Rose Hall Will Be New York City Opera Performance Home By 2015

"We plan to return New York City Opera to Lincoln Center in 2015 at an exciting new venue that was designed as one of the world’s finest medium-sized opera houses: the 1100-seat Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Its state-of-the-art technical specifications, acoustic design and spacious orchestra pit make it an ideal new home for City Opera. The shops, restaurants and nightlife of the Lincoln Center will provide City Opera’s patrons with a host of amenities for pre- and post-performance enjoyment as well as easy and convenient transportation options. Since late fall of 2013, our team has laid the groundwork for a successful re-launch of City Opera. A new Board of Directors has been formed; over $2.5 million in pledges of financial support have been secured; artistic alliances have been created with industry leaders at home and abroad; and we have reached a landmark, 5-year agreement with American Federation of Musicians Local 802. With a highly experienced artistic and production team in place, our business plan combines a distinctive and imaginative artistic vision with a streamlined, entrepreneurial structure. City Opera’s return will include a broad slate of educational programs to introduce opera to New York City’s schoolchildren. The company’s commitment to advancing American opera will continue with a revitalized VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab in collaboration with American Opera Projects, and its long tradition of fostering emerging American talent will continue in a partnership with Martina Arroyo’s Prelude to Performance® program. Our first full season will launch in 2015 with details to be announced this spring. We invite you to be part of this exciting new chapter of City Opera’s history." [Source]

The Dallas Opera Appoints Ian Derrer As Artistic Administrator

"In the wake of Jonathan Pell’s decision to step down after thirty years of distinguished service to The Dallas Opera, General Director & CEO Keith Cerny is delighted to announce the appointment of a new Artistic Administrator, Ian Derrer....Mr. Derrer grew up in North Carolina and, in 1996, completed a Bachelor of Music degree in Voice Performance from the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU. He then worked as a freelance Assistant Director and Stage Manager for Santa Fe Opera, The Atlanta Opera, Opera Carolina, Opera Pacific, and Washington Opera. From 1999-2005 he completed Masters Degrees in Opera Production, Voice, and Performing Arts Management from Northwestern University and Brooklyn College. During the summers of 2001-2003 he was also the Scheduling Coordinator for the International Institute of Vocal Arts in Chiari, Italy. Afterwards, he served as Rehearsal & Music Coordinator for the New York City Opera (2004-2006). Mr. Derrer also has invaluable experience in the field of orchestra and artist management. Immediately prior to joining the Dallas Opera, Ian held multiple positions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago (2006-2014), including Head of the Rehearsal Department, Rehearsal Administrator, and Director of Production, while, also, making time to serve as Rehearsal Director for Santa Fe Opera during the summer of 2012." [Source]

Jerry Hadley and Judith Haddon at New York City Opera in 1982

Major Landmark Soprano Camilla Williams Dies at 92

"Camilla Williams, the first black woman to appear in a leading role with a major US opera company has died in Indiana aged 92. She had been suffering from cancer, according to Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where Williams became the first black professor of voice. The singer made her debut in May 1946 in the title role of Madam Butterfly with the New York City Opera. She also became a strong advocate for civil rights. 'It's impossible to overstate how important that was for the music scene in New York, for African-American singers, and for American singers,' F Paul Driscoll, the editor-in-chief of Opera News, told the Washington Post. Williams' debut performance came nearly nine years before Marian Anderson became the first African-American singer to appear at New York's more prestigious Metropolitan Opera. A New York Times review of Williams at the time, said the singer displayed 'a vividness and subtlety unmatched by any other artist who has assayed the part here in many a year.' The following year she performed the role of Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme and in 1948 she sang the title role of Verdi's Aida. In 1951 she sang the title female role in first complete recording of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess." [Source]

New York City Opera Begins Online Ad Campaigns For 2011-12

How Much of David Koch's Opera Donation Is Tainted Money?

