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Before It All Goes Dark (Jake Heggie) San Francisco 2024 Ryan McKinny, Megan Marino
STREAM IT from Amazon Prime Video
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Before It All Goes Dark
- Composer: Heggie Jake
- Libretto: Gene Scheer, based on a true story reported by Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Presidio Theatre, San Francisco, California
- Recorded: May 22, 2024
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Ryan McKinny, Megan Marino
- Conductor: Joseph Mechavich
- Orchestra: Music of Remembrance Ensemble
- Stage Director: Erich Parce
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: EuroArts
- Date Published: 2025
- Format: Unknown
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
-
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
This world premiere recording of Jake Heggie’s (Musical America’s Composer of the Year 2025) opera tells the compelling true story of Gerald “Mac” McDonald.
The opera is made up of two parts: the prologue and the actual opera. In the prologue we imagine an intimate soirée in Emil Freund’s Musical Salon in Prague, 1939, featuring music by contemporary composers who, like Emil, would soon be swept up in the Holocaust. The works are an important memento of these artists and their work. What remains is the music and the memory.
Gerald “Mac” McDonald is a gravely ill and deeply troubled Vietnam War veteran, which was first reported by Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune. Mac grew up poor, angry, and disenfranchised in the suburbs of Chicago, his family’s Jewish ancestry hidden from him – until Reich tracked him down as part of an investigation inspired by his own family’s experiences during the Holocaust.
When Mac learned that he was heir to a priceless art collection stolen by the Nazis, the two men embarked on a quest to Eastern Europe to uncover secrets of the past. Jewish Czech businessman Emil Freund spent years building a magnificent art collection of impressionist, modernist and abstract paintings.
Quoted from EuroArts
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