The New York City Opera has unveiled its 2010-2011 schedule. The company will present another stripped-down season featuring five operas, two of them revivals, and three works new to the stage in New York City.Self-portrait by Antonin Artaud.
His work inspires a new opera by John Zorn at City Opera this season.
The 2010 Fall season features two operas. Leonard Bernstein's A Quiet Place documents domestic strife in a small suburban home. One of the composer's few "serious" operas, the work has its origin as a short one-act drama called Trouble in Tahiti.
Richard Strauss' Intermezzo also examines family strife, albeit from a comic perspective. Based on a real incident in the composer's life, and with rare libretto from Strauss himself, Intermezzo takes the listener inside the world of a busy conductor in the roaring Twenties.
The 2011 Spring season opens with a revival of the Jonathan Miller staging of L'Elisir d'Amore. On the serious side, the company presents a triptych of three operas by John Zorn, Arnold Schoenberg, and Morton Feldman:
- The Zorn work is La Machine de l’Être, a ten-minute solo work with no words in its libretto.
- The Schoenberg is the nightmarish drama Erwartung.
- Morton Feldman's opera Neither is based on the bleak work of Samuel Beckett. \
The company expands its season with five concert performances, including a long-overdue revival of Oliver Knussen's operatic version of Where the Wild Things Are.
Photo: Philippe de Gobert, Brüssel, © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2008. Image from ArtTattler.com