What you need to know before reading the rest of this post: "The New York State Theater...was renamed the David H. Koch Theater in the fall of 2008 after his $100 million donation." [Source]

Bass Samuel Ramey with the brothers Koch in 2009 at New York
City Opera's former home: The David H. Koch Theater
at Lincoln Center. (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

"In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts. 'I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.' She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France. 'Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,' Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media. Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination." [Source]

Is this the house that tainted money helped repair?

"The Bloomberg news investigation into Charles and David Koch has uncovered unlawful and unpatriotic environmental crimes, political donations and business decisions benefitting Iran. There are so many secret sins committed by the Koch brothers no one story can cover it all. But this is the story everyone will be talking about. We've documented many of the Koch brothers' attacks on middle class families, and detailed their commitment to ending public education and resegregating communities. The Koch brothers have smeared us and journalists who investigate their misdeeds. But the totality of evidence is clear: through our Koch Brothers Exposed film series, as well as reports in the New Yorker and now Bloomberg Markets magazine, there exists beyond a shadow of a doubt the Koch brothers' culpability for the onslaught against Social Security, the environment, our public education system and much more. The Koch brothers use their $50 billion personal wealth to distort and shape policy to grow their corporate profits. The Koch brothers hate public service, and work to deny the government and public sector any chance at success and social good. So when a Southern school board began blazing a trail by growing academic achievement in a diverse community, the brothers acted to reverse the community's gains." [Source]

See what else the Koch brothers are up to after the jump.

New York City Opera Announces Cast Updates

The latest updates are available for all operas being performed across Manhattan by New York City Opera. Not much in terms of surprises, but some singers to watch for during the season include Laquita Mitchell, David Pomeroy, Jennifer Holloway, Rebecca Bottone, Philip Cutlip, Amanda Majeski, Kelly Markgraf, Joélle Harvey and even seasoned professional Rodney Gilfry will be performing. Conductors will be Gary Thor Wedow, Christian Curnyn, Jayce Ogren and Steven White. For more information about NYCO, click here. Full cast listings are after the jump.

New York City Opera Gets Thrown Under a British Double-Decker

"New York is living through a moment of cultural reckoning. The American Folk Art Museum, the preeminent gallery for outsider art, has just shut its doors for good, saddled with millions of dollars in debt. The New York City Opera, which in its heyday mounted 20 productions a season at Lincoln Center, can no longer pay the rent on its theatre and has finally announced a wretchedly abridged season, staged in borrowed space around town. So perhaps the precariousness of our cultural moment explains how weak-kneed the city has gone for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which arrived in town with alarums and excursions this summer for a two-month residency. New York is no longer much of an artistic powerhouse, and the arrival of dozens of actors and technicians at the height of this sweltering summer came almost as a relief." [Source]

Can New York City Opera Retain Its Name Under New Plans?

Steel becoming molten lava.
(Photo: Sara Krulwich/NY Times)

"Mr. Steel has put creative thought into choosing five works for City Opera’s nomadic 2011-12 season. Of special note is a production of Telemann’s Orpheus in an intimate space ideal for Baroque opera, the theater at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. If some other performing arts entity in New York had announced this project, grateful opera buffs would be saluting it. But Mr. Steel’s road show of a season represents a radical rethinking of the company’s mission. The most anguished members of the City Opera family — the orchestra players and choristers, the distinguished artists who signed the letter protesting the company’s decision to leave Lincoln Center and who have counted on the company for years — complain that Mr. Steel’s plans are such a departure from what the company has been for the past 68 years that he can no longer call the company New York City Opera. And they have a point." [Source]

Catherine Malfitano Leads the Artistic Pack....Finally

(Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Follow Daniel J. Wakin's updates on the New York Times Blog here. The obvious question might be: where were all of these artists, orchestra members and choristers when Susan Baker was flushing money down the toilet with the Gérard Mortier debacle? It seems the company should fold and just start over with someone like Catherine Malfitano leading the way. 

