CENTRAL OPERA SERVICE BULLETIN VOLUME 29, NUMBER A CONTENTS NEW OPERAS AND PREMIERES 1 NEWS FMNQKRA COMPANIES 18 GOVERNMENT AND NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 24 27 ODNFERENOS H MEM AND REMWftTED THEATERS 29 FORECAST 31 ANNIVERSARIES 37 ARCHIVES AND EXHIBITIONS 39 ATTENTION C0MP0SH8. LIBRE11ISTS, FIAYWRHMTS 40 NUSIC PUBLISHERS 41 EDITIONS AND ADAPTATIONS 4t EOUCATION 44 AFPOINTMEMIS AND RESIGNATIONS 44 COS OPERA SURVEY USA 1988-89 OS INSIDE INFORMATION 57 COS SALUTES. O WINNERS (4 BOOK CORNER 66 OPERA HAS LOST. 73 PERFORMANCE LIST INC. 1969 90 SEASON (CONT.) 83 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera National Council CENTRAL OPERA SERVICE BULLETIN Volume 29, Number 4 Fall/Winter 1989-90 CONTENTS New Operas and Premieres 1 News from Opera Companies 18 Government and National Organizations 24 Copyright 27 Conferences 28 New and Renovated Theaters 29 Forecast 31 Anniversaries 37 Archives and Exhibitions 39 Attention Composers, Librettists, Playwrights 40 Music Publishers 41 Editions and Adaptations 42 Education 44 Appointments and Resignations 46 COS Opera Survey USA 1988-89 56 COS Inside Information 57 COS Salutes. 63 Winners 64 Book Corner 66 Opera Has Lost. 73 Performance Listing, 1989-90 Season (cont.) 83 CENTRAL OPERA SERVICE COMMITTEE Founder MRS. AUGUST BELMONT (1879-1979) Honorary National Chairman ROBERT L.B. TOBIN National Chairman MRS. MARGO H. BINDHARDT Please note page 56: COS Opera Survey USA 1988-89 Next issue: New Directions for the '90s The transcript of the COS National Conference In preparation: Directory of Contemporary Opera and Music Theater, 1980-89 (Including American Premieres) Central Opera Service Bulletin • Volume 29, Number 4 • Fall/Winter 1989-90 Editor: MARIA F. RICH Assistant Editors: CHERYL KEMPLER JOHN W.N. FRANCIS Editorial Assistants: FRITZI BICKHARDT NORMA LITTON SUSAN FELIX Copyright 1990 Central Opera Service. All rights reserved. Permission to quote need not be requested, but source acknowledgment should be made. The COS Bulletin is published quarterly for its members by Central Opera Service. For membership information see back cover. Please send any news items suitable for mention in the COS Bulletin as well as perfor- mance information to The Editor, Central Opera Service Bulletin, Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York, NY 10023. This issue: $4.00 ISSN 0008-9508 NEW OPERAS AND PREMIERES Philip Glass will be writing an opera for premiere at the eleventh annual AMERICAN New Music America festival, scheduled for November 1 through 11, 1990 OPERA in Montreal. The opera ORPHEE will be based on Jean Cocteau's film PREMIERES version of the Orpheus legend. The premiere is to be directed by Gilles Maheu of Montreal. This will be the first time that the contemporary music festival will be held outside the United States. Mr. Glass's next premiere will be in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. will premiere THE HYDROGEN JUKEBOX on May 26, with subsequent performances in Italy in June. Its libretto is by poet Allen Ginsberg. The piece will first have a trial run in concert at the American Music Theater Festival of Philadelphia. — Also scheduled for premiere during the festival in Charleston is Paul Dresher's new opera PIONEERS, to a text by Rinde Eckert. It is programmed for May 24 through 28. A new opera written for the Montana centennial in 1989 received its premiere in Billings on August 25, repeated on the 26th. PAMELIA tells the story of an early pioneer family in Montana, based on letters between a married couple penned between 1860 and 1864. The opera was created by the Montana composer Eric Funk and Montana librettists Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith. Choral sections of Pamelia were tried out as early as April '86 by the Portland Opera Chorus, and instrumental excerpts were first performed by the Billings Symphony in October '88. At the opera's premiere, Pablo Elvira and Leslie Richards sang the leading roles, Uri Barnea of the Billings Symphony conducted, and Jonathan Griffith was in charge of the chorus. With Idaho celebrating its centennial in 1990, the premiere of a new opera, based on a historic event in that state, was the opening event. C. Griffith Bratt's A SEASON FOR SORROW was written especially to commemorate the anniversary. The libretto by Hazel Weston is based on the story of Harry Orchard, charged with the assassination of Governor Steunenberg of Idaho in 1905. The killing was in retaliation for the governor's use of federal troops to put down unrest in Idaho mines. The work was premiered in Boise at the Performing Arts Center on January 19, 1990. SNOW LEOPARD by William Harper (music and libretto) and Roger Nieboer (co-librettist) had its formal premiere on November 9 by the Minnesota Opera's New Music-Theater Ensemble. There was a total of eight perfor- mances. The Ensemble has taken it through the workshop process