Judgment of Midas Excerpt.mp4

Apollo's Aria from Judgment of Midas, performed May 2009 at South Oxford Space.

MUSIC DIRECTION: J. David Jackson (5/9) and Jonathan Khuner (5/11)
PIANO: Charity Wicks
PERFORMANCES BY: John Duykers, Abigail Fischer, Jeremy Milner, Matt Morgan, Nicholas Probst, and Michael Redding. Also featuring Sarah Nelson Craft, Heather Michele Meyer, Sarah Moulton, and Margaret O'Connell.

Judgment of Midas takes as its starting point a series of mythical musical contests said to have taken place on Mount Tmolus, near Sardis, Turkey, between the two gods Pan and Apollo and witnessed by King Midas. According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the singing contest is between Pan, maker of "street" music—music of the people—and Apollo, maker of the Gods' music—the spiritual or "high" music. The opera's musical language will exploit popular, ethnic, and folk musical styles side by side with serious music of epic proportions, effecting a vivid blaze of musical contrast.

Kamran Ince's compositional style naturally synthesizes folk instruments into the traditional Western orchestra and is well suited to portraying the pleasures of the musical contest at hand. The drama unfolds amid a wonderland of sound made even more magical by the brilliant interplay of vivid musical color and contrast.

Judgment of Midas is being commissioned and developed in part with a generous grant from Mr. Crawford Greenewalt to mark the 50th anniversary of Sardis/Lydia excavations (sponsored by Harvard and Cornell Universities) and is slated for production in 2010.

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Music

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• Midas
• Excerpt