LA Opera kills off world premiere
OperaA Mason Bates opera based on Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was jointly commissioned by LA Opera and the Metropolitan Opera.
Now, however, LA Opera has scrapped the intended world premiere in October on financial grounds, leaving the Met to carry the can alone.
‘It was a very ambitious and therefore expensive project, and unfortunately in the current conditions, it wasn’t something that we can manage,’ said LA Opera CEO Christopher Koelsch (pic).
Peter Gelb said: ‘I was shocked at first. But I understand how all opera companies in America are facing enormous financial challenges, so I was sympathetic.’
The opera will have a student run-through in in Bloomington, Indiana, before heading to the Met in 2025-26.
LA Opera is at least doing financially better than the San Diego Opera where they will be doing a cut-rate Don Giovanni with projections and a reduced rehearsal time.
As an Angeleno and opera lover, I’m so disappointed. Curious to hear their season announcement.
Say goodbye to the Metropolitan Opera…it was great while it lasted. They have been in financial trouble since before the lockdowns, and that combined with escalating prices, dim-witted woke productions (i.e. Faust with Kaufmann), and the general lack of vocal star power has doomed the house. Thanks Peter G….you were the worst mistake the Met ever made.
Getting what they deserve after their shameful treatment of James Levine
Shamefull?! So the guy uses his position to screw jung singers for decades and you find he got shamefully treated. It tells a lot about you!
The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University will co-produce the opera with the Met, and the world premiere will be next November in Bloomington.
This will not be a “student run-through”, it will be a full production at the excellent Opera and Ballet Theatre at IU.
This is a great idea, and Indiana University is the ideal testing ground. However, The Met (and LA) should never have committed major $$ before the work was deemed stageworthy.
Let’s stop making ridiculously expensive opera sets and focus on cultivating the best singers and audiences of young people.
LA Opera box office hasn’t been the same since they sacked Domingo.
Viva Domingo.
lol
Who is Mason Bates?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC6jTdlLP2s
Music which is so thin that it must be propped-up with nice hip sounds to keep at least soemthing of the interest going.
So…..
As long as they keep on staging productions for the 7 people who appreciate the writer or the book….how on earth do you wish to build an audience for the future?
This is why these organizations should be literally sold for scraps and reset from zero. If you take a DIME in public funds, it should be mandatory to put your heads together for 15 minutes and actually produce something relevant for more than 10 people (literally).
This is not the Ezterhazy times.
Don’t expect me to care if these organizations fold. They should.
“the 7 people who appreciate the writer or the book”
???
I can only assume that you either live in Europe or, if in the US, pay zero attention to literature. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” was a New York Times bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize; in 2019, The Guardian included it (at no. 57) on its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century (so far).
Direct to video? At least movie studios know when to cut their loses.
Kavalier and Clay was an excellent book, it was widely read, made many bestseller lists, and was critically acclaimed. It sits on my bookshelf and I’m sure that of many others. As a “book title” it would have pretty good “name recognition” amongst a decent cross section of society.
Whether it would make a good opera? That I’m not sure of. But I’d be very interested to see!
The “run-through” in a modest house will help hone the work. It is what should have been planned in the first place. Most of today’s “opera” composers don’t know the first thing about dramatic structure or pacing, or theatre itself. Only live performance can teach them. Big companies, like the two here, have no business committing money and their subscribers to unproven works unless the composer already has a proven record of achievement in theatre.
Actually Mason Bates has a track record. Another of his operas was performed in Santa Fe. Over the weekend Yannick and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered a violin concerto that Bates wrote for Gil Shaham (on the same program as the Brahms Requiem!). It sounded like an easy-listening, misplaced theatrical work, ill-suited to the earnest personality of the talented Shaham, leaving me with no interest in hearing anything else he composed
VERY well stated.
I’d love to see it, but it’s a poor investment. There aren’t many of us science fiction fans who also enjoy the opera