Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Sophie's Choice Debut Focuses

Spotlight on Nicholas Maw

Composer Nicholas Maw shares a light moment with Simon Rattle during rehearsals for Sophie's Choice

The premiere of a new opera called Sophie's Choice at the Royal Opera House in London on Saturday night was the most eagerly awaited new production in decades and it cast the spotlight on Nicholas Maw, the much admired but less-than-famous British composer, who wrote both the music and adapted the libretto from William Styron's masterful and haunting novel about a Polish woman who cannot shake her memories of the Holocaust and life in a concentration camp.

There is plentry of star power involved in the production, however. Sir Trevor Nunn directed, Sir Simon Rattle is conducting and the beautiful Angelika Kirchschlager is singing the title role.

The opera is nothing if not ambitious--four acts lasting more than four hours with a cast of 80 and 18 separate set changes. The five performances will cost £100,000 and Convent Garden has lowered its prices to a top of £50 in an effort to attact a younger crowd. In short, Sophie's Choice represents a tremendous risk for the venerable opera house, whose finances have been shaky in recent years.

It is also a big gamble for the 67-year-old composer who has written two previous comic operas, the last one some 30 years ago. Born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Maw studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London (1955-58) with Paul Steinitz and Lennox Berkeley; and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Schoenberg's pupil, Max Deutsch. His career as a teacher has included positions at Trinity College Cambridge, Exeter University and Yale University. He is currently Professor of Composition at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

Maw has received commissions from many of the major musical organisations in the United Kingdom and he has been the featured composer at the South Bank Summer Music (1973), the Kings Lynn Festival (1985), the BBC 'Nicholas Maw Day' at the South Bank (1989), the Bath Festival (1991), the Park Lane Group and the Royal Academy of Music's British Music Festival (1992), the 60th Birthday Malvern Weekend (1995), and, the Chester Festival (1999).

His extensive and varied catalogue includes much chamber music, vocal and choral music, two comic operas (the chamber opera One Man Show, 1964, and the three-act The Rising of the Moon, 1967-70), solo instrumental works, and music for children. Maw is, however, most celebrated for his orchestral music: his reputation being established when, at the age of 26, he produced Scenes and Arias (1962) for a BBC Prom, which immediately put him right at the forefront of the British musical scene. This BBC commission is now recognised as one of the most outstanding British works of its decade.

In addition to fulfilling other numerous commissions, from 1973 to 1987 Maw composed Odyssey for orchestra: the single, unbroken 96-minute span of symphonic music which has been unanimously lauded since its initial performance in 1987 at a BBC Prom in London. The EMI recording by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1992 and cited by Classic CD (June 2000) as the best recording out of a hundred recommended releases in the decade. Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Orchestra gave the American premiere of Odyssey in St Louis and New York's Carnegie Hall in 1994. The more recent (1993) Violin Concerto in a recording by Joshua Bell for Sony, was nominated for the 2000 Mercury Prize.

For Maw, getting Sophie's Choice to the stage has occupied much of his thinking for more than a decade. He first proposed the tragic tale to Covent Garden in 1990 and was turned down. Six years later, following a management change, he returned and this time he got the commission.

"I wrote it not because I decided it was time to write an opera again," he told an interviewer. "It happened in the most genuine way - the subject matter literally inspired me. Nobody had to ask me or commission me to write it. I was just obsessed with it."

The obession may just have paid off. First reviews have been positive, including this praise from the Baltimore Sun's theater critic Tim Smith, who wrote in Monday's paper that Sophie's Choice is "an uncompromising, involving, disturbing, often achingly beautiful opera." --JB
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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for our Editor's Pick's of the month. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, NY, NY 10019 Also, feel free to nominate your favorite composer-- even if it's you--for Spotlight of the Week.

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