Sunday 20 February 2011

Fantasy Opera: definitely the final season, with four commissioned works

After this I shall (almost) definitely stop, but ten seemed a properly rounded number, and I wanted partially to rectify an omission to which I have already referred more than once, namely the lack of new work. I therefore decided on a very modest number of four commissions (extremely modest, given that there have been none at all during the previous nine seasons). Fantasy? Doubtless. But we have a decade to make it work.

Brian Ferneyhough, new work
Stravinsky, Renard, Carter, What Next? and Stravinsky, Mavra
Monteverdi, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Birtwistle, Gawain
Tchaikovsky, The Queen of Spades
Unsuk Chin, new work
Henze, Boulevard Solitude
Rameau, Les Indes galantes
Strauss, Feuersnot
Alexander Goehr, new work
Mussorgsky-Rimsky-Korsakov, Boris Godunov
Schoenberg, Erwartung and Feldman, Neither
Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Handel, Jephtha
And finally, what must be the longest-awaited opera by any composer in history: a new work by Pierre Boulez.