Kimmel Center
World Premiere Workshop Production
April 13, 2008 at 3pm
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KIMMEL CENTER'S INNOVATION STUDIO
KIMMEL CENTER, INC.
260 South Broad Street
on the Avenue of the Arts
Philadelphia, PA 19102
Peter Westergaard, composer,
was born in 1931 in Urbana, Illinois. He pursued undergraduate studies at Harvard University, graduating in 1953, and in 1956 obtained an M.F.A. degree from Princeton University. He studied with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Darius Milhaud, Edward Cone, Milton Babbitt and last but not least Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg/Germany.
He taught at Columbia University, Amherst College, and Princeton University before retiring in 2001. Westergaard continues to be active as a composer, mainly of opera and chamber music.
Rhoda Levine, stage director
Career highlights include Of Mice and Men; Lizzie Borden; Rogoletto; The Ballad of Baby Doe; X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (world premiere); From the House of the Dead (American premiere); Die Soldaten; and Mathis der Maler at New York City Opera; Treemonisha at Opera Theater of St. Louis; Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis (world premiere) at Netherlands Opera; South African premiere of Porgy and Bess at Cape Town Opera in 1996; productions at Belgium’s Opéra National; Scottish Opera; San Francisco Opera; Festival of the Two Worlds; Cabrillo Festival; and Holland Festival; directed and choreographed productions on and off-Broadway, in London’s West End, and for CBS and WNET; librettist; author of children’s books.
Ms. Levine has been on faculty at Curtis Institute of Music, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College, and Northwestern University; artistic director of improvisational opera group Play it by Ear. She has been at
Manhattan School of Music faculty since 1992.
Renee Weiss, librettist,
seen here with late husband Ted Weiss, edited the Quarterly Review of Literature for over fifty years. The New York Times says, "The Weisses were assiduous in publishing not only writers like Stevens, Williams, cummings, and Marianne Moore, but a great many of their younger, utterly unknown successors as well. The truth is, it was largely in magazines like QRL that much of the literature now studied as a matter of course in colleges and universities first appeared."
A testament to the love that carried them through decades, Renée pored through the letters of their courtship, the basis for The Always Present Present, and created a dramatic dialogue between the young lovers expressed through poetry, music and dance.