New York City Opera kicks off a new year and a new era of city-wide productions with LA TRAVIATA at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Feb. 12-18. The Jonathan Miller production of Verdi's masterpiece is the season's first NYC Opera staging at BAM, and is followed by the US premiere performances of Rufus Wainwright's PRIMA DONNA from Feb. 19-25. As a gift to the City of New York, The Reed Foundation and The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation have bought the remaining seats for all NYC Opera performances at BAM and will offer these seats at a special $25 price to celebrate NYC Opera’s new beginning.
The news of $25 tickets comes on the heels of an agreement New York City Opera has reached with AGMA and Local 802 AFM that enables the 2012 season to resume as scheduled. NYC Opera’s General Manager and Artistic Director George Steel says, "Many thanks are due to the countless individuals who have helped City Opera forge this new path, most notably members of the New York City Opera Orchestra and New York City Opera Chorus, and the many artists represented by these contracts. Earning your applause is, and will always be, our unifying purpose. Thank you for standing by us, and on with the show!"
The 2011-2012 season has seen NYC Opera embark on a bold new approach under the visionary leadership of General Manager and Artistic Director George Steel, with the company leaving its long-time Lincoln Center home to take its world-class productions to the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Upper West Side, East Harlem and Central Park. NYC Opera has chosen top-notch theaters specifically for each production, with every venue providing excellent production facilities and impeccable acoustics. The season continues with Mozart's Così fan tutte at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College (March 18-24) and concludes with the New York premiere of Georg Philip Telemann's Orpheus at El Museo del Barrio (May 12-20).
Jonathan Miller's production of LA TRAVIATA has already been lauded at Glimmerglass Opera and Vancouver Opera. Opera News judged his psychologically powerful, starkly realistic take on Verdi's tragic masterpiece of love and life lost and found “a sublimely memorable experience…inviting both singer and audience to experience the power of words and music more directly.” The NYC Opera cast includes soprano Laquita Mitchell – a Brooklyn native hailed for her "powerful" voice by The New York Times – as Verdi's fascinating title heroine, the doomed courtesan Violetta, who fights for love even as she battles tuberculosis. Mitchell has sung Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème under Plácido Domingo at Los Angeles Opera and starred as Bess in San Francisco Opera's Porgy and Bess in 2009, with Opera News reporting that she "dazzled the audience with her purity of tone and vivid theatrical presence." Canadian tenor David Pomeroy will make his NYC Opera debut as Violetta’s love, Alfredo, and Stephen Powell as Giorgio Germont. The production will be conducted by Stephen White.
PRIMA DONNA is the first opera by Juno Award-winning, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. A meditation on the fine line between fame and failure, the Dora Award-winning Prima Donna is “a love song to opera, soaked in the perennial operatic themes of loss, betrayal, delusion and nostalgia, and saturated in the musical styles of opera’s golden age,” according to the Times of London. The New York Times declared, "There are inspired touches and disarmingly beautiful passages in this mysterious, stylistically eclectic work." This production, directed by celebrated director Tim Albery, has already thrilled audiences at Sadler's Wells in London and Toronto's Luminato Festival. Set in Paris in 1970, the opera features a French libretto written by the Canadian-American Wainwright and Bernadette Colomine. Rising-star soprano Melody Moore – praised highly last season for her performances in NYC Opera's production of Séance on a Wet Afternoon – sings the tour-de-force role of a once-acclaimed diva haunted by her past success and her present reality as she seeks to return to the spotlight. The cast will also feature Taylor Stayton, Rebecca Bottone and Randal Turner in their NYC Opera debuts. The production will be conducted by Jayce Ogren.
