The Perfect American (complete opera recorded in 2013)

Orange Mountain Music presents the premiere recording of Philip Glass's 2013 opera The Perfect American about the death of Walt Disney performed by an esteemed roster of soloists including Christopher Purves as Walt Disney and performed by the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Real Madrid under the direction of Dennis Russell Davies. This 2CD set of The Perfect American in a fictionalized biography of Disney's final months. We discover Disney's delusions of immortality via cryogenic preservation, his tirades alongside his Abraham Lincoln talking robot, his utopian visions and his backyard labyrinth of toy trains.

Yet, if at first Disney seems to have a magic wand granting him all his wishes, we soon discover that he is as tortured as the man who crosses this story, Wilhelm Dantine, a cartoonist who worked for Disney illustrating sequences of Sleeping Beauty. Dantine fascinated by the childlike omnipotence of this man who identifies with Mickey mouse, desperately seeks Disney's recognition at the risk of his own ruin. Disney's wife Lillian, his confidante and perhaps his mistress Hazel, his brother Roy, his children Diane and Sharon, his close and ill-treated collaborators, and famous figures such as Andy Warhol, all contribute to the opera's animation, with its feel for the life of the Disney world.