Video of full performance of Project Orfeo at Duke University, September 25, 2016. Richard Powers joins Duke faculty composer Scott Lindroth, the Horszowski Piano Trio, clarinetist Benjamin Fingland, flutist Laura Gilbert and Duke faculty violist Jonathan Bagg in a mixed-media concert that combines readings from Powers’ 2014 novel Orfeo with performances of Messiaen’s Quartet, Read More
Richard Powers’s Orfeo won the California Book Award’s Silver Medal for fiction.
On November 21, 2014, Richard Powers joined The Nouveau Classical Project and the Kamea String Quartet at the DiMenna Center in New York City for a performance hosted by the Center for Fiction. Part reading, part concert, this event took the audience through the adventure of Peter Els, the protagonist of Powers’s novel Orfeo. Details,, Read More
Orfeo was listed in eight categories for NPR’s best books of 2014, NPR, December 3, 2104. Richard Powers hits lots of high notes in this exuberantly intellectual road novel….
“A Conversation with Richard Powers,” by Keenan McCracken, Music & Literature, September 10, 2014. The third of his novels to use music as a centerpiece (after The Time of Our Singing and The Gold Bug Variations), Orfeo is yet more evidence of Powers’s rare gift for articulating the seemingly ineffable qualities of sound, one that is accompanied by a near-encyclopedic, Read More
“A Fugitive Language: An Interview with Richard Powers,” by Allan Vorda, Rain Taxi, Winter 2013/2014, in which Powers discusses Orfeo.
Orfeo debuted at #21 on the New York Times Extended Best-Seller List, Feburary 9, 2014.
Watch NOVUS NY, the Trinity Church music orchestra, perform Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), with introduction and narration by Richard Powers. Filmed at Trinity Church in New York City, November 16, 2023, more info here. Richard Powers and W. W. Norton & Company have assembled, Read More
Podcast of Richard Powers in conversation with Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s “Bookworm.” Aloud, Los Angeles Public Library, January 28, 2014.
Richard Wolinsky interviews Richard Powers about Orfeo for Bookwaves, January 23, 2014. SPOILER ALERT! Do not listen to this until you’re ready to hear about the book’s surprises! Direct link to the mp3
The music in Orfeo is starting to show up on Spotify. Here are two playlists so far: This one, by David Dodd, contains 466 tracks. This one, by Ron Hogan, contains 41 tracks.
A Strange Composition: Classical Music Meets Bioterror In ‘Orfeo.’ NPR’s Audie Cornish interviews Richard Powers for All Things Considered, January 17, 2014.