Margaret Garner to be focus of 2007 McCormack Visiting Artist-Scholar Residency

Issues of race and class are the subject of renewed academic discussion this semester at Skidmore, with composer Richard Danielpour's celebrated new opera Margaret Garner as the focal point for an ambitious campus-wide project.

Named as the College's 2007 McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholar, Danielpour visited Skidmore in October to assist in planning the residency. In November he returned for the first of three campus visits, participating in programs, lectures, and workshops that characterize the residency. Danielpour will be in residence again Feb. 6-8 and in March.

The Grammy Award-winning composer will speak with Thomas A. Denny, chair of the Skidmore Music Department, on “Making History: Introducing Margaret Garner,” at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 6, in the Payne Room of the Tang Museum on campus.

At 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, in Davis Auditorium, Danielpour and Skidmore faculty members will participate in a panel discussion titled "Diversity in the Arts".

The McCormack Residency will culminate in a staged concert performance of selections from Margaret Garner at 8 p.m. Friday, March 23, in the Bernhard Theater, with post-performance activities and discussions with the performers and Skidmore faculty from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. the following day in Filene Recital Hall.

During the March residency, Robert B. Driver, general and artistic director of the Opera Company of Philadelphia, will join Danielpour at Skidmore. Driver will stage the performance of selections from Margaret Garner and four cast members of the

opera will speak and teach in a variety of classes, and join in campus and community events. They are Lisa Daltirus, Eric Greene,Tracie Luck, and Mark Panuccio. Also participating in the residency activities will be Laurie Rogers, artistic coordinator and assistant conductor, Opera Company of Philadelphia.

All McCormack residency events are free and open to the public.

With libretto by celebrated novelist Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, the opera Margaret Garner was inspired by one of the most significant fugitive slave stories in pre-Civil War America.

Garner was a young slave in Kentucky who fled her captivity along with her family, including her husband and four children. Facing recapture in Cincinnati, Ohio, she said she would kill herself and her children rather than see them returned to slavery. She succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter before being overpowered and captured, and her plight became noted as much for its legal implications as for its passion and tragedy: because Garner was subject to both the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and also liable for murder by the state of Ohio, there was intense debate about whether she should be tried for murder or for destruction of property.

Although the Danielpour-Morrison opera doesn't exactly follow the facts of the historic event, it confronts the horrors of enslavement, while also conveying the enduring resonance and irrepressible power of the human spirit.

"More than anything else, Margaret Garner is an opera that reminds us that we all belong to the same human family, and it demonstrates what can happen when we forget this fundamental truth", Danielpour wrote about his opera.

It was the publication of Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved in 1988 that rekindled interest in the tragedy. Morrison had learned about Garner nearly two decades before, through a newspaper account.

Separately, Danielpour was looking for topic for his first opera, and came across Garner's story.

The three-act work was jointly commissioned by the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit, the Cincinnati Opera, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia. Premiered in Detroit on May 7, 2005, the $2-million production was directed by Kenny Leon. The opera has since been performed by the other commissioning companies, with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves singing the title role in all three cities.

A New York native who studied at the New England Conservatory and at the Juilliard School of Music, Danielpour is widely known for music considered "eclectic, but distinctly American." Among his numerous works is the orchestral song cycle Elegies, written for mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, and a cello concerto written and recorded by Yo-Yo Ma with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In 2004, Danielpour worked on the second act of Margaret Garner during one of his several residencies at Yaddo, the century-old artist's community on a 400-acre site in Saratoga Springs. He was already a familiar figure in the Saratoga region, having been honored in 1999 by Saratoga Performing Arts Center as its first composer-in-residence in nearly 20 years.

SPAC commissioned Danielpour to compose a violin concerto in honor of Chantal Juillet's 10th anniversary as director of the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival in 2000, and she gave the premiere performance of the new concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra during that summer season.

The McCormack Endowed Artist-Scholar residency is presented annually by Skidmore's Office of the Dean of Special Programs and was established to honor the former dean of special programs, Don McCormack, and his wife, Judy. The McCormack residency brings a guest artist or performer to the campus to share their talents with the campus and the local community. Each residency takes on its own special character and format, dependent on the artists' vision.