presented in The Box, a louche Manhattan night club; Haydn’s Il mondo della luna, presented in the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History; and Daniel Catan’s La hija de Rappaccini, presented in the Rose Garden of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and the Greystone Manor Gardens in Beverly Hills, CA. Other Gotham productions were staged by directors best known for their work in other artistic genres, such as choreographers Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, David Parsons, and Luca Veggetti; Broadway directors Moisès Kaufman and Rebecca Taichman, and puppeteer Basil Twist. Other Gotham productions featured sets by internationally celebrated visual artists Georg Baselitz and Vera Lutter.

Goren’s other conducting credits include Die Zauberflöte for New York City Opera and the Trentino Festival (Italy), Dark Sisters by Nico Muhly (European premiere) for the Trentino Festival and Opera Philadelphia; Transformations by Conrad Susa, for San Francisco Opera Center; Mila by Eli Marshall (world premiere) for the Asia Society of Hong Kong with additional performances in New York and San Francisco; Anaïs Nin and Odysseus’ Women by Louis Andriessen (U.S. premiere) for Center for Contemporary Opera and Le Nozze di Figaro, La clemenza di Tito, and Cendrillon for the Trentino Festival.

A much sought-after recital accompanist, Goren was a protégé of Geoffrey Parsons and has concertized extensively with Leontyne Price, Kathleen Battle, Hei-Kyung Hong, Harolyn Blackwell, Hakan Hagegard, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Aprile Millo, Joyce DiDonato, and Hermann Prey, among others. He is an Associate Professor at Mannes College, The New School for Music, where has served on the faculty since 1991. He is a frequent judge of national and international vocal and composers’ competitions and is a frequent featured guest on the Metropolitan Opera quiz.

A celebrated writer and lecturer on opera topics, his highly-acclaimed book, Beyond the Aria, was published by Rowman & Littlefied (formerly Amadeus Press) in 2020. He has written about music and architecture for Yale Constructs Magazine and about music and art for Air Mail.

Booklet for Nadia Boulanger: La ville morte