Opera Unions Take on George Steel....And They Are Mad

"Unions representing New York City Opera singers and musicians said yesterday that they have lost confidence in artistic director and general manager George Steel. They called his plan for next season, which includes an opera featuring two mutes, 'a formula for continued failure.' At the Manhattan office of City Opera's law firm, Proskauer Rose LLP, Steel offered the union members from Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians and the American Guild of Musical Artists a page-and-a-half, 230-word 'working schedule' of four operas.  Opera 2 is a '21st-century American Opera (running time 2:50)' with two lead roles, two featured and two mute roles. It would be the only production with a full orchestra and one of two with no chorus. Defending the plan before 53 singers, production personnel and musicians, Steel said the unnamed works, to be presented in undisclosed venues, had been chosen to please donors, not the public. He said that calls for traditional operas were 'misguided,' according to a statement from the two unions. Steel, who took over the 68-year-old company in February 2009, recently announced that the troupe could no longer afford to stay in its home at Lincoln Center's David H. Koch Theater. The opera chief left the room after the about two-hour meeting. The union members then took a 'no confidence' vote, said Tino Gagliardi, president of Local 802....Until yesterday, the union hadn't publicly criticized Steel. 'It's pretty pathetic what Steel is trying to do to a main-stage opera company,' Gagliardi said. One singer, not identified in the statement from the unions, said that 'Steel should be calling this the Pot Luck Opera.'" [Source]

Are Domestic Opera Companies Beginning Their Final Descent?

How many are standing around watching the
collapse of opera houses across the United States?

Seems as though New York City Opera was the first company in the United States to really yell "Fire!" loud enough for people to start paying attention to their imminent collapse. Now other companies are following suit, beginning with Washington National Opera, San Francisco Opera and Austin Lyric Opera.

New York Voices Rising Against Current City Opera Dilemma

The Baltimore Sun points out two very prominent New Yorkers reacting to the demise of New York City Opera at the hands of its leader George Steel and the board of directors. Links are included to op-ed pieces and open letters from conductor Julius Rudel and music critic George Loomis. Read the article here.

Fashion Designers Sketch Opera Costumes for Charity

Christian Siriano - Turandot

"Miuccia Prada for Atilla. Thierry Mugler for Lady Gaga. Rodarte for Black Swan. It seems that high-end fashion designers are expanding far beyond their runways these days. So it was only befitting when the 6th Annual Divas Shop for Opera event, a charity designated to benefit the design of New York City Opera costumes, asked various designers to create sketches inspired by their favorite operas. Narciso Rodriguez, Peter Som and Carolina Herrera were among those who created one-of-a-kind drawings that will be auctioned off at the event." [Source]

View seven more designs after the jump. Learn more about the benefit for New York City Opera by clicking here.

Chairman Of The Board Tries To Save New York City Opera

(Photo: Fred R. Conrad/New York Times)

The New York Times offers up a profile of the new Chairman of the Board, Charles Wall, at New York City Opera. His major focus is fundraising, damage control in the form of a major marketing campaign and what repertoire to represent in what he hopes will be an expanded season at the David H. Koch Theater. "Opera was not Mr. Wall’s first love. Though he counts himself 'a fan,' he said that he was more familiar with symphonic music and that he was a die-hard fan of the American musical. And while ' Parsifal is not something I would rush to see,' Mr. Wall said, referring to the complex Wagner opera, he added that City Opera must continue to fulfill its mission of doing productions that may not immediately draw crowds." [Source]

Monodramas: Spring Innovation at New York City Opera

Homo Sapiens Sapiens, 2005 by Pipilotti Rist

"This triple bill of cutting-edge mini-opera features three virtuoso sopranos taking on tour-de-force roles that showcase the work of vital innovators of modern music. La Machine de l’être by New York composer John Zorn takes the soprano on a bravura collision course of elemental sound. Inspired by drawings of seminal theater artist Antonin Artaud, this textless piece receives its