PENTATONE continues its American Opera Series with Houston Grand Opera’s world premiere recording of Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix (2019), an opera on the life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s favorite librettist. Da Ponte (1749-1838) was an adventurer, who not only travelled the world, but in a way also through time, living across what seem to be impossible moments of history that never should have aligned in somebody’s life. Together with librettist John Caird, O’Regan has designed The Phoenix as an opera within an opera, exploring Da Ponte’s life in the US, and as such providing a fascinating perspective on America as a nation of immigrants. The young and elder Da Ponte are created by Luca Pisaroni and Thomas Hampson, respectively. Music director Patrick Summers conducts the Houston Grand Opera.

This is a digital-only album, not available as a physical product.

Booklet with backgrounds available at HGO.

This exuberant opera on the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte uses the opera-within-an-opera device to tell the picaresque story of one of Mozart's literary inspirations, and it shares some of that earlier work's madcap energy and air for pastiche; real-life father- and-son-in-law Thomas Hampson and Luca Pisaroni bring bags of character to their roles as the elderly librettist and his son.