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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > January > 15 > Entry
Austin Lyric Opera announces 2010-2011 season
Verdi’s ‘La Traviata,’ ‘Rossini’s ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers’ and ‘Flight’, the contemporary comedy by Johnathan Dove mark Austin Lyric Opera’s 2010-2011 season, ALO general director Kevin Patterson will announce today.
Actually, the new season will begin this summer with Michael Nyman’s chamber opera ‘The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.’ Based on the popular book by poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks, Nyman’s 60-minute opera will be staged at St. Martin Lutheran Church in collaboration with the Austin Chamber Music Center’s summer festival. ‘Hat’ will run July 9-11.
And ‘Hat’ marks an important development for ALO and opera in Austin. Finally, some chamber opera in this town — and some contemporary chamber opera to boot Nyman’s minimalist score riffs on Schumann lieder. The three-character story follows a singer who suffers from visual agnosia, the inability to recognize familiar things and people.
Dove’s ‘Flight’ will also make a mark on the Austin scene. Based the true story of Mehran Nasseri, an Iranian refugee whose stateless status forced him to live for years within Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport. Dove’s opera, premiered by Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1998, finds a cast of very modern characters grounded by their own emotional incapacities and stuck together in an airport during a storm. ‘Flight’ plays in April 2011.
In November, ALO will present a Lyric Opera of Chicago production of ‘La Traviata’ wiht Pamela Armstrong singing Violetta and native Texan Chad Shelton singing Alfredo.
And in January 2011 it’s Rossini’s ‘The Italian Girl in Algiers (L’Italiana in Algeri)’ in a smart production from Santa Fe Opera. Sandra Piques Eddy, who wowed Austin in La Cenerentola in 2008, will sing Isabella.
Richard Buckley will conduct all of ALO’s upcoming season.
Image: ‘Flight.” Glyndebourne Opera.
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By Michael Barnes
January 16, 2010 10:38 AM | Link to this
Fantastic news! Three new outings for ALO and only one warhorse. My admiration rises.