Wikipedia
Orango is one of the Bijagós Islands, located 60 kilometers (38 miles) off the coast of mainland Guinea-Bissau. It is the centre of the Ilhas de Orango National Park and has one town, Eticoga.
Orango is known for its saltwater hippopotamuses.
Orango is an unfinished satirical opera sketched in 1932 by Dmitri Shostakovich. The manuscript was found by Olga Digonskaya, a Russian musicologist, in the Glinka Museum, Moscow in 2004. The plan was for a prologue and three acts but only about a quarter of the Prologue was sketched.
The libretto was written by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Alexander Osipovich Starchakov. Since Orango is the protagonist of the opera, half-ape and half-man, one of the sources of inspiration for the libretto was the work of Russian biologist, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov who attempted hybridization of humans and other primates. According to McBurney, the word suggests orangutan. Shostakovich had visited Ivanov's primate research station in Sukhumi and "recommended it as a sight worth seeing."
The Prologue was first performed in an orchestration by Gerard McBurney on 2 December 2011 in Los Angeles, California by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor) and staged by Peter Sellars (director).
The piece was also performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra on 24 August 2015 at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the 2015 BBC Proms, again conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Irina Brown was stage director.