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Kamran Ince Honored by The American Academy of Arts and Letters; Judgment of Midas Premieres in Milwaukee

Mar. 04, 2013

Kamran Ince Honored by The American Academy of Arts and Letters; <em>Judgment of Midas</em> Premieres in Milwaukee

It is with great pleasure that we congratulate Kamran Ince on being named a recipient of the Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award honors four composers each year for outstanding artistic achievement and uniqueness of voice.  Each recipient receives a $7500 reward and an additional $7500 toward the recording of one work.  The Academy writes:

The energy and rawness of Turkish and Balkan music, the spirituality of Byzantium and Ottoman music, the tradition of European art music and the extrovert and popular qualities of the American psyche are the basis of Kamran Ince’s sound world. These ingredients happily breathe in cohesion as they spin the linear and vertical contrasts so essential to his works. Ince is Professor of Composition at the University of Memphis and at MIAM, Istanbul Technical University. His prizes include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lili Boulanger Prize. Five recent Naxos CD’s are devoted to his music. Present Music and Milwaukee Opera Theatre will premiere his opera, Judgment of Midas, in April, 2013. 

Present Music, in collaboration with Milwaukee Opera Theatre, presents the world premiere of Judgment of Midas on April 12 and 13, 2013, conducted by Kamran Ince and directed by Jill Anna Ponasik. Loosely based on Ovid’s mythical drama "Metamorphoses," Judgment of Midas is a vivid new imagining of the epic musical battle between the gods Pan and Apollo. The opera's musical language combines popular, ethnic, and folk musical styles with music of grand proportions effecting a vivid blaze of musical contrast. Judgment of Midas was developed in American Opera Projects’ "First Chance" program with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Ince's first opera was commissioned in part by the late Dr. Crawford H. Greenewalt, Jr. to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sardis excavations in Turkey which revealed for the first time a series of mosaics featuring the mythical contest depicted in the opera.

More details on the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music can be found at www.artsandletters.org.

Visit www.operaprojects.org and www.presentmusic.org to learn more about the premiere of Judgment of Midas.

View Kamran Ince’s Naxos discography at www.naxos.com.

Kamran Ince
Judgment of Midas (2012)
opera in two acts
libretto (Eng.) by Miriam Seidel
for two tenors, alto, two baritones, two basses and SSAATTBB chorus
pic.1.0.1.bcl.asax.tsax.1-0.2.2(2.btbn).0-2perc-hp.pno-str
120’

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