Given that I can’t be in DC for the revision of Appomattox, I’m hoping hard for a recording. From NPR —
The original version of Glass’ opera focused on the end of the war and the attempts to address the underlying issue of slavery. But nearly 10 years later, the revised version splits the opera’s two acts into the struggle for peace and the fight to pass the Voting Rights Act a century later.
“Basically what we did is we took the two acts that were composed … and made it into Act One, which was 1865, and made it Act Two 1965,” he says. “That was not a separation we had imagined in the first production, and then by doing it that way we began to see immediately the symmetries and the differences.”
see also: Washington Post review.
Amanda Cellini 