Tom Cipullo's The Parting is part of the Seattle-based Music of Remembrance project, which seeks to commission works commemorating the Holocaust, but there's more to Cipullo's work than the basic idea. David Mason's libretto takes up the subject of poet Miklós Radnóti, who was of Jewish background and was killed by the Nazis on a forced labor march. After the war, his body was exhumed, and poems describing the things he had seen were found in his pockets. Mason juxtaposes these with an imagined final night Radnóti spent ...
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Tom Cipullo's The Parting is part of the Seattle-based Music of Remembrance project, which seeks to commission works commemorating the Holocaust, but there's more to Cipullo's work than the basic idea. David Mason's libretto takes up the subject of poet Miklós Radnóti, who was of Jewish background and was killed by the Nazis on a forced labor march. After the war, his body was exhumed, and poems describing the things he had seen were found in his pockets. Mason juxtaposes these with an imagined final night Radnóti spent with his wife, expressing their love and reflecting on the meaning of life in the face of unimaginable evil. This is an opera, but partly also a song cycle, and Cipullo responds to the tale with a unique musical language. His basic style is neo-Romantic, rooted in verismo and other late operatic Romantic styles, but these harmonies may veer off, in accordance with the libretto, into darker dissonant sounds, and Cipullo does this in such a way as to convey an atmosphere of looming...
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