several times, with Rhoda Levine assisting as stage director. John Conklin was the designer for the premiere production, which will be shared by Chicago's American Ritual Theater Company. The American Chamber Opera Company has announced the premiere of a new one-act opera, PERONELLE, by Larry Lipkis, with a libretto by Barry Spacks. The central figure is the medieval composer Guillaume de Machaut, and excerpts from his motets are incorporated into the opera, played by an onstage ensemble of period instruments. It will open at Marymount Manhattan Theater in New York on February 16 on a double bill with Beeson's Dr. Heidegger's Fountain of Youth, and return for three more performances. It received a first reading by ACO earlier this season, together with Nicholas Flagello's THE WIG. Two one-act operas by Philip Hagemann were presented by the Santa Fe Concert Association, with Maralin Niska not only singing the lead role -1- NEW OPERAS AND PREMIERES but also staging the double bill. The Music Cure complemented the new work, ROMAN FEVER, in its premiere on November 25. A CHEKHOV TRILOGY by Richard Wargo has been in the making since its first opera, The Seduction of a Lady, was premiered at Florida State University in March 1985; The Music Shop followed in September, as pro- duced by the Minnesota Opera's touring company, Midwest Opera Theater. The middle opera, A VISIT TO THE COUNTRY, was given a workshop reading by the Greater Miami Opera in 1986-87. The Chautauqua Opera will now stage its world premiere, and that of the complete Trilogy, on July 20. Doug Lofstrom, Music Director of Chicago's Free Street Theater for the past seven years and an Associate Artistic Director there since last year, has written TWO SOLDIERS, an opera set for premiere by his company on March 8. Al Day wrote the libretto, which tells the story of a Russian and a German soldier in the 1940s. Two performances will take place at the UIC Theater at the University of Illinois in Chicago. As part of the New Music America festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Dance Theater Workshop coproduced ten days of perfor- mances of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie's KABBALAH. It opened on November 16. — The previous week, on November 11, Merkin Hall hosted a double bill of new works by Michael Cave, CANTO and RENASCENCE, the latter based on a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A double bill of American one-act operas was premiered by the After Dinner Opera in New York on November 6, as part of the American Music Week. They are Seymour Barab's LA PIZZA CON FUNGHI (Pizza with Mushrooms) and Vernon Martin's FABLES FOR OUR TIMES. William Mayer's ONE CHRISTMAS LONG AGO had its professional stage premiere on December 20 in New York City at the Saint Paul the Apostle Church on West 59th Street. WORLD The fourth opera by the Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen, KULLERVO, PREMIERE based on the national Finnish epic Kalevala (Vol. 27, No. 3), will have OF FOREIGN its world premiere in Los Angeles on February 22, 1992, the year in OPERA IN U.S. which Finland celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence. The work's first performance was to have opened the new opera house in Hel- sinki; however, delays in construction have made the date of completion indefinite. A joint announcement from Peter Hemmings, General Director of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, and Ilkka Kuusisto, General Manager of the Finnish National Opera, informs us that the work will be prepared in Helsinki by the Finnish National Opera, then brought complete with cast, sets, conductor, and director to California; the Los Angeles Music Center Opera will supply the orchestra and the technical stage staff. It is to play in California through March 1. COMMISSIONS As part of the Lyric Opera of Chicago's ten-year plan, and in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America, the company has commissioned Pulitzer Prizewinning composer William Bolcom to write a new opera, GOLD, for premiere during the 1992-93 season. The work is based on an American classic, Frank Norris's novel McTeague; Arnold Weinstein and film director Robert Altman are providing the libretto. Dennis Russell Davies is to conduct the premiere. -2- NEW OPERAS AND PREMIERES Composer John Adams is collaborating with librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars on a new opera based on the Achille Lauro high- jacking (Vol. 28, No. 4). The same team is responsible for another opera based on recent political events, Nixon in China. The new work, entitled THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, represents a commission given jointly by six companies that will share the premiere production. It is scheduled to open at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels on March 19, 1991, to appear next in Lyon in April, and then to travel to the U.S.