While performing arts centers around the country struggle to stage high-budget standard productions, American Opera Projects (AOP), the Brooklyn-based company "known for bringing cutting-edge vocal productions to the masses" (New York), and Works & Process at the Guggenheim Museum co-present three stream-lined music-theatre works featuring celebrated composers Arvo Pärt and Tarik O'Regan. The triple bill, which charts a new and timely course for opera and dance, will be performed at the Guggenheim Museum's Peter B. Lewis Theater on Sunday, January 11 and Monday, January 12, 2009 at 7:30 PM.
The program will feature Estonian composer Arvo Pärt's L'abbé Agathon in the world premiere operatic version commissioned by AOP. L'abbé Agathon, originally composed for soprano Barbara Hendricks and the Ensemble de Violoncelles de Beauvais has been transformed by AOP, with Pärt's supervision, into a chamber opera. The opera will be premiered by soprano Lauren Flanigan in a commissioned English translation by Cori Ellison. L'Abbé Agathon will be re-imagined by French visual artist Sophie Calle, with a film installation by Ms. Calle. AOP's commissioning fund is comprised in part from a grant from the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation. The monodrama L'abbé Agathon marks the first completed opera in a series of monodrama projects that AOP will produce throughout 2009, entitled The Peter Jay Sharp Solo Project.
The program will also include a preview of music from AOP-Artistic Partner and current Grammy nominee (best classical and best choral album Threshold of the Night) Tarik O'Regan. AOP has commissioned O'Regan to set poet Anna Rabinowitz's book-length poem The Wanton Sublime. J. David Jackson conducts a string orchestra made of players from the MET Orchestra and The NY City and Opera orchestras, which have no performances during the rehearsal and performance dates. The program at the Guggenheim also boasts dancers from the New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan, Albert Evans and Sébastien Marcovici, in choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's Liturgy set to Pärt's Fratres and After the Rainset to Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel.
Focusing attention on the bare essentials in these belt-tightening times, the monodramas and pas de deux will emphasize the pure artistic beauty of Part's and O'Regan's compositions, avoiding grand sets and costumes. This production heralds the new and necessary direction for the performing arts in the years to come, focusing the audience's attention on the power of simplicity: words, movement, visuals, conspiring, without hierarchy, with music to make an opera.
Visit www.operaprojects.org for more information.
