recordings
The Perfect American
An opera
2013

Music by Philip Glass
Conductor: Dennis Russell Davies

Catalog

Opus Arte OA1117D

Cast

Walt Disney: Christopher Purves
Roy Disney: David Pittsinger
Dantine: Donald Kaasch
Hazel George: Janis Kelly
Lillian Disney: Marie McLaughlin
Sharon: Sarah Tynan
Diane: Nazan Fikret
Lucy/Josh: Rosie Lomas
Abraham Lincoln/A funerary worker: Zachary James
Andy Warhol: John Easterlin
Chuck/A doctor: Juan Noval-Moro
A secretary: Beatriz De Galvez
Nurse: Noelia Bunuel

Director: Phelim McDermott
Set and costume designs: Dan Potra
Lighting design: Jon Clark
Choreography: Ben Wright
Video: Leo Warner
Chorus master: Andres Maspero

Recorded live from Teatro Real Madrid.

Notes

The last days of the American icon Walt Disney form a powerful and poignant subject for Philip Glass’s latest opera, which was filmed at its first performances in Madrid in January 2013. Phelim McDermott’s spectacular production is worthy of Disney’s own visual imagination and its definitive influence on American culture. In the pit conductor Dennis Russell Davies, an experienced and authoritative champion of the composer’s hypnotically beautiful music, gives wings to Rudy Wurlitzer’s operatic transformation of Peter Stephan Jungk’s novel, using both fact and fiction to peer into Disney’s troubled psyche as illness forces him to confront his mortality.

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COMPOSITIONS:
The Perfect American