A young couple is brutally killed, and the convicted murderer, Joseph De Rocher, sits on death row. Sister Helen Prejean agrees to be his spiritual adviser. As she meets his family, and the families of his victims, she begins questioning every attitude she has about how human beings treat each other. Based on real-life events, Jake Heggie’s music and Terrence McNally’s libretto explore the nature of friendship and forgiveness in the most profound ways. Hugely acclaimed in major houses internationally, Dead Man Walking is widely acknowledged as one of the most riveting operas of the 21st century. It simply demands to be seen.
After two albums exploring the boundaries of jazz via the music of Thelonious Monk (Green Chimneys) and Charles Mingus (Peggy's Blue Skylight), ex-Police guitarist Andy Summers returns to original compositions with a new band that moves forward through a swarm of genres on Earth + Sky. Employing two keyboard players, John Novello and John Beasley, as well as drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, saxophonist Katisse Buckingham, and bassist Abraham Laboriel, Summers creates a body of work that looks through jazz, rock, and folk forms and is technology based while also using organic rhythms and atmospherics. While some might see this as retrenchment, Summers, unlike so many of the superchopper guitarists out there, is a melodist whose lyricism is inescapable in virtually everything he plays…
In Great Scott, the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano, one of today’s best-loved classical singers, creates a role conceived specifically with her in mind. The character she plays, Arden Scott, just happens to be an opera star, and she is the lynchpin of what Fred Plotkin of WQXR, the USA’s leading classical music radio station, welcomed as a “deeply moving and musically brilliant work” that “should enter the standard repertory just as Heggie’s two previous masterpieces – Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick – already have”.