Prof. Tod Machover speaks with WBUR’s Andrea Shea about his new opera, which uses technology and music to tell the story of composer Arnold Schoenberg. Machover notes that opera, “was always a kind of funky experimental form where it was the place to combine narrative and visuals and engineering stage sets and music that worked — as a listening experience.”
New York Times reporter Robert Berkvist memorializes the work of A.R. Gurney, a prolific playwright who taught American literature and humanities as a member of the MIT faculty for 36 years. Berkvist writes that in Gurney’s plays “the conventions of the drawing-room comedy became the framework for social analysis.”
Boston Globe reporter David Weininger writes about “Persona,” a new opera by Prof. Jay Scheib and Prof. Keeril Makan, based on a 1966 Ingmar Bergman film. The opera is staged as if the action is being filmed, which allows viewers to be “more involved with what’s happening than I think they’re expecting,” explains Makan.