Boston may lack an opera company with the prestige of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but our two pre-eminent companies are at least trying. Last week Boston Lyric Opera announced an expanded season for 2002-2003 including two free performances of Bizets Carmen to be presented on Boston Common. The comparatively tiny, Charlestown-based Boston Academy of Music, meanwhile, announced a new biennial contemporary-opera festival to be presented in conjunction with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project beginning in February 2003. Each proposal is daring in its own way, but the Lyric which usually presents one new or 20th-century work each season is deferring a planned world premiere of a new opera at least until 2003-2004 and sticking with more-standard repertoire.
As general director Janice Mancini Del Sesto explained at the companys February 26 press conference, BLO "felt it was important, following a hard year, to give people easy-to-love, smile-able operas." The first half of the companys 2001-2002 season unfolded in the shadow of the terrorist attacks of September 11 Verdis Don Carlos and the Boston premiere of MIT-based composer Tod Machovers take on Tolstoys Resurrection. (The season concludes with Donizettis Don Pasquale starting March 27 and Puccinis La bohme starting May 1). Del Sesto says that following September 11, the company reconsidered its 2002-2003 season. The result: Rossinis Il barbiere di Siviglia (October 2-15), Mozarts The Abduction from the Seraglio (sung in English; November 6-19), Puccinis La rondine (March 26April 8), and Richard Strausss Die Fledermaus (April 30May 13). And the 2003-2004 season will open with a world premiere of a new opera.
But the big news was the announcement of the Carmen, an "abridged" version to be sung in English in a multimedia outdoor production on Boston Common September 20 and 21, in a co-production with Houston Grand Opera. The performances will be projected on giant TV monitors with amplified sound. An extensive educational-outreach program to Bostons neighborhoods is planned in conjunction with this production.
Then last Thursday, February 28, Boston Academy of Music unveiled what promises to be the biggest undertaking in its history a one-week festival of 20th-century chamber opera presented in conjunction with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under the title "Opera Unlimited." The biennial festival, says sponsor Randolph Fuller, "will explore the whole breadth of 20th-century opera . . . from the first decade to the last." If the first season (February 6-11, 2003) is any indication, that also includes a fair share of 21st-century opera, and by Boston composers at that. Daniel Pinkhams The Cask of Amontillado (based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, with a libretto by the composer) and Elaine Ruehrs Toussaint Before the Spirits (based on Madison Smartt Bells novel All Souls Rising, with a libretto by the author and his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires) will be given world premieres. Ruehr describes Toussaint as a "dance opera" that shes creating with choreographer Nicola Hawkins. The Cask of Amontillado will play on a double bill with Pinkhams The Garden Party. The inaugural season of "Opera Unlimited" will also include British wunderkind composer Thomas Adss Powder Her Face and a fifth opera to be announced.
Fuller, BAM artistic director Richard Conrad, and BMOP artistic director Gil Rose all express the hope that "Opera Unlimited" will become an international festival on the scale of the Boston Early Music Festival, and taking place in alternate years. At this stage, says Fuller, "Opera Unlimited" is working with a list of 150 20th-century chamber opera titles, all demanding small casts and small orchestras. Rose says that the group hopes to focus on "senior American composers" and Boston-based composers. "Were going to lead," he emphasizes. "Were not going to follow."
