Podcasts

WOS Radio: Edward Seckerson Talks to Nico Muhly & Craig Lucas

Editorial Staff
London

The much-anticipated world premiere of Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas‘ opera Two Boys takes us deep into high-tec world of the internet and social networking. It’s a dark and unsettling world where nothing and no one are quite as they seem.

Identity – mistaken or otherwise – has been a factor in opera for centuries now but here it takes and new and savage twist. In this highly animated audio podcast in English National Opera’s Opertalks series Edward Seckerson joins Muhly and Lucas on a spin through the highways and byways of the writing process: the workshops, the rewrites, the testing helter-skelter of the rehearsal period.

Muhly is just about the hottest young composer on the planet right now; Lucas hails from the Broadway stage as both performer and writer and has come full-circle from appearing in Richard Rodgers’ short-lived Henry VIII musical Rex to writing the libretto for Rodgers’ grandson Adam Guettel’s masterpiece The Light in the Piazza.

Listening to their banter here gives some impression as to just how dynamic their collaboration on this piece has been. A brilliant new opera for our time but with none of the electronic accoutrements that its subject matter might suggest. As they say in those TV warnings expect strong sex and violence.