Composer Mark Adamo is best known for his work as an opera composer, and by the release date of Naxos' Mark Adamo: Late Victorians, he has composed two of them: Little Women (1998) and Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess (2005). Operas take a long time to compose and are expensive to record well, and when you devote a lot of time to a single, focused work it can be hard to accumulate the little things you need in order to produce a single CD that affords listeners a sample of what you can do. The title work, Late Victorians ...
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Composer Mark Adamo is best known for his work as an opera composer, and by the release date of Naxos' Mark Adamo: Late Victorians, he has composed two of them: Little Women (1998) and Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess (2005). Operas take a long time to compose and are expensive to record well, and when you devote a lot of time to a single, focused work it can be hard to accumulate the little things you need in order to produce a single CD that affords listeners a sample of what you can do. The title work, Late Victorians (1994, but heard in a revised version), is one of those comparatively little things, a symphonic cantata with a text cobbled together from an essay included in Richard Rodriguez's Pulitzer Prize-nominated book Days of Obligation -- a book where Rodriguez controversially came out as gay -- and select poems of Emily Dickinson. The Rodriguez text concerns late Victorian houses in San Francisco, lately rehabbed, but then left vacant as their owners struggled and died with the AIDS virus....
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