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Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
by Claudio Monteverdi
&
The Glitch
by Nico Muhly and Greg Pierce
Friday, November 21 at 7:30pm
Saturday, November 22 at 7:30pm
Sunday, November 23 at 1:00pm
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The Glitch is a one-act, true-crime opera based on the infamous 2015 Dannemora prison break. Told through a single charged conversation between a former prison employee (who is now a prisoner, incarcerated for helping plan the escape of her lover) and her husband (who refuses to accept his wife’s culpability, in his first visit since her guilty verdict), the work explores betrayal, lust, and jealousy in the shadowy world of illicit love.
Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda sets a famous episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata that tells the tragic story of two warriors fated to clash in battle. The Christian knight Tancredi encounters a Saracen soldier during the Crusades and, not recognizing the fighter beneath their armor, challenges them to combat. A fierce duel unfolds and after a prolonged and exhausting fight, Tancredi strikes a fatal blow. Only then does he remove his opponent’s helmet and discover, to his horror, that he has slain Clorinda, the woman he loves. Overwhelmed with grief, Tancredi fulfills Clorinda’s final wish and baptizes her with water from a nearby spring. She dies peacefully, and the piece closes with an air of solemnity and transcendence.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Stage Director Marcus Shields describes the relationship between Nico Muhly and Monteverdi’s short operatic works.
These two pieces share a striking kinship. Both are brief, both circle around love and conflict, and both capture the instant of a clash—emotional in the Muhly, physical in the Monteverdi. At their heart lies a struggle between a man and a woman, born of misunderstanding and misperception.
Taken symbolically, the stories open outward, resonating with mythological echoes: Zeus and Hera, Siegfried and Brünnhilde, and countless others who embody the tension of love entangled with strife. Push the abstraction further, and the human scale falls away and what remains are two cosmic forces—order and chaos, civilization and wilderness, justice and compassion—locked in eternal dialogue, within every person and every relationship.
The two works written almost 400 years apart invite us to see these conflicts poetically. Together, the works become a mirror of each other and of our world today: two visions of intimacy and violence, realized in opposite ways, leading us from one side of the spectrum to the other.
ABOUT THE ARTISTIC & CREATIVE TEAM
Conductor: Neal Goren
Stage director: Marcus Shields
Lighting & Set designer: Abigail Hoke Brady
Costume designer: Amanda Gladu
Producer: Natalie Renee
Stage Manager: Bethany Windham
ABOUT THE CAST
Tilly Mitchell/Clorinda: Devony Smith, mezzo
Lyle Mitchell/Tancredi: Efrain Solis, baritone
Testo: Karim Sulayman, tenor
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Nico Muhly (b. 1981) is an American composer whose music spans opera, choral works, chamber music, film scores, and collaborations across genres. A graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, Muhly studied with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, and worked closely with Philip Glass. His compositions are known for weaving Renaissance choral traditions and minimalist textures with a contemporary sensibility, creating music that is both intricate and luminous. His operas include Dark Sisters (2009) commissioned by Gotham Chamber Opera, Two Boys (2011), commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera, and Marnie (2017), based on Winston Graham’s novel and He has written orchestral music for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, among many others and collaborated with artists like Sufjan Stevens, and Björk to name a few.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was a groundbreaking Italian composer whose operas helped establish the genre as a major Western musical form. Trained in Cremona and later active in Mantua and Venice, Monteverdi fused expressive text setting with bold harmonic innovation to create works of striking dramatic power. His first opera, L’Orfeo (1607), commissioned by the Gonzaga court in Mantua, remains one of the earliest operatic masterpieces, blending myth, music, and staging in unprecedented ways.
He continued to refine the art form with later operas such as L’Arianna (1608, now mostly lost) Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) and his Venetian works, including Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643). His operas brought psychological depth to character portrayal and showcased music’s ability to convey human passion, politics, and vulnerability. By marrying theatrical immediacy with musical invention, he set the foundation for centuries of operatic tradition and almost 400 years after his death, he is still considered one of the genre’s greatest pioneers.
