June 6-8, 2019, music director Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of David Lang’s new, fully-staged opera, prisoner of the state, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer.
Search Results for:
David Brophy
‘the little match girl passion’: Best of 21st Century

The Guardian UK has listed David Lang’s the little match girl passion as one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century. The composition received a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.
the little match girl passion has been staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney…
continue readingWaPo Best of 2019: Classical Music
By Anne Midgette
Classical music critic
Dec. 10, 2019
People often ask: Why can’t we update old operas for our time? With “Prisoner of the State,” David Lang has done just that. He remakes Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” a problem child of the repertory, into a new work that hews to the original in form while underscoring its relevance to today’s society…
continue readingEuropean Premiere: ‘prisoner of the state’
After its acclaimed world premiere in June 2019 with the New York Philharmonic, David Lang’s fully-staged opera, prisoner of the state, directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, begins a European premiere tour 11 January at the Barbican Centre in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and conductor Ilan Volkov.
prisoner of the state was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s De Doelen, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Germany’s Bochum Symphony Orchestra, Belgium’s Concertgebouw Bruges and Sweden’s Malmö Opera…
continue readingLA Opera online premiere: ‘let me come in’
LA Opera releases the latest in their online series “On Now”: David Lang’s let me come in features soprano Angel Blue, with conductor Bryan Wagorn, violist David Creswell, cellist Anja Wood, and percussionist Miles Salerni.
Co-commissioned by LA Opera and the Fisher Center at Bard College, this online premiere of let me come in is accompanied by a new film by filmmaker Bill Morrison …
continue readingNYT Op-Ed Article
This weekend, David Lang wrote a fun article for the New York Times!
“…It’s like car mechanics talking about the wiring under the hood — good wiring is essential but cars exist because ordinary people need to get places. So I was feeling isolated from the audience, and itching to get back into the real world, where the real listeners live…”
‘death speaks’ premiere sells out Carnegie Hall!
In October 2007 Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices premiered David Lang’s the little match girl passion at Carnegie Hall. People in the audience that night knew they had heard something special. But this special? Only a few months later the piece won the Pulitzer Prize, then the recording on Harmonia Mundi won a Grammy, and the piece has gone on to become a hit around the world.
Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts bring back Theatre of Voices and the little match girl passion, along with the premiere of a major new work they have commissioned just for the occasion…
continue readingLang Piano Competition Concert!
After much anticipation….. On May 6, David Lang hosts the winners of his piano competion at (le) Poisson Rouge.
The winner, Peter Poston, performs his winning-version of Lang’s solo, wed; Andrew Zolinsky, who recorded Lang’s memory pieces recently on Cantaloupe; Zolinsky and Poston premiere a new work for piano-four-hands; and the runners-up premiere a new work for piano-six-hands.
This is a not-to-be-missed event!
Why Composers of Any or No Faith Are Drawn to Sacred Music

If you like Christmas music, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” isn’t just the name of a song.
This time of year, Christmas music is all around us — in stores, in elevators, in ads on your phone. It may even be in your home. My wife was raised on “The Perry Como Christmas Album,” so that always gets some play in our household. I am not a Christian, and I wasn’t raised with any Christmas albums, but of course I know all the songs…
continue readingthemillions.com

In 1998, I wrote music for a production of Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. The director was my friend Carey Perloff, the music was sung by the spectacular men’s vocal ensemble Chanticleer, and the translation of the text was by the writer and Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold. There can be a lot of down time for a composer and a translator during theater rehearsals so Michael and I passed the time telling each other stories about books we should be reading, and Michael suggested I read Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser …
continue reading