“Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that they would join forces to mount several fully staged opera productions,” writes Michael Cooper in Wednesday’s (1/14) New York Times. “The partnership is to begin this August with the first American stagings of George Benjamin’s ‘Written on Skin’ … as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival. That will be followed in 2016 with Gerald Barry’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater as part of the next installment of the Philharmonic’s new-music festival, the NY Phil Biennial. A third opera, which has not been announced, is being planned for 2017.… Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s music director, said that he considered the partnership a way to make good on a founding goal of Lincoln Center … ‘to work together and to use the energy and the possibilities of all the different constituents and the people who are working all on the same campus,’ he said.” The article notes that Philharmonic musicians will be not perform in 2015’s Written on Skin, as they will be on break following “a busy summer that will have taken them to California, Shanghai and Vail, Colo. So Mr. Gilbert will instead conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.” Philharmonic musicians will perform in 2016’s opera.
Posted January 15, 2015
Pictured: Barbara Hannigan and Iestyn Davies in George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” at the Prinzregententheater in Munich, July 2013. The opera will be performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2016. Photo by Matthias Schrader / Associated Press
