The School of Music and Pacific MusicWorks co-present this special student cast performance of W.A. Mozart's masterwork The Magic Flute. Grammy-winning conductor Stephen Stubbs conducts the Pacific MusicWorks Orchestra (and UW instrumental performance students) in Dan Wallace Miller's staging of one the composer's most profound and beloved works, performed by the talented students of the UW Vocal Performance program. With new dialogue by Karen Hartman.
One of Mozart’s crowning achievements, The Magic Flute is a potent alchemical mixture of popular music and theater with a depth of meaning that is still mysterious and controversial. The fact that Mozart had steeped himself in the music of Handel and Bach in the years leading up to the creation of The Magic Flute makes it also a personal testament to his admiration for their art.
Hear Mozart's beloved opera, conducted by Pacific MusicWorks artistic director Stephen Stubbs, performed in the Northwest’s first historically informed performance with a classical orchestra.
UW Student Cast
Tamino Ross Hauck
Papageno Patrick Borror
Pamina Kat Deininger
Queen of the Night Alexandra Picard
Papagena Christine Oshiki
Sarastro Colin Ramsey
First Lady Christina Kowalski-Holien
Second Lady Emerald Lessley
Third Lady Dakota Miller
Monostatos Josh Langager
Speaker of the Temple Matthew Scollin
Tenor Priest Nic Varela
Bass Priest Chris Kouldukis
Three Spirits Denna Good-Mojab, Michelle Brettl, Margaret Boeckman
CHORUS
|
Soprano Denna Good-Mojab Michelle Bretl Katrina Denninger Alison Johnson Alexis Neumann Amy Kueffler Addie Francis
|
Alto Margaret Boeckman Alice Carli Christine Oshiki Jocelyn Beausire Erica Wiseman |
Tenor Zach Finkelstein Nic Varela David Boeckh Brian Ramaley Blair Mothersbaugh |
Bass Patrick Borror Nick Reynolds Josh Smith Paul Johns Keegan McElligott
|
ARTIST BIOS
Stephen Stubbs, conductor
After a thirty year career in Europe, musical director and lutenist Stephen Stubbs returned to his native Seattle in 2006. Since then he has established his new production company, Pacific Musicworks, and developed a busy calendar as a guest conductor specializing in baroque opera and oratorio.
With his direction of Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, he began his career as opera director and founded the ensemble Tragicomedia. Since 1997 Stephen has co-directed the bi-annual Boston Early Music Festival opera and is the permanent artistic co-director. BEMF’s recordings of Conradi’s Ariadne, Lully’s Thesee, and Psyché were nominated for Grammy awards in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
Stephen was born in Seattle, Washington, where he studied composition, piano and harpsichord at the University of Washington. In 1974 he moved to England to study lute with Robert Spencer and then to Amsterdam for further study with Toyohiko Satoh and soon became a mainstay of the burgeoning early-music movement there, working with Alan Curtis on Italian opera in Italy, William Christie on French opera in France and various ensembles in England and Germany particularly the Hilliard Ensemble.
With his return to Seattle in 2006 he formed the long-term goal of establishing a company devoted to the study and production of Baroque opera. His first venture in this direction was the creation of the Accademia de’Amore, an annual summer institute for the training of pre-professional singers and musicians in baroque style and stagecraft, now housed at the Cornish College of the Arts.
In 2008 he established Pacific MusicWorks. The company’s inaugural presentation was a revival of South African artist William Kentridge’s acclaimed multimedia marionette staging of Claudio Monteverdi’s penultimate opera The Return of Ulysses in a co-production with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. After a warmly received 2010 presentation of Monteverdi’s monumental Vespers of 1610 at Seattle’s St. James Cathedral, PMW presented a full subscription season, opening with a program based on the Song of Songs and ending with two triumphantly successful performances of Handel’s early masterpiece, The Triumph of Time (1707).
As a guest conductor Stubbs has led performances of Gluck’s Orfeo and Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto in Bilbao, Spain, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Amsterdam’s Netherlands Opera. Following his successful debut conducting the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2011, he was invited back in 2012 to conduct the Symphony’s performances of Messiah. He will also debut with the Edmonton Symphony in Messiah this season.
Stephen Stubbs is Senior Artist in Residence and member of the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Washington.
Mr Stubbs is represented by Schwalbe and Partners.
Dan Wallace Miller, director
Dan Wallace Miller is the founder and Artistic Director of Vespertine Opera Theater, a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) non-profit company that strives to present operas in unique spaces that are both innovative and dramatically engaging. He and his company have produced Purcell’s Dido and Aeneasand Holst’s Savitri in the University of Washington’s outdoor Sylvan Grove Theater, an English version of Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine in the intimate blackbox Stone Soup Theater, and Puccini’s La Bohéme in the three-quarters round at the Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center. Most recently, he is directing and producing the US premier of Benjamin Britten’s English, two-piano adaptation of Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tiresias at the Columbia City Theater. In addition to his work with Vespertine Opera Theater, Dan Wallace Miller has worked at Seattle Opera for their productions of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and Trisan und Isolde, Verdi’s Atilla, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program productions of Massenet’s Werther and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. Dan Wallace Miller graduated from the University of Washington, and assisted their production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, as well as their Opera Scene Workshop.