Our News
Keep up to date with our latest news at The Sembrich! Scroll down to see the latest updates on our Bolton music festival, other events, museum programs, and scheduled activities! To read Notes from the 9th Floor, a newsletter from Artistic Director Richard Wargo, click here.
Written from the desk of his 9th floor composition studio in Scranton, Pennsylvania, The Sembrich’s Artistic Director and Composer-in-Residence Richard Wargo offers special insights into the planning of each season at The Sembrich and his own work as a composer.
Notes from the 9th Floor
The boxes here are on ninth floor are repacked now, ready for a return trip to Bolton Landing. A great deal of my time here during the past nine months has been spent working with our Sembrich “team,” preparing the upcoming summer festival, “Trailblazers,” and the numerous exciting events that we look forward to sharing in the weeks ahead.
This year, an extended museum schedule kept me in residence on the Sembrich grounds well into October. One of the first tasks awaiting me on my return to Scranton was the assembly of the instrumental parts for my Christmas cantata, VOICES IN THE MIST.
Quite by chance, these past six months featured productions of three of my operas: “A Visit to the Country” (Part Two of A CHEKHOV TRILOGY) at University of Georgia, “Losers,” Part Two of BALLYMORE at Illinois Wesleyan University and “Winners,” Part One of BALLYMORE at Westminster Choir College.
While the autumn season in recent years has become a time for me to travel, most notably, to Eastern Europe, to visit musical colleagues in Poland and Ukraine, this year, quite by chance, the travel focus has turned to colleges and universities here in the US, to hear performances of some of my works.
Like last season, my winter-time travel this year was minimal, due to the ongoing pandemic. But an unexpected opportunity arrived with the mid-March Canadian premiere of my opera THE MUSIC SHOP, a virtual production presented by Vancouver Opera…
Happy New Year! And warm wishes from the three small rooms that comprise my office and composing studio on the ninth floor of the Professional Arts Building in downtown Scranton, where I’ve been working almost exclusively since the outbreak of COVID-19 last March.
The pervasive mood of these coronavirus days brought to mind the photo on the right, one of my favorite images from The Sembrich Collection, dating from July, 1914. Not to compare our current crisis with the calamity of the Great War, but the emotion and pensive mood conveyed by this image seems to capture the uncertainty of our own pandemic times.