Sunday, January 23, 2011

Will The New World Symphony Space Have Opera?

"The story of how the world's most celebrated living architect came to design an ingenious new music-academy campus and concert hall in Miami Beach goes back almost 60 years, to a rather prosaic circumstance: Frank Gehry, then a young, unknown Los Angeles architect, baby-sat a precocious 8-year-old named Michael Thomas. A few years later, the piano prodigy would shoot to fame as an orchestral conductor under his full name, Michael Tilson
Thomas. As so often happens with architects, it took Gehry longer, into his sixth decade, before he, too, gained world renown. Umpteen Grammys and architectural accolades later, their long friendship has been cemented in a new, high-tech musical home for the New World Symphony -- the Beach-based orchestra for young musicians that Tilson Thomas founded and leads -- quite unlike any other concert hall anywhere. As much Tilson Thomas' handiwork as Gehry's, the $160 million New World Center, which opens this week with a series of galas and concerts, bears their shared trademarks of edgy experimentation, intellectual rigor and artistic ambition tempered by unabashedly populist impulses. A combination performance laboratory and finishing academy for music-school graduates, the gleaming music box aims no less than to nurture new audiences and modes of performance by remolding fusty conceptions of the classical concert hall." [Source]

UPDATE:
With Thomas Adès on board, it just might!
[Source]