EMA Features

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Madness, Revenge, and New Music: Looking for the Lost Finale of ‘L’Orfeo’

EMA Features, News /

This week, Seattle-based Pacific MusicWorks, for their upcoming season finale (May 20 and 21), will give the world premiere of a new musical completion of the finale scene that appeared at the end of the originally published libretto for Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Combining sung and danced performance, this alternate ending is the work of Stephen Stubbs, the lutenist, conductor, and the founder and artistic director of Pacific MusicWorks, with choreography by Baroque dance specialist Anna Mansbridge.

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South Asian Singers Find a Home in Early Music

EMA Features, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, News /

Sopranos Maya Kherani and Sherezade Panthaki (at right) and tenor Asitha Tennekoon are among a growing number of South Asian musicians working to promote more diversity in early-music casting and programming while building their own impressive careers. “I knew what it was like to not have role models,” says Kherani. “I thought if I could change that for one young person by being proud and open about my heritage, I should do it.”

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Opera Lafayette Connects Marie-Antoinette, Music, Slavery, & Revolution

EMA Features, News /

Inspired by the woman who remains an icon and a cautionary tale over 200 years after her death, Opera Lafayette’s ‘The Era of Marie Antoinette Rediscovered’ will shed light on the French queen’s extraordinary education in music and dance, her early embrace of opéra comique, and her legacy as a champion of modern composers in pre-Revolutionary France. But the series goes further, exploring ‘progressive’ philosophies that were in direct opposition to the atrocities being committed against enslaved people on sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, the source of much of France’s wealth.

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Bobby Horton, HIP to American Folk Music

EMA Features, News /

Alabama folk musician Bobby Horton takes a historically informed approach to folk music from many American genres. He’s worked closely with popular documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose ‘The Civil War,’ ‘Baseball’ and other PBS programs bear Horton’s mark as a performer, collector, composer, and adviser. His contributions to more than 20 National Park Service films reflect his intense interest in conservation and centuries past. Horton is on the soundtrack for Ken Burns’ latest project, ‘Benjamin Franklin,’ which airs on PBS starting April 4.

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Let’s Talk About Antisemitism in Our Field

EMA Features, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, News /

As a society, we are finally having conversations that aim to upend systemic injustice. But there’s been curiously little discussion about the ancient hatred of antisemitism, which has seen a resurgence across the political spectrum. Even as American Jewish institutions have come under fatal attack, this conversation has taken a backseat in the early-music community.

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