Harvestworks congratulates Anthony Davis whose opera The Central Park Five, with a libretto by Richard Wesley, has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
In 1989, Harvestworks sponsored Anthony Davis’ music composition Songs for Dora Orenstein (1989), a part of a full-length program entitled “Soprano Bar & Grill” in which Ms. Orenstein portrays a series of characters through music and drama. The composition, retitled Lost Moon Sisters, was published by Emergency Music/Composers Recordings (NWCR654) on the Urban Diva CD (1993). Lost Moon Sisters was funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Anthony Davis is a composer and pianist. In 1986, he created the opera, “X, The Life of Malcolm X” and later received a Grammy Nomination for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition”. A second opera, “Under the Moon,” premiered at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June 1989 and a third, “Tania,” was released at the American Music Theater Festival in June 1992. As an orchestral composer, Mr. Davis has written: “Esu Variations” (1995), “Jacob’s Ladder” (1997), “Still Waters” (1982), and “Notes from the Underground” (1997). He also has written accompanying music for the Broadway version of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,”
The latest his work, “The Central Park Five,” has won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2020. In 1980’s New York, five African American and Latino teenagers were unjustly convicted of a Central Park rape but exonerated thirteen years later. Davis’ opera is a passionate story about the issue that still resonates today.