We've been inundated by press and reviews this week! It's hard to keep up, so we've collected those from the past couple of days here. Death and the Powers has one more Boston performance this Friday night (March 25) before moving on to Chicago for a one-week run (April 2-10). - Updated March 24, 2011 …
Continue reading "Opening Week Press on Death and the Powers"
What an incredible weekend! Death and the Powers opened on Friday night at the Cutler Majestic Theater in the epicenter of Boston's theater district. The air was electric with anticipation. The audience was studded with an only-in-Boston constellation of artists, intellectuals and übergeeks. Spotted in the crowd were M.I.T. President Susan Hockfield, Harvard Provost Steven …
Getting ready for tonight's U.S. premiere of Death and the Powers, composer Tod Machover shares an intimate moment with Operabot...
We were pleased to discover the Boston Musical Intelligencer, an erudite and elegant blog edited by pianist and musicologist Robert Levin and devoted to the classical music scene in Boston. They recently published a highly informative article about Tod Machover and his new opera, Death and the Powers. The article delves deeply into Tod's musical …
Whether he’s creating genre-breaking compositions for the concert hall, “robotic” operas for worldwide stages, software that allows anyone to compose original music, or musical activities that can diagnose illness and restore health, Tod Machover’s unique vision is shaping the future of music. Join us as Tod discusses his new opera "Death and the Powers" and …
Journalist Chris Dahlen hung out in the Cutler Majestic Theater during rehearsals of Death and the Powers last August, just before the set was shipped off to Monaco for the opera's world premiere. His story in the current Boston Phoenix reports in detail on the numerous technological innovations in the opera. It's an entertaining account …
Continue reading "Boston Phoenix – “High tech meets high anxiety”"
You can count on the BBC to produce great material, and this interview with Death and the Powers composer Tod Machover is no exception! The interviewer asks great questions. Are the operabots instruments or are they performers? How much is the pursuit of immortality a motivation for the composer? Is it about living forever through …
Continue reading "BBC World Service chats with Tod Machover"
Here's a charming article in the Boston Globe that focuses on the creative and technological efforts that went into the "operabots" in Death and the Powers. The article reveals how director Diane Paulus and choreographer Karole Armitage latched on to some early technical quirks and glitches and used them to imbue the operabots with dramatic …
Here's another excellent article about Death and the Powers from Variety. This one sheds light on how composer Tod Machover and production designer Alex McDowell thought about rendering the character of Simon Powers through the elements of the stage design and the development of "Disembodied Performance" technology. "Machover sees applications for this technology in large …
Continue reading "A radical new approach to live performance"
NPR's popular weekly program, Science Friday, this week put a spotlight on Death and the Powers. Composer Tod Machover talks about his desire to use technology to amplify rather than diminish the live human presence in musical performance. You can listen to the podcast here (click on the audio player in the upper left-hand corner). …
Continue reading "Science Friday features Death and the Powers"
Opera of the Future 