For Your GRAMMY® Consideration

The Queen, My Lord, Is Dead consists of one extended scene featuring Lady Macbeth, completely alone.

If included in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, the stage action of the opera would appear after the indelible sleepwalking scene and before the announcement of the Queen’s death near the play’s conclusion. With The Queen, we attempted to reveal something of the ambiguous humanity and drive at the heart of this seminal character without removing her from the world of Shakespeare’s play, in which her astonishing presence is so vivid and mystifying. The unexplained nature of her offstage death has served to enshrine her inscrutability over the centuries; actors and audiences alike have been forced to make substantial assumptions about her motivations and her fate. We wanted to shed new light; to take Macbeth, open up its binding, and reveal some story bits that were scribbled in the margins; to bring the hidden heart and conclusion of Lady Macbeth’s story out of the shadowy wings and onto the lighted stage.

The world premiere studio recording features the same musicians that created the June 2022 onstage premiere of the work and captures every haunting nuance of the score in HD audio.

CDs are available for sale in the SSP Store and on Bandcamp; digital downloads are for sale on Bandcamp; and the recording is available on all major streaming services: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Pandora, etc.