The Met will recover Innocence… three years from now
OperaThe Metropolitan Opera has responded to the death of Kaija Saariaho with a pledge to perform her last opera Innocence.
A revival of Simon Stone’s world 2021 premiere production at Aix-en-Provence will be staged in the 2025-26 season.
It comes furnished with this bold claim: ‘Recent decades have seen a blossoming of contemporary opera at the Met as part of General Manager Peter Gelb’s modernization plan.’
Innocence enjoyed huge success at Covent Garden in Stone’s production over the past two months.
It´s the greatest opera after Britten.Absolutely shattering.Great production,too. I wonder when it will be staged in Germany,where i work….
I disagree. Having a libretto in multiple languages looks great in theory, but what it means in practice is that most of the time the audience is having to focus on the surtitles rather than the action. Also, the plot is hokey and for an opera about a school shooting the scary bits just aren’t scary enough. I loved the sound world, but I thought L’Amour du Loin was much better.
Everyone is expected to declare the future is with contemporary music. Really?
Does anyone still perform the operas of the late Eino-Juhani Rautavaara?
Contemporary works do not die with the composer. They die in the premiere, because most notes were dead to begin with.
Talk about making it all about Peter…I’m not a psychologist, but isn’t this something diagnosable???
How many modernization plans has Peter Gelb had for the Met? And how many have failed, some expensively and miserably?
The Met has been planning this for a long time. What’s the news? And there are a lot of problems with Peter Gelb, but it is true that he has made the Met more modern. Granted, the starting point was pretty much zero.
Indeed – there is an unmistakable commitment to modern opera at the Met in recent years. Fire Shut up in my Bones got a season premiere, Champion, Akhenaten, etc. And they have been explicit about it being a focus.
San Francisco is doing it in 1 year.
The Met didn’t “respond” to the composer’s death with a pledge to perform her last opera – they’ve been planning to produce it since before the 2021 world premiere in Aix. The closing credits of the Aix video list Finnish National Opera, Dutch National Opera, Royal Opera House and San Francisco Opera as co-producers of the Simon Stone production “en partenariat avec le Metropolitan Opera.”
Incidentally, the closing credits of the Met’s Die Zauberflöte HD transmssion Saturday, June 3 included a “this performance is dedicated to” tribute to the composer, who had died just one day earlier.
So even if it’s a good thing because it’s the Met it’s BAD! Got it.
L’Amour du Loin at the Met was both an ear sore as well as eyesore (those lasers hurt my eyes, and having to leave early because of them hurt my wallet)