Tod Machover is Musical America’s 2016 Composer of the Year
“Death and the Powers” a Finalist for 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music
Buzz from the world premiere performances of Schoenberg in Hollywood
The New York Times on “Cheesesteak at Carnegie Hall”
“Death and the Powers doesn’t point the way to a new era of opera. It’s there. Now.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
“Schoenberg in Hollywood works splendidly as theater, and as an opera whose score allows its clever libretto to work its magic, seems likely to follow Machover’s previous successes.” – Keith Powers, Classical Voice North America
“…Machover, voluble and friendly in person, confounds expectations. Valis, based on a science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick and dubbed “the first opera of the twenty-first century,” now sounds anything but scary, and his last three operas, Resurrection, Skellig and Death and the Powers, have rare emotional depth. Machover, now a fully mature composer, is unafraid of harnessing the old-fashioned powers of opera, unafraid of sentimentality, unafraid of C major.” — Philip Kennicott in Opera News, October 2013
“Machover is a remarkable composer. [His] technological inventions in giving to sounds, through electronics, new sonorities, new eloquence, have been widely and amply acclaimed. But I’d like to stress what a good opera composer he is, bringing the ‘traditional’, necessary skills to a far from traditional work. Machover has a command of expressive vocal gesture. He sets words sensitively, with a feeling for the natural weight, stress and length of syllables rare today. Voices and instrumental/electronic sound are well balanced. The final duet is a moving modern addition to the great line of father-daughter exchanges: Boccanegra-Amelia, Rigoletto-Gilda, even Wotan- Brünnhilde. This was a grand, rich, deeply serious new opera, presented by a team with manifold coherent accomplishments.” — Andrew Porter in Opera Magazine January 2011
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