Composer Wayne Shorter with the score from his “... (Iphigenia)” opera. Photo by Jeff Tang.
In Tuesday’s (3/19) Boston Globe, David Weininger writes, “The jazz icon Wayne Shorter spent much of the last decade of his life composing an opera called ‘…(Iphigenia).’ By the time of its premiere in Boston in 2021, he was in frail health and relied on a dedicated team of artists to help bring his vision of the Greek myth into reality. One member of that team was the conductor Clark Rundell, who’d frequently worked with Shorter’s quartet when the group teamed up with orchestras. One day, Rundell’s assistant, Phillip Golub, went to Shorter’s house in Los Angeles to pick up some manuscript pages of the opera … He told Rundell, ‘Clark, there’s an awful lot of orchestral music in that house. We need to do something about it.’… Shorter’s house contained a bevy of previously unknown orchestral manuscripts—new compositions and arrangements of older tunes, all in the composer’s beautifully precise handwriting…. Before he died last March at 89, he curated a concert that will reach the Boston Symphony Orchestra (under Rundell’s baton) Thursday through Saturday. It includes ‘Gaia’ and a suite of music from the opera, along with orchestral versions of works from Shorter’s earlier albums … ‘His writing is very opulent, very sensational, in a way,’ Rundell said of his symphonic music.”
