"I feel that opera as a genre does lend itself to big emotion. the colorful way that Jack Keats depicts snow so it's not just the realistic white we see up here in New England but we see purple and blue and all these other colors in the snow. Although he didn't experience his first real snowfall until November 2018. "I got to tap into that sense of wonder that I think Peter is experiencing when he is seeing snow for the first time."ĭescribing the lasting appeal of the book, Thompson says, "I think it taps into this intangible sense of wonder that we tend to lose as we grow older and it's all over the book. As a child he had a copy of The Snowy Day in English and Spanish. The composer, who is now pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Yale University, grew up in the Bahamas - although he spent three years in Houston starting when he was 10 years old - and now considers Atlanta his home base. "Because of its simplicity, people are able to superimpose their own imaginations and their own lenses onto the book," Thompson says. Both had somewhat different takes on what message it was conveying, he says, but that did not stop them from working in a "very free and collaborative process." Thompson and librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney worked on building the score and story from what is, admittedly, a pretty short book about a young boy's experiences with snow. It was the first picture book with an African American main character to win a major children's award. Taken from the Caldecott award-winning book of the same title by Ezra Jack Keats, the opera version of The Snowy Day will premiere at HGO on December 9. What made the book groundbreaking when it was published in 1962 was that the main character Peter was a young Black boy.
The proposal from HGO represented a chance to do something different. His compositions such as "The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed" often deal with heavier themes.
"All of a sudden, opera made sense as a possible genre for me," says Thompson who up till now has been best known for his orchestral and choral work. Emmy award-winning composer Joel Thompson had never done an opera before but when Houston Grand Opera's Patrick Summers approached him with the seed of an idea to build on the classic children's book The Snowy Day, he was both "humbled" and ready to go.
0 kommentar(er)
