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Building on Long Beach Opera’s legacy of pushing operatic boundaries and boldly taking performance into uncharted territories, the 2023 Season continues to bring new energy and relevance to the form with a series of surprising, immersive, and accessible operatic experiences. These new works and new interpretations of seldom-staged pieces from the repertoire see the company further exploring the currents of opera that leading composers/makers in the field are creating today, sparking a dialogue between opera and a diverse range of mediums including dance, film, cuisine, live performance art, animation, and more. These mediums, folded into the fabric of the season, provide fruitful territory for a deeper collision with opera and emphasize the generative and often surprising results that arise when creating multimedia and multi-sensory artistic experiences.
The season begins in February with a world premiere by Kate Soper, THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE, directed by James Darrah and conducted by Christopher Rountree. In March, LBO will present THE HORSE, a newly devised ritualistic dance-opera created and performed by Chris Emile with a new score by Cody Perkins. In May, LBO will present THE FEAST, a baroque banquet featuring the music of G.F. Handel and based on his seldom-staged opera Alessandro, starring superstar countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński with choreography and dancers from the Martha Graham Dance Company.
The season will close with THE RECITAL, LBO’s 2023 Opera & Film Festival, featuring a new live staging of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin in a double bill with the lauded short film Christopher at Sea, inspired by the same Schubert cycle and directed by Tom C. J. Brown. The festival will also include a world premiere film called The Recital, co-created by James Darrah, Christopher Rountree, and soprano Measha Brueggergosman, inspired by Luciano Berio’s theater piece Recital I (for Cathy).
LBO is also thrilled to announce new multi-year artistic partnerships with the Martha Graham Dance Company and Composer-in-Residence Shelley Washington.
Artistic Director James Darrah adds: “2023 marks the start of establishing Long Beach Opera as a new creative home in Southern California where both established and emerging artists can come together to create, experiment, and push the form forward. It’s about recommitting to opera’s role as a bold merger of all of the arts and empowering the season’s artists to explore what “opera” can mean to them and their work. Each project is led collaboratively, curated, and created by teams of culture makers who defy singular definition but all grapple with questions of how continually evolving and intersecting artistic mediums shape and redefine their individual practices, expand the operatic form, and impact the world at large.”
Information about season tickets at longbeachopera.org
